Using Literacy to Enact Critical Pedagogy and Scientific Inquiry: An Analytic Literature Review

Literacy is a powerful tool to engage students in learning about the social, cultural, political, and natural worlds around them. This is especially true within the discipline of science where students use reading and writing to engage in scientific inquiry. In the era of accountability reform, however, students spend more time acquiring reading and writing skills instead of using them to engage in content area learning. This is especially true for racially, linguistically, and economically diverse students who confront oppressive schooling conditions daily. In this analytic literature, I engage with recent scholarship to understand how literacy can be used as a tool to engage in both scientific inquiry and critical pedagogy. I argue that Paulo Freire’s (1970) theory of critical literacy offers a way to reimagine inquiry as an instructional approach that can engage students in meaningful learning, confronting injustice,and taking action toward social change.Educatio

Has the risk of social exclusion for Australian children become more geographically concentrated? : Patterns from 2001 to 2006

The concept of social exclusion, encompassing a wider view of disadvantage than that of income poverty, is now used extensively in European debates about people at risk of experiencing social disadvantage. Aggregate national data indicate the groups at risk of social exclusion but it also has an important geographical dimension with the people at risk being concentrated in particular areas. In an earlier series of papers based on data from the 2001 Census of Population, the authors explored spatial indices of risk of social exclusion for Australia’s children. The results showed that the inclusion of variables, in addition to income measures of poverty, added to our knowledge about those geographical areas where children were more likely to be at risk of social disadvantage. This paper reports on a comparison of the 2001 results with results from earlier Censuses. This comparison will enable the identification of areas where the risk of social exclusion is more entrenched and to investigate whether there has been a widening gap among small areas in the risk of social exclusion for Australian children. The results reported in the paper are based on both a composite index and the geographical distribution of particular variables likely to be related to child disadvantage. The paper explores the methodological issues of comparing an index based on small area data over time and has important policy implications for the delivery of services to children. This paper was written by Anne Daly, Ann Harding, Justine McNamara, Robert Tanton and Mandy Yap

Survey of the relative importance which fifth and sixth-grade teachers place on the teaching of map and globe skills

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Culture and Identity in your Community and the World [6th grade]

“Culture and Identity in your Community and the World” is an interdisciplinary unit designed to stimulate questions about identity and culture and how those two things relate. This unit is meant to be taught at the end of the first semester and the beginning of the second semester. Students have already established an understanding of literary elements in fiction and will now be searching for those same engaging elements in non-fiction. As the students read the memoir Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang in Reading, they will be studying the effects of culture and community on a single person’s identity in Non-Fiction Studies, a writing and social studies class. Students will learn the skills to analyze non-fiction and elaborate on their application of the writing process, as well. The unit will culminate in a an exhibition of the students’ culture. Students will create an exhibit within our very own Institute of KIPPster Cultures. Students will model their exhibit after exhibits in the Institute of Texan Cultures, which they will have previously visited. We will turn our gym into the Institute and students will set up their exhibits around the gym during our sixth grade report card night. Parents, siblings, administrators, community members, and the press will be invited to view the Institute. Students’ exhibits should represent their identity, community (school, neighborhood, and/or San Antonio), culture, and at least one connection made with other individuals, communities, or cultures around the world

The impact of the welfare state on the economic status of Indigenous Australian women

This paper uses census data and Department of Social Security (DSS) administrative records to examine the role of social security income in explaining the growth and relative improvement in the income status of Indigenous Australian women. The real median income of Indigenous women was 81 per cent of that of non-Indigenous women in 1991 compared with 74 per cent in 1976. Much of the change has come from an improvement in the position of Indigenous women who were not in employment. The paper argues that much of this improvement can be attributed to increased access to social security benefits for Indigenous women and therefore needs to be qualified by the circumstances in which Indigenous women live. A mid-term review of the Aboriginal Employment Development Policy (AEDP) has recently been completed. While much of the associated policy rhetoric and assessment of policy outcomes has been aimed at the national level, the fiscal environment in which AEDP goals are to be achieved is invariably one of regional labour markets and administrative systems operating in the economic context of States and Territories. In view of this reality, this paper responds to a need for regional-level analyses of change in the economic status of Indigenous people compared to that of non-Indigenous people in each State and Territory. Using 1986 and 1991 Census-based social indicators for the Northern Territory, attention is focused on relative shifts in population growth and intra-State distribution, labour force and income status, and levels of welfare dependency (measured as non-employment income). A major finding is that while the gap in labour force status between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people has narrowed, the relative income status and level of welfare dependency of Indigenous people has worsened. This suggests that increased emphasis on the quality of AEDP outcomes, and not just quantity, will be necessary if the overall aims of the AEDP are to be accomplished

