Standing brave in the face of rapid curriculum change : EAL/D teachers speak about critical literacy and its place in senior English teaching

Critical literacy (CL) has been the subject of much debate in the Australian public and education arenas since 2002. Recently, this debate has dissipated as literacy education agendas and attendant policies shift to embrace more hybrid models and approaches to the teaching of senior English. This paper/presentation reports on the views expressed by four teachers of senior English about critical literacy and it’s relevance to students who are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds who are learning English while undertaking senior studies in high school. Teachers’ understandings of critical literacy are important, esp. given the emphasis on Critical and Creative Thinking and Literacy as two of the General Capabilities underpinning the Australian national curriculum. Using critical discourse analysis, data from four specialist ESL teachers in two different schools were analysed for the ways in which these teachers construct critical literacy. While all four teachers indicated significant commitment to critical literacy as an approach to English language teaching, the understandings they articulated varied from providing forms of access to powerful genres, to rationalist approaches to interrogating text, to a type of ‘critical-aesthetic’ analysis of text construction. Implications are also discussed.

Workplace information literacy : cultivation strategies for 'working smarter' in 21st century libraries

This paper presents a hybrid framework of Swedish cultural practices and Australian grounded theory for organizational development and suggests practical strategies for 'working smarter' in 21st Century libraries. Toward that end, reflective evidence-based practices are offered to incrementally build organizational capacity for asking good questions, selecting authoritative sources, evaluating multiple perspectives, organizing emerging insights, and communicating them to inform, educate, and influence. In addition, to ensure the robust information exchange necessary to collective workplace learning, leadership traits are proposed for ensuring inclusive communication, decision making, and planning processes. These findings emerge from action research projects conducted from 2003 to 2008 in two North American libraries.

Systems thinking : an approach for advancing workplace information literacy

As the importance of information literacy has gained increased recognition, so too have academic library professionals intensified their efforts to champion, activate, and advance these capabilities in others. To date, however, little attention has focused on advancing these essential competencies amongst practitioner advocates.This paper helps redress the paucity of professional literature on the topic of workplace information literacy among library professionals.

Reshaping children’s knowledge through film making: What to film, how to film and why

How can teachers reinvigorate content area knowledge and representation through filmmaking? We give examples of what to film, how to film, and why, drawing on our visual ethnographic research with Year 5 students in a working class suburb of Logan, Queensland. The unit developed content knowledge of Indigenous places and practices through sensitising activities in nature. Valuing students’ funds of knowledge, we interpreted local places through epistemologies of different cultures. Through filmmaking workshops by a digital artist, students filmed community members in a local shopping mall about their perceptions of health and happiness in local places. Students were positioned as future community leaders, presenting their films at a national conference. To conclude, we map the dominant and marginalised, local and specialised, and print and visual forms of knowledge that were interwoven, reshaped, and shared through multimodal design.

Multimodality, media, and access to multiliteracies

In many English-speaking countries bilingual and multilingual speakers of English are integrated into mainstream classrooms, where the teacher is expected to help them “catch up” with speakers of the dominant language. In this presentation, I argue that we teach in culturally and linguistically diverse societies that are increasingly interconnected through a broadened range of multimodal and digital textual practices. Intuitively, one might expect that multimodal approaches are more equitable than exclusively print-based approaches because learners can draw from a broader range of semiotic resources. Yet the potentials of using multiple modes and new digital media to provide greater access to multiliteracies cannot be assumed. I draw on a case study of a multilingual language learner, Paweni, a Thai immigrant, describing how she and her peers negotiated cultural and linguistic difference. These encounters occur during multiliteracies lessons involving both print and digital texts. I theorise a “dialectic of access” to explain the reciprocal interaction between the agency of learners, modes, and media. I apply Giddens’ structuration theory to take into account the social structures – domination, signification, and legitimation – that played an important role in this dialectic of access.

Yarning circles in the literacy classroom

This article explains how the speaking and listening practice of yarning circles can be used in the literacy classroom. The article opens with an account of a live enactment of yarning circles with elementary students in a mainstream classroom in Australia. It explains the purpose and origin of yarning circles in Indigenous communities, and provides steps for establishing and implementing the practice in classrooms.

Socio-Spatial Approaches To Literacy Studies: Rethinking the Social Constitution and Politics of Space

Literacy studies have begun to examine the spatial dimension of literacy practices in a way that foregrounds space, and that considers space as constitutive to human relations and practices. This chapter provides an introduction to spatial literacy research, providing a guide to key theorists, themes, and studies that have shaped historical and new developments in spatial approaches to literacy practice and pedagogy. It begins by reconceptualising socio-spatial approaches to literacy research and defines terms. Intersections with related social theories are examined, with an emphasis on critical approaches and the politics of space. It clarifies the relationship between socio-spatial and socio-cultural paradigms, revisiting the spatial in seminal socio-cultural research. It covers new ground,including networks, flows, and deterritorialisation of literacy practice. The chapter concludes with challenges and recommendations for future language research and educational practice.

How to improve pupils' literacy? A cost-effectiveness analysis of a French educational project

The Action Lecture program is an innovative teaching method run in some nursery and primary schools in Paris and designed to improve pupils’ literacy. We report the results of an evaluation of this program. We describe the experimental protocol that was built to estimate the program’s impact on several types of indicators. Data were processed following a Differences-in-Differences (DID) method. Then we use the estimation of the impact on academic achievement to conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis and take a reduction of the class size program as a benchmark. The results are positive for the Action Lecture program.

