Literacy in the middle years

Learning from Collaborative Classroom Research

Anne-Marie Morgan, Barbara Comber, Peter Freebody, Helen Nixon

• Publisher: Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA)
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781875622931
• eBook ISBN: 9781875622948
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Literacy in the Middle Years: Learning from Collaborative Classroom Research showcases teachers' innovative literacy work across the curriculum. Classroom practice, teacher thinking and collaborative research are highlighted in ways of working with new curricula and rapidly changing literacy modes and platforms. Connections with place, critical engagement with digital literacies, using multimodal texts with EAL/D learners, and subject-specific literacies are detailed in teachers' stories of practice. Teacher wellbeing, for a sustainable workforce, underpins the case studies, aimed at equipping 'change ready' teachers with positive examples of literacy approaches and inquiry in practice.

1	LITERACY RESEARCH: A MIDDLE YEARS PROJECT

Peter Freebody
Anne-Marie Morgan
Barbara Comber
Helen Nixon

This chapter introduces the project on which this book is based. The project’s university researchers establish the case for ‘why literacy again?’ and outline the key themes and emphases of the book. These include new literacy demands and the need for a continuing focus on literacy, middle years literacy requirements, collaborative research to address literacy demands, Design-Based Research methodology, and the pedagogical approaches used by teacher researchers in the project: place-conscious pedagogies, curriculum-specific pedagogies, and digital literacies and youth cultures pedagogies.

Teacher researcher projects are outlined within the overarching frame and goals of the project, and we also foreground the relationship of these projects to literacy in the Australian Curriculum, in both curriculum-specific ways and as a General capability.

This book is about literacy education and innovation in the middle years of schooling. It advances an argument about the importance of literacy and of collaboration between teachers and researchers. It is based on a research project aimed at developing innovations in classroom practice, and in this chapter we outline the nature of this project. But first we make a case for continuing to foreground literacy teaching and learning in the middle years.

There are at least two ways of seeing the relationship between literacy education and innovation. In one interpretation, literacy and innovation are closely tied and mutually informing: many social, cultural and technological innovations call for expanded forms of literacy practice; human life constantly reconfigures, and literacy is recruited, with increasing prominence, to lead or support these reconfigurations. Intensifying those processes are the changing backgrounds and destinations of students, which call for innovative ways of teaching contemporary forms of literacy that are understandable, meaningful and useful to students. A second interpretation, however, places these ideas essentially in opposition: many education systems mandate ways of teaching reading and writing, define their component skills as generic and universal, thoroughly portable across settings, and assessable in standardised forms, with established common developmental milestones. In this sense, any innovation in teaching ultimately needs to show how it provides for closer and closer approximations to correct, standardised practice, with teachers encouraged to innovate, but only in ways that will improve outcomes against standardised and static norms.

In this book we make the case for the first of these views, with literacy education and innovation being mutually informing and responsive to each other. We provide examples of innovation and changed practice, from schools and with teachers where and for whom this view informs planning and practice, and where there is a culture of using teacher research to inform pedagogy that is responsive to the contextualised needs of the students. We outline the implications for teaching and collaborative research and development in classrooms and schools arising from these examples of changed practice. We argue that this is both important and timely work. Innovation in literacy education matters more now than ever because of the conflicting pressures on educators both to standardise practice, and, at the same time, to diversify their practice. The need to standardise arises from increasingly managerial governments and bureaucracies. The need to develop diverse and responsive educational repertoires arises from increasingly variable, sometimes difficult-to-manage communities, students and workplaces. In general, the urgency arises from the rapidly evolving civic, domestic, and private lives of the people who work in schools, the students who attend schools, and who depend on the quality and outcomes of schooling. While our focus in this book is on the teaching and learning of literacy, the overall themes of the work reported here could be applied to other sets of capabilities – skills, knowledge, attitudes, and dispositions – that bear on the social, cultural, and economic conditions in which Australians currently live and that lie in wait for them.

