Creative pedagogies : "art-full" reading and writing

This paper reports on a small-scale research inquiry, designed to support teachers in a Melbourne primary school to bring together the arts, reading and writing in their classrooms in ways that create possibilities for "art-full" teaching and learning. The principal, concerned by underperformance on State literacy tests of the school’s largely working-class and NESB population, requested David Hornsby and other members of the project team from the Education Faculty at La Trobe University to offer whole-school professional development. The focus was on developing oral language as a foundation for literacy learning, enacting Britton’s claim that “reading and writing float on a sea of talk”. The project team introduced the teachers to a range of innovative classroom practices for using visual and performance arts, literature, music and crafts. Drawing on video, interviews and writing samples, a number of teachers worked collaboratively with the research team to develop case studies of individual students with a range of literacy aptitudes and social skills. A key research question was: "What do children take from their engagement in arts-based activities into reading of literary texts, and potentially into writing from the perspective of another character?" In this paper we ponder this from three vantage points: by outlining the informing principles in our research project; confirming insights from current interdisciplinary work about children learning to see, do, act and say in play; and analysing the research data from the initial phase.

My place: exploring children's place-related identities through reading and writing

This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider children’s place-related identities through their engage- ment with, and creation of, texts. This paper will discuss the project, its interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and the empirical research we conducted with two classes in primary schools in Eastern England. A key text used in our research was My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins. Drawing on our interdisciplinary theoretical framework, particularly Doreen Massey’s notion of place as a bundle of trajectories, and Louise Rosenblatt’s notion of the transaction between the reader and the text, this paper will examine pages from My Place, children talking about how this text connects with them, children talking about their sense of place, and maps and writing the children produced based on their place.

Assessing the reading and writing of EAL/D students: issues and implications

This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a study on literacy strategies for learners in established English as an Additional Language (EAL) classes in Years 7-10 in three Victorian secondary schools. The paper draws on baseline reading and writing assessment results (N=45). 

“Never read anything that can at all unsettle your religious faith”: reading and writing in the monthly packet

The Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church (1851–99) reveals the interest that Charlotte Yonge had in promoting and supporting girls as readers and writers. As the editor and as a major contributor, Yonge provided a variety of material for the magazine as part of a strategy for the development of girls' reading and writing habits in ways that were consistent with their High Anglican beliefs and that would never cause them to question their faith.

What reading and writing trauma fiction illuminates about post-traumatic growth.

Angelina Mirabito's PhD in Creative Writing investigated the therapeutic value of reading and writing trauma fiction. Her findings show that it is possible for adult survivors of complex trauma to experience post-traumatic growth from writing an adult survivor of childhood trauma coming of age story.

Driven to abstraction: doctoral supervision and writing pedagogies

The writing of academic abstracts is more than a tiresome necessity of scholarly life. It is a practice that goes beyond genre and technique to questions of writing and identity. In this article we deconstruct a series of abstracts from a variety of refereed journals to 'read' for the representation of data, argument, methodology and significance. We describe one strategy for writing abstracts, developed as part of a long-term project on postgraduate writing pedagogies. We propose that the art of writing abstracts is neglected in the academy, is given scant attention by journal editors, and has produced a motley and often bland array of conventions and genres. We suggest that abstract art should be an important aspect of supervision if graduate students and novice researchers are to stake a claim in the academy.

Re-envisioning literacy instruction with adolescents: multiliteracies, multimodality and new technologies

Engaging students' lifeworlds and the concerns of their communities in globalised, semiotic and information societies is imperative in New Times. As youth continue to exhibit their proficiency with new literacies emerging from Internet communication technologies (leTs), education-particularly curriculum and instruction-remains largely focused around monomodal, print-only literacy practices, often ignoring students' hybrid multiple voices. This paper reports on two curricular interruptions to the progressive reading and writing workshop that acknowledged adolescents' engagement with digital technologies and their new multimodalliteracy practices in a year eight public classroom within a small urban academy of technology.

American and Australian doctoral literature reviewing practices and pedagogies

The literature review is fundamental to the doctoral enterprise of academic disciplines, yet research into how the doctoral literature review is learned, taught or experienced is limited. Responding to an apparent under-examination of the literature review as a critical feature of doctoral learning, this thesis investigates the doctoral literature review process as experienced by American and Australian doctoral candidates, doctoral supervisors and academic librarians. The research followed a qualitative approach shaped by two questions: "How is the doctoral literature review process learned?" and, "What is learned by doing a doctoral literature review?" Data were generated from in-depth interviews conducted with 42 participants in education, nursing and the physical and biological sciences. Critical literacy, critical pedagogy and critical information literacy provided frameworks for interpreting participants‘ experiences and perspectives on literature reviewing practices, disciplinary influences and mutually associated doctoral literacies.