Digital social signal processing - theorectical underpinning and research agenda

Organizations make increasingly use of social media in order to compete for customer awareness and improve the quality of their goods and services. Multiple techniques of social media analysis are already in use. Nevertheless, theoretical underpinnings and a sound research agenda are still unavailable in this field at the present time. In order to contribute to setting up such an agenda, we introduce digital social signal processing (DSSP) as a new research stream in IS that requires multi-facetted investigations. Our DSSP concept is founded upon a set of four sequential activities: sensing digital social signals that are emitted by individuals on social media; decoding online data of social media in order to reconstruct digital social signals; matching the signals with consumers’ life events; and configuring individualized goods and service offerings tailored to the individual needs of customers. We further contribute to tying loose ends of different research areas together, in order to frame DSSP as a field for further investigation. We conclude with developing a research agenda.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, education and health literacy

Health literacy is a vital tool to build health knowledge and enable empowerment in health decision making at a community and individual level. There are different views of what constitutes health literacy with the most inclusive addressing broadly the skills and competencies required “to seek out, comprehend, evaluate, and use health information and concepts to make informed choices, reduce health risks, and increase quality of life” (Zarcadoolas 2005). Poor health literacy has been shown to impact health seeking behaviour, access and awareness to preventive health.

Indigenous/digital heterogeneities : an actor-network-theory approach

This thesis analysed the theoretical and ontological issues of previous scholarship concerning information technology and indigenous people. As an alternative, the thesis used the framework of actor-network-theory, especially through historiographical and ethnographic techniques. The thesis revealed an assemblage of indigenous/digital enactments striving for relevance and avoiding obsolescence. It also recognised heterogeneities- including user-ambivalences, oscillations, noise, non-coherences and disruptions - as part of the milieu of the daily digital lives of indigenous people. By taking heterogeneities into account, the thesis ensured that the data “speaks for itself” and that social inquiry is not overtaken by ideology and ontology.

An investigation into painting's transformation and regeneration through post-photographic intervention in the digital archive

This PhD practice-led research inquiry sets out to examine and describe how the fluid interactions between memory and time can be rendered via the remediation of my painting and the construction of a digital image archive. My abstract digital art and handcrafted practice is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomics of becoming. I aim to show that the technological mobility of my creative strategies produce new conditions of artistic possibility through the mobile principles of rhizomic interconnection, multiplicity and diversity. Subsequently through the ongoing modification of past painting I map how emergent forms and ideas open up new and incisive engagements with the experience of a ‘continual present’. The deployment of new media and cross media processes in my art also deterritorialises the modernist notion of painting as a static and two dimensional spatial object. Instead, it shows painting in a postmodern field of dynamic and transformative intermediality through digital formats of still and moving images that re-imagines the relationship between memory, time and creative practice.

Discovering how scientific literacy has been positioned in the new Australian curriculum : science

Through the use of critical discourse analysis, this thesis investigated the perceived importance of scientific literacy in the new Australian Curriculum: Science. It was found that scientific literacy was ambiguous, and that the document did not provide detailed scope for intentional teaching for scientific literacy. To overcome this, recommendations on how to intentionally teach for scientific literacy were provided, so that Australian Science teachers can focus on improving scientific literacy outcomes for all students within this new curriculum.

Hybrid placemaking in the library : designing digital technology to enhance users’ on-site experience

This paper presents research findings and design strategies that illustrate how digital technology can be applied as a tool for hybrid placemaking in ways that would not be possible in purely digital or physical space. Digital technology has revolutionised the way people learn and gather new information. This trend has challenged the role of the library as a physical place, as well as the interplay of digital and physical aspects of the library. The paper provides an overview of how the penetration of digital technology into everyday life has affected the library as a place, both as designed by place makers, and, as perceived by library users. It then identifies a gap in current library research about the use of digital technology as a tool for placemaking, and reports results from a study of Gelatine – a custom built user check-in system that displays real-time user information on a set of public screens. Gelatine and its evaluation at The Edge, at State Library of Queensland illustrates how combining affordances of social, spatial and digital space can improve the connected learning experience among on-site visitors. Future design strategies involving gamifying the user experience in libraries are described based on Gelatine’s infrastructure. The presented design ideas and concepts are relevant for managers and designers of libraries as well as other informal, social learning environments.

The Indigenous digital collectif : the case among the iTadian of Northern Philippines

This paper reports on an adaptation of Callon and Law’s (1995) hybrid collectif derived from research conducted on the usage of mobile phones and internet technologies among the iTadian indigenous people of the Cordillera region, northern Philippines. Results brings to light an indigenous digital collectif—an emergent effect from the translation of both human and non-human heterogeneous actors as well as pre-existent networks, such as: traditional knowledge and practices, kinship relations, the traditional exchange of goods, modern academic requisites, and advocacies for indigenous rights. This is evinced by the iTadian’s enrolment of internet and mobile phone technologies. Examples include: treating these technologies as an efficient communicative tool, an indicator of well-being, and a portable extension of affective human relationships. Alternatively, counter-enrolment strategies are also at play, which include: establishing rules of acceptable use on SMS texting and internet access based on traditional notions of discretion, privacy, and the customary treatment of the dead. Within the boundaries of this digital collectif reveal imbrications of pre-existing networks like traditional customs, the kinship system across geophysical boundaries, the traditional exchange of mail and other goods, and the advocacy of indigenous rights. These imbrications show that the iTadian digital collectif fluently configures itself to a variety of networked ontologies without losing its character.