Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education : Issues, Challenges and Solutions

Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education provides a comprehensive introduction to literacy teaching and learning. The book explores the continuum of literacy learning and children’s transitions from early childhood settings to junior primary classrooms, and then to senior primary and beyond. Reader-friendly and accessible, this book equips pre-service teachers with the theoretical underpinnings and practical strategies and skills needed to teach literacy. It places the ‘reading wars’ firmly in the past as it examines contemporary research and practices. The book covers important topics such as literacy acquisition, family literacies and multiliteracies, foundation skills for literacy learning, reading difficulties, assessment, and supporting diverse literacy learners in early childhood and primary classrooms. It also addresses some of the challenges that teachers may face in the classroom and provides solutions to these. Each chapter includes learning objectives, reflective questions and definitions to key terms to engage and assist readers. Further resources are also available at www.cambridge.edu.au/academic/literacy. Written by an expert author team and featuring real-world examples from literacy teachers and learners. Literacy in Early Childhood and Primary Education will help pre-service teachers feel confident teaching literacy to diverse age groups and abilities.

Mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers’ work : federal policy, local effects

This paper explores how mandated literacy assessment is reorganising teachers’ work in the context of Australia’s National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), which was implemented in 2008. Students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are tested annually, with school results publicly available. The wider policy context and the emergence of different forms of interconnected educational work associated with the testing phenomenon are described. Taking an Institutional Ethnography approach, the local effects of the federal policy regime are examined through a case study of one school. What mandated literacy assessment does to educators’ work in a culturally diverse low socioeconomic school community is discussed. Key themes include strategic exclusions of students from the testing process, appropriations and adaptations of literacy theory, work intensification, and ethical mediation of results. Questions concerning equity are raised about the differential effects of policy in different school contexts.

Digital technologies and musical participation for people with intellectual disabilities

Research on the aspirations of people with intellectual disabilities documents the importance of alternative zones of inclusion where they can assert their own definitions of ability and normality. This stands in contrast to assumptions concerning technology and disability that position technology as ‘normalising’ the disabled body. This paper reports on the role of a digital music jamming tool in providing access to creative practice by people with intellectual disabilities. The tool contributed to the development of a spatio-temporal zone to enable aesthetic agency within and beyond the contexts of deinstitutionalised care. The research identifies the interactions among tools, individuals and groups that facilitated participants’ agency in shaping the form of musical practice. Further, we document the properties of emergent interaction - supported by a tool oriented to enabling music improvisation - as potentially resisting assumptions regarding normalisation.

Networked reading : using AustLit to assist reading and understanding of texts from the past

In response to a focus on reading, this paper examines the notion of reading online; as such it uses the term ‘networked reading’ to describe any act of reading in an online or digital environment. In accordance with this notion of ‘networked’ reading, the paper provides a broad introduction to AustLit: the Australian Literature Resource. This is followed by an examination of a suite of services and digital tools (LORE) developed by the Aus-e-Lit project that extends the scope of AustLit records and facilitates links to external resources. The focus of the final section of the paper is on a collection of Full Text resources located within the AustLit subset Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR). It proposes a number of ways in which these texts, and an accompanying anthology of critical articles, can be utilised in classrooms across the Primary, Middle and Senior School spectrum.

The digital transformation of 21st century news journalism

This presentation will deal with the transformations that have occurred in news journalism worldwide in the early 21st century. I will argue that they have been the most significant changes to the profession for 100 years, and the challenges facing the news media industry in responding to them are substantial, as are those facing journalism education. It will develop this argument in relation to the crisis of the newspaper business model, and why social media, blogging and citizen journalism have not filled the gap left by the withdrawal of resources from traditional journalism. It will also draw upon Wikileaks as a case study in debates about computational and data-driven journalism, and whether large-scale "leaks" of electronic documents may be the future of investigative journalism.

User participation in the categorisation of the State Library of Queensland digital image collections: characteristics, motivations and experiences

In 2010, the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) donated their out-of-copyright Queensland images to Wikimedia Commons. One direct effect of publishing the collections at Wikimedia Commons is the ability of general audiences to participate and help the library in processing the images in the collection. This paper will discuss a project that explored user participation in the categorisation of the State Library of Queensland digital image collections. The outcomes of this project can be used to gain a better understanding of user participation that lead to improving access to library digital collections. Two techniques for data collection were used: documents analysis and interview. Document analysis was performed on the Wikimedia Commons monthly reports. Meanwhile, interview was used as the main data collection technique in this research. The data collected from document analysis was used to help the researchers to devise appropriate questions for interviews. The interviews were undertaken with participants who were divided into two groups: SLQ staff members and Wikimedians (users who participate in Wikimedia). The two sets of data collected from participants were analysed independently and compared. This method was useful for the researchers to understand the differences between the experiences of categorisation from both the librarians’ and the users’ perspectives. This paper will provide a discussion on the preliminary findings that have emerged from each group participant. This research provides preliminary information about the extent of user participation in the categorisation of SLQ collections in Wikimedia Commons that can be used by SLQ and other interested libraries in describing their digital content by their categorisations to improve user access to the collection in the future.

