CLIP podcast

Vivian Vasquez has been working with teachers on critical literacy for many years. Her excellent book, 'Negotiating critical literacies with young children', won the AERA Division B Outstanding Book of 2006 Award last year. In the book, she documents her research on critical literacies with children in the earliest years of schooling. Now, in what is an exciting development of her work, Vivian has started podcasting on critical literacy as it is practised in different contexts - the Critical Literacy in Practice (CLIP) Podacst site can be found here. On the CLIP Podcast site, there is a useful bibilography and links to sites of interest to critical literacy educators.

For those of you wanting to try podcasting yourselves, there is some helpful guidance and useful links here.

Jackie

Critical histories

On re-reading a chapter written by Barbara Comber, I was struck by the following:

‘Teachers who are engaged in a critical literacy project have assembled and continue to assemble their theoretical, research, and pedagogical repertoires over time and across careers. They respond to changing times and circumstances rather than simply replicating old formulae.’ (Comber 2001: 273).

One of the important tasks of this project, then, is to map out these journeys over time, develop reflective accounts, life-histories, autobiographies, autoethnographies of educators interested in critical literacy practices. Guy and Julia have been developing an autoethnography here in relation to their own blogging experiences.

I’m going to use the resources on this site in order to produce podcasts of our critical literacy educational histories – at least those of myself and the teacher I am working with. What are the questions we should be asking ourselves as we do this? Perhaps this should be a thread on the discussion board here…

Jackie

(Reference - Comber, B. (2001) Critical literacies and local action: Teacher knowledge and a ‘new’ research agenda. In B.Comber and A. Simpson (eds) ‘Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms’. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. )

Update

We held a meeting of the UK group a few weeks ago and shared progress on the pilot projects. We have agreed to write up the projects and place them on the Critical Literacies project site in November. Meanwhile, you can find out about some of the exciting work undertaken by one of the teachers here.

Two of the teachers involved in the Australian projects, Helen Grant and Catherine Walsh, took part in a a teacher-researcher project funded by the Spencer Foundation - 'Invesitagating identity and power relations'. Details about this facinating project are located here.

Finally, this story offers a salutory reminder about the need to continue to challenge reductive discourses about children and young people's engagement with new media. Roll on the project!

Jackie