What Is Essential Is Invisible To The Eye : Culturally Responsive Teaching As A Key To Unlocking Children\u27s Multiple Literacies

Refugee students, language learners, and students in poverty are often viewed through a deficit model of everything they do not have in the way of school preparedness. However, many of them are survivors who possess courage and resilience. They also possess exceptional visual literacy developed through experiences with video and other images. Leveraging their visual literacy builds a bridge to help them understand text, which in turn helps them understand how literature reflects all of our experiences. Increased textual literacy helps students engage with vexing human questions. These questions form an inquiry base from which students can approach writing as an authentic task for self-expression. Student voice and culturally responsive teaching is valued in this model, which counters the experiences with failure that so many immigrant and low-income students learn when standardized testing is the focus of school. Inviting students to co-create literate spaces honors them, their families, and their cultures

The impact of diversity in Queensland classrooms on literacy teaching in changing times

The intent of the paper is to identify possible inhibitors to best practice for literacy teaching and learning and to identify key considerations for a responsive, relevant and constructive curriculum and pedagogy for the teaching of literacy in diverse classrooms. A review of relevant research and pedagogical frameworks such as sociocultural constructivism, productive pedagogies and multiliteracies pedagogy, will provide the basis on which to argue some possible classroom practices for teachers to consider for the as ways forward in diverse classrooms. This paper will be contextualized within the current political agenda in regard to literacy education and recent research into literacy teaching and learning in Australia, reported in 'The National Inquiry into Literacy' and consider the issues together with the assessment demands placed on teachers in classrooms

Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Noticing and Wondering: An Equity-Inducing yet Accessible Teaching Practice

Noticing and Wondering is a promising practice with an emerging research base in mathematics education for helping move teachers to a more contemporary paradigm of learning where culturally and linguistically diverse students have more equitable opportunities for academic success. This paper documents and extends this emerging research of Noticing and Wondering to fill a gap in the literature by (1) conceptualizing six reasons for the value of Noticing and Wondering and (2) discussing its potential to support English learners, such as by providing teachers easy access to students’ cultural assets. We document application of Noticing and Wondering beyond mathematics and conclude with a call for empirical research and practice in this direction

English language in rural Malaysia: situating global literacies in local practices

This paper claims that underlying the naturalisation of teaching and learning of English in the Malaysian education system are ideological pressures and political dogmas, often emerging from colonial, urban/rural and even local ethnic conflicts and hierarchies. It suggests therein lie the inherent difficulties of teaching and learning English in rural communities in Malaysia. Three paradigms frame this view in the paper: the overarching view of literacy as a situated and variable social process; the use of an ethnographic perspective in investigating English language and literacy education in Malaysia; the stance on the need for Malaysians to acquire English as an additive rather than as a deficit philosophy

Values-Based Network Leadership in an Interconnected World

This paper describes values-based network leadership conceptually aligned to systems science, principles of networks, moral and ethical development, and connectivism. Values-based network leadership places importance on a leader\u27s repertoire of skills for stewarding a culture of purpose and calling among distributed teams in a globally interconnected world. Values-based network leadership is applicable for any leader needing to align interdependent effort by networks of teams operating across virtual and physical environments to achieve a collective purpose. An open-learning ecosystem is also described to help leaders address the development of strengths associated with building trust and relationships across networks of teams, aligned under a higher purpose and calling, possessing moral fiber, resilient in the face of complexity, reflectively competent to adapt as interconnected efforts evolve and change within multicultural environments, and able to figure out new ways to do something never done before

Developing new work based learning pathways for housing practitioners whilst participating peripherally and legitimately: The situated learning of work based learning tutors

This paper discusses the experiences of two work based learning tutors at the University of Chester in the context of developing work based learning for housing practitioners

Exploring the Impact of Teacher Collaboration on Student Learning: A Focus on Writing

In this yearlong case study, six English teachers in an urban high school in Northern California engaged in sustained collaboration focused on developing and enacting strategies to improve the writing skills of their culturally and linguistically diverse freshmen. The study was conducted between August 2018 and June 2019, to determine the connections, if any, between teacher collaboration and student learning. Qualitative data were analyzed from teacher collaboration and observation of classroom practices, focus groups and teacher-created artifacts. Students’ on-demand writing assessments in fall and spring were compared with instructionally supported writing. Student surveys were analyzed in a mixed methods approach. Findings suggest that students’ writing skills improved and students reported increased confidence in writing and other literacy practices. The lessons developed in the collaboration meetings and observed in practice, in tandem with student and teacher self-reports suggest a positive relationship between teacher collaboration and student learning outcomes

Beyond the Spoken Word: Examining the Nature of Teacher Gesturing in the Context of an Elementary Engineering Curriculum for English-Learner Students

Our research team performed an exploratory analysis of teacher gesturing via a case study of an elementary teacher. We focused on gesturing, a practice found to support both bilingual English learner students’ linguistic development and mathematics achievement, during the teacher’s engineering and science lessons. The research team systematically analyzed teacher video data using McNeill’s gestural dimensions framework and found variation of gesturing types and rates when comparing engineering and baseline science lessons. Additionally, specific types of teacher-gestures appear to be associated with either behavioral or classroom management practices, procedural instructions, and discussion facilitation. We suggest that teacher-gestures such as these have the potential to facilitate bilingual English learners’ language acquisition, while also developing their STEM literacy in general and engineering capacity in particular. Further exploration of teacher-gestures in elementary engineering curricula could lead to an integrated STEM pedagogy that incorporates gesturing as a fundamental teaching strategy, bridging STEM instruction with linguistically responsive instructional practices.Educatio