Youth social exclusion in Australian communities: a new index

Using specialised data from the 2011 Census, this paper presents a new index intended to be representative of youth at risk of social exclusion. Abstract Social exclusion and inclusion has been given a great deal of attention in Australia and throughout the world. This broader concept of disadvantage has replaced much of the social discourse around poverty and inequality, with the realisation from researchers, practitioners and policy makers that disadvantage is often a multi-dimensional occurrence, spanning many dimensions of an individual’s life. Despite the attention social exclusion has been given, particular population groups are often overlooked – particularly young people. A growing interest in the power of geographic data and the prevalence of social exclusion, has lead the authors to develop the first nation-wide geographically disaggregated index of youth social exclusion for Australia. A number of domains and indicators deemed important to youth wellbeing were identified and constructed to develop a comprehensive index of youth social exclusion for young people aged 15-19 years. Using specialised data from the 2011 Census, supplemented with national school assessment data, we use a domains approach to construct an index that is representative of youth at risk of social exclusion, using a combination of principal components and equal weighting techniques. Particular attention is paid to ‘youth’ as an important stage of life in its own right and the implications of the delayed transition into adulthood that is now seen in many developed nations. Many more young people now remain as dependent children well into their twenties. A final index of youth social exclusion across Australian communities is presented and discussed

Indigenous welfare policy: lessons from a community survey

Although Indigenous Australians only represent two per cent of the Australian population, they have a high profile in the community as the original inhabitants of the continent and because of the problems associated with their poverty, dispossession and welfare dependence. In this article we present a summary of research findings from a three-year study conducted among Indigenous people living in and around the town of Kuranda in Northern Queensland — about half an hour’s drive inland from Cairns

International comparison of relative earnings in Australia, Great Britain and the United States

This thesis investigates the relationship between age and earnings for men and women in Australia, Great Britain and the United States. The facts for fulltime workers in the three countries can be summarised in the following way: 1. There was greater variation in earnings with age in the US than in either of the other countries. This was particularly apparent for men. In the US, 45 year old men earned on average, 42 per cent more than 25 year old men while in Great Britain, they earned 21 per cent more and in Australia, 13 per cent more. 2. Women’s earnings varied less with age than did men's in each country and peaked much earlier than male earnings. At their peak in their early 30s, American women's earnings were about 20 per cent above those of a 25 year old, in Great Britain they were 8 per cent above a 25 year old’s and in Australia they were about the same. 3. In each country, women's earnings varied less with age than did male earnings. If we take the proportionate difference between male and female earnings at each age between 16 and 64, the largest gap, relative to the gap at age 25, was between men and women in Australia in their late 30s. The relative difference between men and women in Australia was twice as large as in the other countries. There are a number of theories which have been put forward to explain why earnings vary with age. This thesis considers some of the factors suggested as being important; sex, experience in the workforce, education, industry of employment, the level of unionisation in an industry and cohort size. Our results show that within each country for both men and women, education, experience and industry of employment are important determinants of earnings. The evidence presented here is consistent, at least for men, with the hypothesis that higher levels of unionisation in an industry are associated with flatter age earnings profiles than in the less unionised industries. Our results on the effect of cohort size on earnings were less conclusive. The earnings regressions for each country were used to decompose the differences in the relative earnings by age into that part which can be attributed, at least in an accounting sense, to endowments and that part which can be attributed to coefficients or the rewards to these endowments. We found that differences in both the stocks and the rewards to the basic human capital variables, education and experience, were the major sources of differences between the countries in the shapes of the age earnings profiles for both men and women. The evidence presented here suggests that at least with respect to age earnings profiles for men, the centralised system of wage determination in Australia has not led to very different results than those found in Great Britain. However, the results for women are consistent with the hypothesis that the Australian system has produced flatter profiles than found in the other countries