The doctoral literature review is traditionally considered to be two segregated events—literature seeking and writing in an academic genre. The study findings challenge this perspective, proposing instead that doctoral literature reviewing is a complex, comprehensive process characterised by interdependent activities in a cycle of gathering, reflecting upon and synthesising literatures. Moreover, these findings indicate that, by engaging with disciplinary literatures and the literature review process, doctoral researchers become familiar with an array of critical doctoral literacies—disciplinary literacy, information literacy and reading and writing literacies. Thus, the doctoral literature review can be conceptualised as a pedagogy through which candidates acquire the lived practices and craft skills of disciplinary-specific research; learn to manage large bodies of information, literature and knowledge; and learn to read and write as scholars in their disciplines.

This project reconceptualises traditional perspectives on doctoral literature reviewing and recommends further exploration into its pedagogical potential. By approaching the doctoral literature review as a pedagogical process, the inquiry attempts to unpack literacies embedded within the doctoral enterprise, thereby exposing them as explicit aspects of doctoral learning. Becoming aware of the interrelatedness of critical doctoral literacies can mobilise supervisors, librarians and candidates to exploit the literature review process more fully. Ultimately, this research contributes to an international focus on a central feature of the doctorate and, as such, more broadly informs and supports doctoral pedagogy, particularly for those involved in American and Australian doctoral education.

Exploring girl power : gender, literacy and the textual practices of young women attending an elite school

Popular discourses concerning the relationship between gender and academic literacies have suggested that boys are lacking in particular, school-based literacy competencies compared with girls. Such discourses construct “gender” according to a binary framework and they obscure the way in which literacy and textual practices operate as a site in which gendered identities are constituted and negotiated by young people in multiple sites including schooling, which academic inquiry has often emphasized. In this paper I consider the school-based textual practices of young women attending an elite school, in order to explore how these practices construct “femininities”. Feminist education researchers have shown how young women negotiate discourses of feminine passivity and heterosexuality through their reading and writing practices. Yet discourses of girlhood and femininity have undergone important transformations in times of ‘girl power’ in which young women are increasingly constructed as successful, autonomous and sexually agentic. Thus young women’s reading and writing practices may well operate as a space in which new discourses around girlhood and femininity are constituted. Throughout the paper, I utilize the notion of “performativity”, understood through the work of Judith Butler, to show how textual practices variously inscribe and negotiate discourses of gender. Thus the importance of textual work in inscribing and challenging notions of gender is asserted. I argue that critical literacy is just as important, but perhaps no more guaranteed, within elite girls’ education as it is within boys’ education.

The mathematical and science skills of students who are deaf or hard of hearing educated in inclusive settings

This study examined the science and mathematics achievements of 16 Year 9 students with hearing loss in an inclusive high-school setting in Western Australia. Results from the Monitoring Standards in Education (MSE) compulsory state tests were compared with state and class averages for students with normal hearing. Data were collected from three cohorts of Year 9 students across a 3-year period (2005‐2007). Results from mathematics MSE9 and the MSE9 science assessments showed that the majority of students with hearing loss performed below the state average (88%). Findings in this study suggest that students with hearing loss demonstrated more mathematical strength in the areas of space and measurement, which use visuo-spatial skills. Results for students with hearing loss in the five sections of the science assessment suggest more consistency across the different areas tested in the MSE. Comparisons with the MSE9 English paper for the 2005 cohort of students with hearing loss suggest a strong relationship between reading and writing skills and performance on mathematics and science assessment. In particular, questions with high language content created difficulty. On the science assessment, questions requiring a written explanation appeared to be particularly challenging. These findings have implications for teaching and learning in these crucial areas for students with hearing loss in inclusive secondary school settings. Greater attention to the interpretation of the language of mathematics and to writing about science concepts may help to improve outcomes for students with hearing loss on statewide assessments

The compositor of the farce of dustiny : Lacan reading, and being read by, Joyce

"We have learnt to see Joyce as Lacan's own symptom," writes Jean-Michel Rabate, "and as the sinthome par excellence" (2006, 26). This duality of Joyce as an unreadable text permeated with enjoyment and at the same time as an enigma that Lacan wants to decipher supplies the key to an understanding of Seminar XXIII. Lacan's addition to the triad of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary of a fourth term, the Sigma (or sinthome) firms up his late shift from the speakingbeing (parletre, the Lacanian neologism that indicates the insertion of the human being into the signifying chain) to MAN (LOM, a Lacanian play on l'homme). Instead of the human being as inserted into the Symbolic Order, Seminar XXIII presents Joyce as inserting himself into language, tying the signifier to the body in a special, unique way. For Lacan, the sinthome is eccentric to the registers of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, yet it paradoxically links them when the Name-of- the-Father fails. The implication is carried in the concept of "nomination" that the Name-of-the-Father (or its structural equivalents, such as "Woman," "God" and "Joyce") makes language possible for the individual.