Why literacy again?

It was in 1908 that Edmund Huey conducted and published the first systematic and extensive review of the available research on the teaching of reading. So literacy educators are probably within their rights to ask, over a century later, ‘Why more on literacy? After all this time, how can literacy education still be a concern?’

There are at least four good answers:

1 the changing modes, platforms and uses of literacy and the resulting need for ongoing refinements and expansions of our definitions of literacy

2 the changing cohort of learners in schools in Australia and many other countries, and the increasing diversity and variety in literate practices and resources learners and their families and communities bring to classrooms, urge us to regularly pause to reconsider what it is to be and become literate

3 the changing accountabilities of educators with regard to student literacy learning on publicly standardised assessments, and with regard to rapidly changing curricula, and accreditation processes

4 the ongoing development of a base of empirical and theoretical work around literacy and literacy education.

Firstly, definitions of literacy are changing, and arguments about definitional developments are not just an academic preoccupation. A useful definition for starting a debate about literacy is this:

Literacy can be roughly defined as communication through visually decoded inscriptions, rather than through auditory and gestural channels (Street & Lefstein, 2007, p. 56).

This is indeed ‘rough’ in the sense of allowing a lot in at the expense of stretching common usage to include visually decode-able objects of all kinds. What are specifically excluded are other semantic (meaning-making) systems, including sound (auditory) channels, and movement (gestural or embodied) channels of communication, semantic systems that are more commonly included in present day multiliteracies. We note that ‘literacy’ is described as the work of the reader, the ‘decoder’, presumably as a member of a culture that designates some things as readable and others not normally so.

In an influential historical analysis, writing is defined as the sequencing of standardised symbols (characters, signs or sign components) in order to graphically reproduce human speech, thought and other things in part or whole (Fischer, 2001, p. 12).

Here the literacy work is done via the writer’s investment of meaning in inscriptions and conveying speech, but more than speech. Again, technicality is traded off in the interests of including potentially diverse, unpredictable, and culturally specific practices. Assembling definitions of literacy (as in Freebody, 2007) makes it clear immediately that defining literacy is not like defining a triangle or some other idea that exists only via an act of stipulation (eg a triangle, the calculus, a mammal). Literacy is, first and foremost, an open-textured concept. What counts as an acceptable definition is what works productively to cover features of a particular setting at a particular time, and is therefore subject to ongoing change. For example, no matter how pervasive and well-known a term such as ‘humour’ is, it is not definitionally as portable across time and place as is a term such as ‘molecule’.

Two forces try to pull literacy back to a simpler form. The first is a nostalgic retreat from the complexity of the contemporary nature and uses of literacy into the simpler, apparently more literate society of the past, which in turn becomes apparently more literate by having The Basics drilled in. Sadly, for this view

there is little to go back to in terms of pedagogical method, curriculum, or school organisation. The old tried and true approaches, which nostalgia prompts us to believe might solve current problems, were designed neither to achieve the literacy standard sought today, nor to assure successful literacy for everyone (Resnick & Resnick, 1977, p. 385).

Further, these approaches were neither tried nor true: variability has pervaded the teaching of reading and writing for at least the last four thousand years (Fischer, 2001), and, for most of that period, up to at least 120 years ago, almost no systematic observation, documentation, or assessment of these variations was made.

A second reason to reconsider the question 'Why literacy again?' relates to the changes in the student population, the growing diversity of students and their backgrounds, families and communities from which they come. Currently over a quarter (26 per cent) of Australia’s population was born overseas and a further 20 per cent had at least one parent born overseas (ABS, 2013). A growing number of Australian students therefore speak a language other than English at home and bring diverse and variable literacy skills and capabilities to the classroom. To state the case more strongly, they bring with them more, and, to a host society, less visible variations on the nature of reading and writing and the ways in which these are put to work.

