Possibilities for pedagogy in Further Education: Harnessing the abundance of literacy

In this report, it is argued that the most salient factor in the contemporary communicative landscape is the sheer abundance and diversity of possibilities for literacy, and that the extent and nature of students' communicative resources is a central issue in education. The text outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education project in a social view of literacy, and the associated research design, methodology and analytical framework. It elaborates on the notion of the abundance of literacies in students' everyday lives, and on the potential for harnessing these as resources for the enhancement of learning. It provides case studies of changes in practice that have been undertaken by further education staff in order to draw upon students' everyday literacy practices on Travel and Tourism and Multimedia courses. It ends with some of the broad implications for conceptualising learning that arise from researching through the lens of literacy practices

Reclaiming literacies: competing textual practices in a digital higher education

This essay examines the implications of the ubiquitous use of the term ‘digital literacies’ in higher education and its increasing alignment with institutional and organisational imperatives. It suggests that the term has been stripped of its provenance and association with disciplinary knowledge production and textual practice. Instead it is called into service rhetorically in order to promote competency based agendas both in and outside the academy. The piece also points to a tendency to position teachers in deficit with regard to their technological capabilities and pay scant attention to their own disciplinary and scholarly practices in a digital world. It concludes that there is a case for building on established theoretical and conceptual frameworks from literacy studies if we wish to integrate advantages of the digital landscape with thoughtful teaching practice

Rhodium platings – experimental study

Modern rhodium plating solutions are based on either sulphate or phosphate. Although in theory there are four possible combinations, in practice only three different rhodium electrolytes are used. These are based on dilutions of rhodium sulphate or phosphate concentrates with added sulphuric or phosphoric acid. These processes are be discussed in this paper with a demonstration of Rh platings in the Slovenian firm Zlatarna Celje d.d

Analysis of Different Views and Conceptualizations of the Literacy Practices of Pupils, Families, and Teachers in Costa Rican Primary Education

This article is based on a socio-cultural discourse model of literacy, whereby literacy events are regarded as being situated within social practices, creating various formal, informal, and non-formal literacy events that are part of 10multiliteracies. The aim of the research was to analyze primary pupils ’ literacy practices (8–12 years) from the perspectives of 1,354 primary pupils, 1,020 family members, and 96 teachers in Costa Rica, using an ex-post facto design and a survey method. The findings indicate that the three groups of participants (pupils, family members, and teachers) have different views on 15and conceptualizations of literacy practices in school and in the community. The results show that young learners develop their literacy practices according to their different communicative needs inside and outside school. A multimodal literacy is promoted outside school to meet students’ daily communicative needs. However, the school promotes a monomodal lit20eracy, which allows pupils to respond essentially to school needs

Catalan Teenagers’ Identity, Literacy and Language Practices on YouTube

This chapter addresses the interconnection between identity building and the use and learning of language and literacy online. We will do so through a case study that investigates the specifics of three Catalan teenage language users and learners who use YouTube as a multimodal space of confluence for making meaning. We will particularly address three research questions: 1. How do teenage language users and learners in Catalonia appropriate YouTube? 2. What means of performing identity do teenagers in Catalonia employ on YouTube? 3. How do teenagers in Catalonia as youtubers develop such means of identity representation and performance in relation to language and literacy practices?This research was supported in part by a postdoctoral grant from the autonomous government of Galicia (Xunta de Galicia, Spain) awarded to Boris Vazquez-Calvo (ED481B 2017/007). This research was also supported by the research project ForVid (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities—National Research Agency, Spain: Video as a language learning format in and outside schools, RTI2018-100790-B-I00). There is also collaboration with the research project CDEPI (FEDER/Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities—National Research Agency, Spain: Competencia digital y e-inclusión del alumnado de educación primaria de Galicia: el papel de la escuela, la familia y el entorno próximo, EDU2015-67975-C3-1-P)

Diving deep into digital literacy:emerging methods for research

Literacy studies approaches have tended to adopt a position which enables ethnographic explorations of a wide range of ‘literacies’. An important issue arising is the new challenge required for researchers to capture, manage, and analyse data that highlight the unique character of practices around texts in digital environments. Such inquiries, we argue, require multiple elements of data to be captured and analysed as part of effective literacy ethnographies. These include such things as the unfolding of digital texts, the activities around them, and features of the surrounding social and material environment. This paper addresses these methodological issues drawing from three educationally focused studies, and reporting their experiences and insights within uniquely different contexts. We deal with the issue of adopting new digital methods for literacy research through the notion of a ‘deep dive’ to explore educational tasks in classrooms. Through a discussion of how we approached the capture and analysis of our data, we present methods to better understand digital literacies in education. We then outline challenges posed by our methods, how they can be used more broadly for researching interaction in digital environments, and how they augment transdisciplinary debates and trends in research methods