Tell me what you see : Pre-service teachers' recognition of exemplary digital pedagogy

How do you identify "good" teaching practice in the complexity of a real classroom? How do you know that beginning teachers can recognise effective digital pedagogy when they see it? How can teacher educators see through their students’ eyes? The study in this paper has arisen from our interest in what pre-service teachers “see” when observing effective classroom practice and how this might reveal their own technological, pedagogical and content knowledge. We asked 104 pre-service teachers from Early Years, Primary and Secondary cohorts to watch and comment upon selected exemplary videos of teachers using ICT (information and communication technologies) in Science. The pre-service teachers recorded their observations using a simple PMI (plus, minus, interesting) matrix which were then coded using the SOLO Taxonomy to look for evidence of their familiarity with and judgements of digital pedagogies. From this, we determined that the majority of preservice teachers we surveyed were using a descriptive rather than a reflective strategy, that is, not extending beyond what was demonstrated in the teaching exemplar or differentiating between action and purpose. We also determined that this method warrants wider trialling as a means of evaluating students’ understandings of the complexity of the digital classroom.

Enhancing women’s participation in Turkey through digital storytelling

This paper explores the process of introducing Digital Storytelling (DST) workshop practice to Turkey through a project called “Digital Stories from Amargi Women”, which was part of my Ph.D. research in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. In the resulting dissertation, I examined the potential of Digital Storytelling workshop practice as a means to promote agency and self-expression in a feminist activist organization (such as Amargi Women), focusing in particular on whether or not Digital Storytelling can be used as a change agent – as a tool for challenging the idea of a single public sphere in ways that make it more inclusive of women’s participation. In order to explore the issue in depth, my thesis engaged with feminist scholarship’s critiques of the public/private dichotomy, as well as the concept of gender. The conducted workshops, the resulting digital stories, and in-depth interviews were analyzed to seek connections between these topics and narrative identity. The results indicated that the participating women defined new activist usages for digital stories, as well as their overall activated networking habits in the DST workshop settings. Digital Stories from Amargi Women became the first Digital Storytelling project that aimed to enable women’s participation in Turkey through facilitating a co-creative environment where the participants could share their stories and learn digital skills that they could make use of after the workshops.

Preface to special issue on digital human modelling for vehicle design and manufacturing

The automotive industry has been the focus of digital human modeling (DHM) research and application for many years. In the highly competitive marketplace for personal transportation, the desire to improve the customer’s experience has driven extensive research in both the physical and cognitive interaction between the vehicle and its occupants. Human models provide vehicle designers with tools to view and analyze product interactions before the first prototypes are built, potentially improving the design while reducing cost and development time. The focus of DHM research and applications began with prediction and representation of static postures for purposes of driver workstation layout, including assessments of seat adjustment ranges and exterior vision. Now DHMs are used for seat design and assessment of driver reach and ingress/egress. DHMs and related simulation tools are expanding into the cognitive domain, with computational models of perception and motion, and into the dynamic domain with models of physical responses to ride and vibration. Moreover, DHMs are now widely used to analyze the ergonomics of vehicle assembly tasks. In this case, the analysis aims to determine whether workers can be expected to complete the tasks safely and with good quality. This preface provides a review of the literature to provide context for the nine new papers presented in this special issue.

Debating literacy in Australia : a documentary history, 1945 - 1994

A documentary history of 'literacy' as an issue, topic and problem in the Australia print media, 1945-1994. The accompanying critical analysis makes the case that 'literacy crises' in Australia have arisen during periods of major socioeconomic, cultural and geopolitical upheaval and change, with schools and teachers, youth and families the object of 'blame' for such changes.

