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

Understanding dental students’ use of feedback

Introduction Feedback can enhance learning and is thought to be highly valued by students; however, it is not clear from the literature how dental students actually use feedback. Aim This study aimed to explore how dental students use feedback in a variety of contexts. Methods Qualitative methods involving audio‐recorded focus groups were used to explore the use of feedback by undergraduate dental students studying at three UK dental schools. A purposive sampling strategy was used to ensure diverse representation across the undergraduate dental programmes in each of the schools. Results Six focus groups, involving a total of 72 students, were undertaken. Thematic analysis identified five main themes relating to the use of feedback: value, future applicability, accessibility, variability and understanding. The inter‐connectivity and interaction of the themes (along with their subthemes) were used to develop a model for optimising feedback with the aim of enhancing its potential use by students. Conclusion The use of feedback by students would appear to be strongly influenced by several factors. Understanding these factors and how they interlink may be helpful to education providers who are seeking to optimise their feedback processes

The construction of identity through visual intertextuality in a Bohemian early modern travelogue

Cultural historians have long been concerned with visual sources. Their research has centred on ways of reading images and how they can most accurately be interpreted. This article focuses on an alternative aspect of these visual sources: on how images were made and used. It analyses how the identity of a Bohemian Catholic, Bed?ich z Donín, is constructed by his use of images in a travelogue based on his pilgrimage in the early 17th century. Highlighting the process of ‘visual intertextuality’, it claims that the ways in which Donín adopts and adapts visual images reveals his association with various affinity groups. The distinction between ‘actual’ and ‘habitual’ intertextuality is applied to the analysis of this historical source and shows how competing voices are present in the images. This article is an example of how historians can use the methodologies of semioticians to benefit their research

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

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