Learning conversations: teacher researchers evaluating dialogic strategies in early years settings

Learning conversations, dialogic interactions with adults, are important opportunities for children to develop their thinking as well as their speech and language skills. This area of teachers' practice is informed by a well-established body of research evidence and professional guidance literature. The design and facilitation of this practitioner research project was framed by a metaphor for teachers' professional learning as ‘interplay’ between the vertical domain of public, published, knowledge and the horizontal domain of the teachers' practical wisdom. The teacher researchers used a framework based on the published literature to analyse video clips of their conversations with children in early years workplace settings. The study highlights the power of video analysis as a prompt for professional learning within a practitioner research framework. The use of conversation strategies by these teachers involves a balancing act between competing agendas within their workplace setting. In addition to mediating the strategies proposed by the research evidence base to suit their own early years workplace settings, in part by emphasising speech and language development, the teacher researchers identified a useful strategy, based on transportable identity, of ‘stepping out’ of being a teacher, for example by positioning themselves as a playmate or family member.     

Developing an equalities literacy for practitioners working with children,young people and families through action research

ABSTRACT

The Marginalisation and Co-created Education (MaCE) project was developed between the University of Southern Norway, VIA University in Denmark and the University of Cumbria in the UK and funded by Erasmus+. The project aims to co-create proposals to achieve an equitable and socially just education system through participative action research with ‘Early School Leavers’. This paper establishes a conceptual framework called ‘Equalities Literacy’ that evolved from the first action research cycle of the project. The framework is informed by the practice experience and theoretical knowledge of the international and interdisciplinary research team. It is applied to one youth narrative in this paper to illustrate its efficacy in revealing socio-cultural in/equalities. The Equalities Literacy framework is proposed to challenge and inform practice and further research. Further, the ‘Indirect Approach’ is introduced and located within action research as a participatory methodology that other researchers may wish to adopt.     

International

THE VOICE OF AMERICA: FROM DETENTE TO THE REAGAN DOCTRINE by Laurien Alexandre (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1989—no price given, ISBN 0-89391-465-7)

VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDERS IN THE THIRD WORLD edited by Douglas A. Boyd, Joseph D. Straubhaar and John A. Lent (New York: Longman, 1989—price not given, ISBN 0-8013-0196-3)

SPACEBRIDGES: TELEVISION AND US-SOVIET DIALOGUE edited by Michael Brainerd (University Press of America, 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, MD 20706—$13.50, paper, ISBN 0-8191-7433-5, with a hardback also available)

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCE edited by Mereroo Jussawalla, Tadayuki Okuma, and Toshihiro Araki (New York: Praeger, 1989—$39.95, ISBN 0-313-26326-4)     

A quest for Cinergy: The war metaphor and the construction of identity

As organizations struggle to present a consistent identity to multiple and overlapping publics, metaphor provides one unifying possibility. This essay examines the case of an unlikely winner in a corporate dispute over control of Indiana's PSI Resources, arguing that PSI's consistent portrayal of its “enemy” as a savage, using the war metaphor's victimage ritual, contributed to a successful defense. In addition to demonstrating how metaphor pervaded one organization's discourse to present a consistent identity to stakeholders, the essay offers questions and conclusions about the efficacy and ethics of the war metaphor as a weapon of corporate persuasion, with a focus on the consequences of its polarizing nature.     

Words for Artworks: The Aesthetics of Meaning Making

In this article we introduce a research strategy that involves the making of visual maps by individuals in response to their interactions with artworks. The maps record the meaning‐making processes involved in the encounters and provide us with permanent records of otherwise ephemeral experiences. The case study presented here provides data for comparisons between three visits each to two artworks exhibited at the Calouste Gulbenkian Modern Art Centre in Lisbon. We conclude that our meaning‐making strategy is important for its own heuristic research value in both formal and non‐formal educational contexts, as well as providing an instrument for the training of teachers and museum educators.     

Lawbreaking Jokers: Tricksters Using Outlaw Discourse

In an attempt to enrich Sloop and Ono's (1997 Sloop , J. M. , &; Ono , K. A. ( 1997 ). Out-law discourse: The critical politics of material judgment . Philosophy and Rhetoric , 30 , 50 – 69 .[Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) theory of outlaw discourse, this article draws from the more extensive literature on the trickster to demonstrate how the two concepts have a shared heritage. First, the nature of outlaw discourse is reviewed, and then the myth of the trickster is discussed. Following these overviews, the similarities and differences between the two are explained by providing three brief examples of trickster-influenced outlaw discourse that demonstrate the potential for a trickster perspective to enrich the study of certain kinds of outlaw discourse.     

Spelling without phonology: A study of deaf and hearing children

To what extent does phonology play a role in spelling English words? The written responses of deaf students and groups of hearing children to five tasks were subjected to quantitative and qualitative analyses. The first three tasks were used to see if deaf students utilized phonology when they generated their own words and to compare their spelling performance with that of hearing subjects. The fourth and fifth tasks were designed to compare the spelling performance of deaf and hearing subjects when they were required to reproduce visually presented common words. Results showed that deaf students, who were chronologically much older, were not better spellers than hearing children from the fifth grade. Analysis of data revealed little evidence that the deaf students involved in the present study utilize phonology in spelling. Nor did word-specific visual memory for entire words appears to play a role in spelling by deaf students. Rote visual memory for letter patterns and sequences of letters within words, however, appears to play a role in the spelling by deaf students. It is concluded that sensitivity to the stochastic-dependent probabilities of letter sequences may aid spelling up to certain point but phonology is essential for spelling words whose structure is morphophonemically complex.