Reclaiming literacies: competing textual practices in a digital higher education

This essay examines the implications of the ubiquitous use of the term ‘digital literacies’ in higher education and its increasing alignment with institutional and organisational imperatives. It suggests that the term has been stripped of its provenance and association with disciplinary knowledge production and textual practice. Instead it is called into service rhetorically in order to promote competency-based agendas both in and outside the academy. The piece also points to a tendency to position teachers in deficit with regard to their technological capabilities and pay scant attention to their own disciplinary and scholarly practices in a digital world. It concludes that there is a case for building on established theoretical and conceptual frameworks from literacy studies if we wish to integrate advantages of the digital landscape with thoughtful teaching practice.     

Collaborative knowledge building to promote in-service teacher training in environmental education

Abstract

This project was undertaken by researchers at three universities in England where there is a well established tradition of introducing student teachers to Information Technology. Questionnaires were administered at three key points in the course to a student group in each university, to establish how students' concepts of IT were developing and to identify key influences on their practice and their thinking. Selected students were interviewed towards the end of their teaching practice, as was the school mentor for each student wherever possible, and all staff in the student's host department were invited to complete a questionnaire. All tapes were transcribed. The study suggests that student teachers of English have a broader view of literacy than is currently predominant in schools and this view positively embraces the role of IT in literacy. Student teachers do not envisage the disappearance of books, instead they see a wider and more inclusive range of texts, including the electronic, as part of the normal focus of the English teacher. Practising teachers of English range from those with an essentially negative attitude to IT, to an increasing number who are themselves developing this broader view of literacy. Current pre-service provision appears to be succeeding in giving new English teachers a positive and committed attitude towards the use of IT in the current and future literacy curriculum.     

The Spaces of Children's Programming

In the competitive world of children's programming, networks are under intense pressure to build brand loyalty and increase market share. This essay examines how Fox Kids and the Disney Channel transform electronic space into “place” as a means for carving out brand identity. This transformation of electronic space into place requires strategies that encourage viewers to see electronic spaces as habitable and desirable. While the two networks employ different approaches to the creation of place, they both reproduce familiar ideologies (e.g., individuality as identity) and social arrangements (e.g., families and neighborhoods) to represent a habitable place that can inspire loyalty and even affection from viewers.     

We can Achieve if We Receive: Examining the Effects of Out-of-School Time Activities on Black Student Achievement in Mathematics

Using policy discourse analysis, the author analyzed 21 diversity action plans issued at 20 U.S. land-grant universities over a five-year period to identify images of diversity and the problems and solutions represented in diversity action plans. Discourses of marketplace, excellence, managerialism, and democracy emerged and served to construct images of the diverse individual as a commodity, entrepreneur, and change agent. These findings suggest that the dominance of the marketplace discourse may situate the diverse individual as a resource to be exploited and inspire entrepreneurial endeavors rather than change-making activism. Diversity action plans in their current form may unintentionally undermine the achievement of their equity goals.     

Education and Social Cohesion: Recentering the Debate

Social capital theory has tended to treat social cohesion as a mere aggregation of individual and community-level characteristics, ignoring the long tradition of theory on social solidarity and social cohesion at the societal level. However, the key indicators of social capital-associational membership and social trust-do not covary cross-nationally, and societies rich in community-level social capital are not always cohesive societies. Social capital and societal cohesion are not necessarily the same thing, and education may have different effects on each. This article seeks to put the analysis of education and societal cohesion back in the center of the picture. We do this first through a critical review of some of the existing literature on education and social capital, which points to the limitations of individual-level analysis of what are fundamentally societal issues. Second, we outline some alternative models for understanding how education influences social cohesion in different societies, drawing on an analysis of some of the aggregated cross-national data on skills, income distribution, and various indicators of social cohesion. The argument suggests some causal mechanisms for the social impacts of education that are quite different from those that normally underpin arguments about human and social capital.     

Protect and Survive: ‘whiteness’ and the middle‐class family in civil defence pedagogies

‘Civil defence pedagogies’ normalise continuous emergency through educational channels such as school, community and adult education. Using critical whiteness studies, and critiques of white supremacy from critical race theory, as a conceptual base, the protection of whiteness, and particularly the white middle‐class family, is considered to be centrally important to civil defence in education. Civil defence is not only classed and state‐centred, but a racialised and eugenic discourse where the state considers not necessarily the survival of the majority of white people, but the continuity of whiteness to be prioritised above the survival of people of colour. Within these policies, the enterprising white, middle‐class, suburban family has provided a key role as main reference, beneficiary, activist and supporter of civil defence pedagogies. Through the use of policy analysis and documentation from the USA in the 1950s and the UK in the 1980s, I discuss representations of the family, race and class in civil defence pedagogies. Although whiteness is contextualised by geography and history, there is congruence in terms of the eugenic tendencies of these seemingly innocuous pedagogies.