Recent migration trends into Australia show a shift from European and English-speaking nations to Asian (especially Chinese), Indian sub-continental, Middle Eastern and African nations. Apart from English, the most common languages spoken in Australia are Chinese, Italian, Arabic, Cantonese, Greek, Vietnamese, Tagalog/Filipino, Spanish and Hindi (ABS, 2013). So to understand literacy in terms of the reading and writing skills, rules and attitudes that relate only to the use of standard Australian English is even less adequate than it has been as a basis for acknowledging the literate and language resources of Australian learners and addressing their learning needs in English. Recognition within literacy definitions and programs needs to be given to the skills these learners bring and of them as bi- or pluri-lingual learners who communicate translingually across the languages they use, and who have different literacy learning needs (see Garcia & Kleifgen, 2010).

A third force driving a retreat from the complexity needed for a fully operational definition of literacy originates in the educational administration and policy sectors. The policy echelon needs definitions that can support their regulatory needs and that can provide the demonstrations of ‘success’ that constitute their ‘performance indicators’ or ‘achievement standards’. This form of public simplification is based on the drive towards standardisation, convenience of assessment and ease of accountability to the public.

It is important, as we begin to look at literacy education in action, to appreciate the extent to which both nostalgia and administrative convenience continue to push out definitions of literacy that were as inadequate in Edmund Huey’s time as they are now, but that regularly buffet attempts to work with definitions that can not only cope with, but actively engage with the real demands that face increasingly diverse societies as they try to participate in contemporary domestic, civic, and vocational life. Our working definitions, for all their provisionality, need to be sufficiently open-textured to pull their weight in the realities of teachers’ and students’ lives.

There is no ‘neutral space’ in which literacy can be generically defined for all practical purposes. The term literacy has various histories of use. Each of these, of necessity, has produced a manageable object of study and practice for researchers and educators alike. More recently the pressure has been on to produce not just research-amenable versions of literacy but also policy-amenable versions – abstract, portable, and comprehensively measurable. (Freebody, 2007, p. 12).

A further answer to the question ‘Why literacy again?' is independent of the changing nature of literacy use in contemporary societies such as Australia; it concerns the intensification of teachers’ public accountability for adequate literacy teaching and learning.

In Australia as in other places, this literacy accountability includes the performance of students on assessments that enter teachers, schools, jurisdictions, systems, states, and even nations into competitions whose rules – definitions of key concepts, forms of assessment, relations to ongoing curricular learning, etc – they did not set. Doing well in these competitions is not just achieved through assessed levels of overall literacy achievement, but also comprises indices for equity in the distribution of literacy skills. For instance, Australian schooling has been described as a ‘high performing, low equity’ system (McGaw, 2007), and it is clear that, on the measures deployed by international agencies such as the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD), such as through its Programme for International School Assessment (PISA), how well literacy capabilities are distributed across a society is highly variable, independently of overall, average levels of scoring. That an organisation so focused on standardised testing and reportable and comparable outcomes is prepared to consider variability in societies and recognising these in literacy capabilities points to the need for this view to be considered more widely.

Australian teachers also face new accountabilities in relation to literacy arising from recent major curriculum innovations, in particular national curriculum and assessment programs. These initiatives are largely made up of:

1 a new curriculum in English that has a designated literacy strand (along with language and literature strands)

2 cross-curricular General capabilities that include literacy (along with numeracy, intercultural understandings, personal & social capabilities, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) capabilities, critical and creative thinking, and ethical understanding)

3 cross-curriculum priorities (Indigenous Australian culture, Asian perspectives, and sustainability)

4 a national assessment program in literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) involving brief standardised tests at school Years 3, 5, 7, and 9.

State, territory, and regional jurisdictions across the country are not reacting in uniform ways to these interventions. Some authorities have aligned their local assessment and reporting schemas to comply with new national curricular and assessment regimens; some have developed specific, lesson-plan-level materials and pedagogical approaches to support teachers’ transition to the new curricular content; some have developed mobile support groups to work with school leaders and local and school-level leaders to implement these initiatives; and one has re-written the national curricula into new formats and sequences, aiming to retain local authority over the ‘syllabus’ used in its jurisdiction.

