Critical Literacies

Symposium

2007-07-15T02:40:00.000-07:00

The critical literacies symposium at the UKLA conference last week went very well (although we ran out of time, of course!). Guy has written a useful summary of the four papers here . Join in the discussion Guy and I had about the phrase 'critical literacy' - I think, for example, this it refers to both texts and practices (and multimedia/ multimodal analysis and production) and so I am not sure I fully subscribe to the notion that it is 'rooted in an autonomous literacy and an outsider mindset'. Interesting thought, however!

Critical links

2007-06-23T10:17:00.000-07:00

We held a project day for the 'Critical Literacies' project a few weeks ago and it was a rich and fruitful day for all concerned. We were updated on the various projects involved and shared reflections on the challenges and opportunities faced by teachers undertaking critical literacy work in the current UK climate. Despite the varied nature of the 4 projects, we decided that there were a number of similar elements:
a) Each of the projects had focused primarily on subjects that were rooted in the children's own interests and experiences. This enabled teachers to draw on the students' own expertise in these particular areas of knowledge.
b) Each of the projects involved children in multimodal, multimedia production and were developing critical practices across these modes and media.
c) All of the teachers noted that children's responses were enthusiastic in nature and the project had motivated children who otherwise struggled to engage in the curriculum.
d) All of the teachers involved in the presentations felt that the project had been beneficial for their own professional development as it has enabled them to reflect on issues that previously had not been central to their concerns.
More on this at the UKLA conference, but needless to say that there is such a lot of rich material developed in the project that we are going to need to extend the project into next year in order to get it all written up! More on this in due course.

Jackie

Critical Literacies Symposium

2007-04-05T10:14:00.000-07:00

Work that has been undertaken on the UK Critical Literacies project will be shared at the UKLA International Conference in Swansea, 6th - 8th July, 2007. You can find further details of the conference here. There will be a symposium in which teachers and researchers from 4 of the projects will present their work.

Ernest Morrell will be a keynote speaker at the same conference. We look forward to learning about his work on critical literacies, some of which he shared here.

So - book your place now at what will be a very exciting conference!

Jackie

More Blogging By Monteney

2006-12-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

Posh Eaten by Rogue T Rex

Image created by Lauren age 9 for a tabloid front cover.

Hello I am the Peter mentioned in Jackie's post. Since the DinoBlog we have continued to use a variety of web 2:0 applications to present our work. One of the reasons for using Blogger was that it was a public site and I felt that the children needed to learn about and use internet safety rules within a 'real world' context. The children are using a variety of social networking sites in their own homes with little or no parental controls. If schools teach internet safety always within the protective 'bubble' of an LEA Firewall, we will be failing to provide our children with the skills necessary to keep them safe outside this bubble.

We don't teach road safety to our children and then never let them cross the road.
The children love the vehicle of blogging etc to get their work out onto the internet and share with a much wider audience than just their teacher or even peers.

Best of all they can share it with their parents.

Critical blogging!

2006-11-20T10:57:00.000-08:00

Peter, one of the teachers in this Critical Literacies project, has been doing some very interesting work using blogs with a Year 4 class (children aged 8 and 9). You can see one of the blogs at:

http://dinoproject.blogspot.com/

How did this work develop critical literacy practices? Drawing on Luke and Freebody’s model (1999), the activity enabled the pupils to:

· Break the code of texts: children drew on their knowledge of spelling, grammar, understanding of genre and understanding of visual grammar in the construction of the blogs.
· Participate in the meanings of text: children composed meaningful texts in collaboration with others, drawing on their cultural resources.
· Use texts functionally: children used the blogs for different purposes (follow the links from the blog above to the 'All about us' or 'Dinosaur pictures' blogs for example) and were able to determine fitness for purpose. In developing the blogs, they understood the way blogs worked, the varied social and cultural functions they perform.
· Critically analyze and transform texts: children were able to analyse critically each other’s blog posts. They also drew critically on a range of web-based texts as they developed links and images for their posts.

It's exciting stuff. And now they are in Year 5, the pupils are becoming expert at blogging - watch this space!

Jackie

Global resources

2006-11-16T02:03:00.000-08:00

Finding useful resources for facilitating critical literacies work is normally no problem - the stuff of everyday life provides plenty of material ripe for deconstruction. However, there are also valuable collections of materials on the web, and these pages would be an appropriate place to provide links to these materials for each other. The resources available on this site, International Networks Archive, which is tracing the impact of globalisation, includes downloadable files with statistics on issues such as capital flows, arms, migration and so on. This site is also useful for work on critical global issues, as it pulls together 100 key words and images that attempt to capture a single moment in time in world news. The words and images change on an hourly basis. It would be useful for pupils to compile their own bank of images and words that capture current global issues - how would these compare across the classrooms in this project?

Jackie

No profit left behind?

2006-10-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Allan Luke for alerting us to this story about the Bush family profiting from the 'No Child Left Behind' Act.

In England, the government are currently consulting on the development of a quality assurance scheme for commercial phonics programmes, given the recommendations made in the Rose Review Report about the value of synthetic phonics programmes. How many of those making representations to the Rose Review committee about the need to promote synthetic phonics will be able to profit from government endorsement of commercial phonics programmes, I wonder? A useful critical literacy project in schools would be to monitor this carefully...

Jackie

Street Art

2006-09-12T00:32:00.000-07:00

Dr Joolz, who is a researcher involved in this project, has been interested in street art for some time. On a recent visit to Granada, I was struck by the richness of street art and the statements it made about American imperialism and the war in Iraq . In this working paper by Michael Alderton, he discusses the texts produced by 'billboard liberators' as a form of critical literacy practice. I like the concept of 'billboard liberation'. It certainly lightened up the last general election in the UK when billboard liberators challenged some of the Tory party's offensive campaigning - see examples here.

Jackie

CLIP podcast

2006-07-17T10:55:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-02T02:21:00.000-07:00

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

Welcome to the Critical Literacies Blog!

2006-05-12T07:19:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the 'Critical Literacies' Project blog. You can find out about the aims and scope of the project here. This blog can be used by project participants to share ideas, offer updates on the project, comment on progress and chew over some of the emerging themes and concepts, amongst other things. The project participants can use the blog in ways they see fit and so this space will develop as the project unfolds - we look forward to the journey!