Resilience by design: A participatory approach to designing an interactive digital application for promoting children's resilience

The promotion of resilience (the capacity of an individual or community to bounce back and recover from adversity) has become an important area of public health. In recent years it has expanded into the digital domain, and many online applications have been developed to promote children's resilience. In this study, it is argued that the majority of existing applications are limited because they take a didactic approach, and conceive of interaction as providing navigational choices. Because they simply provide information about resilience or replicate offline, scenario-based strategies, the understanding of resilience they provide is confined to a few, predetermined factors. In this study I propose a new, experiential approach to promoting resilience digitally. I define resilience as an emergent, situated and context-specific phenomenon. Using a Participatory Design model in combination with a salutogenic (strength-based) health methodology, this project has involved approximately 50 children as co-designers and co-researchers over two years. The children have contributed to the design of a new set of interactive resilience tools, which facilitate resilience promotion through dialogic and experiential learning. The major outcomes of this study include a new methodology for developing digital resilience tools, a new set of tools that have been developed and evaluated in collaboration with children and a set of design principles to guide future development. Beyond these initial and tangible outcomes, this study has also established that the benefits of introducing Participatory Design into a health promoting model rests primarily in the change of the role of children from "users" of technology and education to co-designers, where they assume a leadership role in both designing the tools and in directing their resilience learning.

Hybridized writing for scientific literacy : pedagogy and evidence

Disengagement of students in science and the scientific literacy of young adults are interrelated international concerns. One way to address these concerns is to engage students imaginatively in activities designed to improve their scientific literacy. Our ongoing program of research has focused on the effects of a sequence of activities that require students to transform scientific information on important issues for their communities from government websites into narrative text suitable for a lay reader. These hybridized stories we call BioStories. Students upload their stories for peer review to a dedicated website. Peer reviews are intended to help students refine their stories. Reviewing BioStories also gives students access to a wider range of scientific topics and writing styles. We have conducted separate studies with students from Grade 6, Grade 9 and Grade 12, involving case study and quasi-experimental designs. The results from the 6th grade study support the argument that writing the sequence of stories helped the students become more familiar with the scientific issue, develop a deeper understanding of related biological concepts, and improve their interest in science. Unlike the Grade 6 study, it was not possible to include a control group for the study conducted across eight 9th grade classes. Nevertheless, these results suggest that hybridized writing developed more positive attitudes toward science and science learning, particularly in terms of the students’ interest and enjoyment. In the most recent case study with Grade 12 students, we found that pride, strength, determination, interest and alertness were among the positive emotions most strongly elicited by the writing project. Furthermore, the students expressed enhanced feelings of self-efficacy in successfully writing hybridized scientific narratives in science. In this chapter, we describe the pedagogy of hybridized writing in science, overview the evidence to support this approach, and identify future developments.

Defining critical literacy

This article traces the lineage of critical literacy from Freire through critical pedagogies and discourse analysis. The author discusses the need for a contingent definition of critical literacy, as a situated and contextual response to political economies, institutional and cultural relations of power.

Low SES primary school students engaging in an after-school robotics program

Recent attention in education within many western contexts has focused on improved outcomes for students, with a particular focus on closing the gap between those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and the rest of the student population. Much of this attention has supported a set of simplistic solutions to improving scores on high stakes standardized tests. The collateral damage (Nichols & Berliner, 2007) of such responses includes a narrowing of the curriculum, plateaus in gain scores on the tests, and unproductive blame games aimed by the media and politicians at teachers and communities (Nichols & Berliner, 2007; Synder, 2008). Alternative approaches to improving the quality and equity of schooling remain as viable alternatives to these measures. As an example in a recent study of school literacy reform in low SES schools, Luke, Woods and Dooley (2011) argued for the increase of substantive content and intellectual quality of the curriculum as a necessary means to re-engaging middle school students, improving outcomes of schooling and achieving a high quality, high equity system. The MediaClub is an afterschool program for students in years 4 to 7 (9-12 year old) at a primary school in a low SES area of a large Australian city. It is run as part of an Australian Research Council funded research project. The aim of the program has been to provide an opportunity for students to gain expertise in digital technologies and media literacies in an afterschool setting. It was hypothesized that this expertise might then be used to shift the ways of being literate that these students had to call on within classroom teaching and learning events. Each term, there is a different focus on digital media, and information and communication technology (ICT) activities in the MediaClub. The work detailed in this chapter relates to a robotics program presented as one of the modules within this afterschool setting. As part of the program, the participants were challenged to find creative solutions to problems in a constructivist-learning environment.

First year design "Visualisation II": The hybridisation of analogue and digital tools

This paper discusses first year students’ responses and outcomes to the integration of digital technologies in their second semester foundational visualisation class; ‘Visualisation II’. As the second class in the Visualisation series, previous analogue knowledge taught in ‘Visualisation I’ is compounded with new digital technologies establishing the introduction to a myriad of hybrid visualisation tools and techniques for design exploration and design artefact. This research examines the differentiation between analogue and digital design, common precedents of the two, and reflects upon the environment and class structure with the learning experiences and confidence of surveyed participants.