In addition to the challenges of a new national curriculum, definitions of literacy and pressures to teach to national testing priorities, teachers are required to engage with new national registration, performance appraisal, and accreditation processes through the suite of programs developed by the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). The central AITSL document, Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL, 2012), now underpins teacher registration, re-registration, promotion, performance planning and professional learning for teachers nationally.

Conforming to and reporting against generic standards necessarily sets boundaries around what innovations are possible, and how locally responsive teaching practices can be developed, disseminated, and sustained. In that these standards name what counts and does not count as acceptable educational activity, teachers need to engage with them by re-defining and re-evaluating practice.

It becomes important, in that light, to develop (and to study and document) settings in which teachers can both broaden their teaching repertoires and work in sustainable and rewarding ways within commonly understood, nationally defined and managed frameworks. In this way, through teacher inquiry, collaborative practice and innovative pedagogies, individual teachers and the system at large can extend the envelope of practice models understood to be relevant to particular community settings. Objectifying the standards as features of teachers’ activities, and comparing them to what teachers in those settings actually do can open up the possibility of debate about how teachers should respond to standards, and the ways in which their work matters. The strengths and drawbacks of the use of generic standards can thus be scrutinised, in professional and public domains, in light of the full range of conditions facing Australian teachers.

A further answer to ‘Why literacy again?' concerns the ongoing empirical and theoretical work around questions to do with the nature, teaching and learning of literacy. The study of the teaching and learning of reading, writing and literacy has developed in significant ways over the last generation of teachers and researchers. For instance, a generation ago there was comparatively little theoretical development around writing in education; anthropologists may have studied literacy, but educators for the most part studied reading. In their early 1970s reviews of reading research published in the leading research journal in the area, Reading Research Quarterly, Samuels (1973) and Williams (1973) identified four recurring themes: the assessment of ‘reading readiness’, visual and auditory training as the basis of reading development, the widespread use of word lists in research and teaching, and the first signs of interest in reading what was termed ‘meaningful prose’ and later ‘extended discourse’. Most of these have faded into history or linger as minority pursuits. The mid to late 1970s saw researchers beginning to pay serious attention to an extended range of literacy-education areas, including:

• comprehension of the texts that appear in real educational settings (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983)

• a growing distinction between capabilities with limited acquisition periods and those that continue to develop significantly (Paris, 2005)

• classrooms as sites of everyday literacy learning (Comber, 2000)

• the importance of equity issues in the educational distribution of literacy practices (Comber & Nixon, 2009)

• the significance of digital and online technologies in literacy teaching and learning (Lankshear, Snyder, & Green, 2000).

As with any other field of academic and professional complexity and urgency, the literacy ‘business’ surges ahead along with literacy research, and with increased activity in the policy and commercial sectors. Literacy teaching and learning has thus become consequential in political debates and in the marketplace.

These are all reasonable answers to ‘Why literacy still?’, but some of Huey’s findings should still draw our attention. Huey pointed to the critical role of literacy in learners’ expanding social experi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 COLLABORATIVE LITERACY RESEARCH: A MIDDLE YEARS PROJECT
• 2 PLACE-CONSCIOUS LITERACY PEDAGOGIES
• 3 ENGLISH AS AN ADDITIONAL LANGUAGE LEARNERS (EAL) AND MULTIMEDIA PEDAGOGIES
• 4 CURRICULUM-SPECIFIC LITERACY: EXPANDING THE REPERTOIRE
• 5 LITERACY IN THE DIGITAL DOMAIN
• 6 GUIDING STUDENTS' INTERNET RESEARCH
• 7 READING AND WRITING SCIENCE: A WHOLE-SCHOOL APPROACH
• 8 COLLABORATIVE LITERACY RESEARCH AND WHY IT MATTERS
• References