Strangely familiar: teacher-researchers rethinking literacy pedagogies in digital environments

This article reports on a collaborative project between middle school teachers and university researchers exploring the impact of a one to one netbook program on literacy teaching and learning at one Australian primary school. Following the traditions of ethnographic classroom research and practitioner research in literacy, we describe and analyse the evolution of teacher knowledge and understandings informing the processes of reshaping print based literacy pedagogies and practices within digital learning environments. The study sought to explore the possibilities of one-to-one computing through an investigation of the affordances of digital literacy pedagogies within an open plan learning environment. We focus on the richness of ethnographic tools, in particular visual ethnographic methods, for "making the familiar strange" and identify contexts supporting the emergence of innovative digital literacy pedagogies and powerful professional learning in primary classrooms. Drawing on surveys, interviews and conversations with teachers and students and classroom observations, we suggest that dialogues between teachers and researchers provide a forum for co-construction of insights into innovative digital literacy pedagogies and offer rich learning opportunities for students, teachers and researchers.

The emergence of

The emergence of as developed by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) is traced from antecedent concepts of integrated reporting and earlier voluntary corporate reporting initiatives. The paper uses actor network theory and its conceptions of detour, affordance and laboratory to examine the development of while still controversial and where meanings remained open and malleable to the inscription of interests from a wide coalition of actors. The programme of action is interpreted through interviews with key individuals, official documents, publications and integrated reports circulated by the IIRC. The analysis highlights the imperatives of private standard setters and indicates how integrated reporting corporate governance regulation in South Africa provided a laboratory prototype for reshaping the UK Connected Reporting initiative into the IIRC framework. The analysis reveals important detours and the associated affordances made during the development of : (a) the repositioning of in the corporate reporting infrastructure to ensure that it did not usurp the pre-existing frameworks of supporting actors; and (b) the specification of providers of financial capital as the intended reporting audience to ensure that it could meet the interests of those actors seeking a solution for more entity-specific, communicative, de-cluttered corporate reporting.

Like a porcupine or hedgehog?: The prose poem as post-romantic fragment

Prose poems are frequently characterised as fragmentary or incomplete in the way that they gesture to a larger, often unnamed, frame of reference; present small, sometimes unfinished narratives which are implied to be parts of larger narrative structures; and are often characterised by considerable indeterminacy. In this respect, it may be argued that prose poetry traces part of its lineage back to Romantic fragment poems—indeed, at least as far back as James Macpherson’s Ossian “translations”. In the Romantic period, fragments were understood as reflecting the idea of the imperfectability of contemporary human existence, aided by the antiquarian attraction of many Romantic writers to the ruins and relics of the classical past and an associated preference for the evocation of notions of infinitude and boundlessness. This paper argues that prose poems gesture to this Romantic genealogy in their concern with openness and diversity, and the reshaping of literary-aesthetic boundaries to metonymically explore incompleteness. The paper takes its name from Friedrich Schelgel’s Igel. Schlegel famously described the fragment as an Igel, or hedgehog, because of its autonomy and isolation from the wider world. One way of understanding the renaissance of the prose poem in the last 35 years, is to apply the Schlegelian metaphor of a hedgehog to contemporary prose poems in order to argue that this hybrid genre remains in dialogue with the fragmented literary works of the past. This paper argues that as prose poetry continues to explore fissured identity and plurality in a postmodern society, it owes a significant debt to postmodernism’s Romantic and fragmented inheritance.

Shaping and being shaped: extending the relationship between habitus and practice

This chapter extends understandings of the contributions of practice in re/forming the habitus. In Bourdieu’s account, an agent’s practices are thought to reflect his or her habitus: that system of dispositions operating at the level of pre-thought or un-thought and expressed in tendencies and inclinations to think and act in certain ways under certain conditions. Evidence of the habitus can be 'read' from practice. The shaping and re-shaping of the habitus involves practices of family and community (primary pedagogic work) and of social institutions (secondary pedagogic work), in any given field. However, Bourdieu also describes habitus as constantly evolving and the outcome of past practices. This raises questions about the conditions under which an agent’s field-specific practices might, in time, influence the shaping of their habitus, leading either to a feel-for or a rejection of the dominant game that defines the field. The chapter explores these issues within the context of formulaic approaches to research production in higher education. It asks whether the practices required of academics in order to comply with conditions of the field are merely a performative response or whether they might also have a deeper role in the reshaping of the individual and collective academic habitus?