Adolescents as Readers of Social Studies: Examining the Relationship between Youth’s Everyday and Social Studies Literacies and Learning

In this paper, we examine the relationship between student engagement and social studiesliteracy, exploring the possible connections between students’ reading interests and practices andsocial studies learning. With a sample of 802 secondary students from five schools in one urbancommunity, we use complementary methods to explore survey and interview data. Descriptiveanalysis of survey data indicated that study participants often perceived social studies educationin school as boring and irrelevant. Nevertheless, qualitative analysis of interview data from asubsample revealed that many young people describe using texts to explore dimensions of theiridentities as well as themes of struggle and conflict. We use these findings to illuminateconnections between youths’ concerns and interests and the enduring problems taken up by thesocial sciences, arguing that attention to these connections has the potential to engage studentsand develop their thinking and literacy practices in the social studies

Adolescents as Readers of Social Studies: Examining the Relationship between Youth’s Everyday and Social Studies Literacies and Learning

In this paper, we examine the relationship between student engagement and social studiesliteracy, exploring the possible connections between students’ reading interests and practices andsocial studies learning. With a sample of 802 secondary students from five schools in one urbancommunity, we use complementary methods to explore survey and interview data. Descriptiveanalysis of survey data indicated that study participants often perceived social studies educationin school as boring and irrelevant. Nevertheless, qualitative analysis of interview data from asubsample revealed that many young people describe using texts to explore dimensions of theiridentities as well as themes of struggle and conflict. We use these findings to illuminateconnections between youths’ concerns and interests and the enduring problems taken up by thesocial sciences, arguing that attention to these connections has the potential to engage studentsand develop their thinking and literacy practices in the social studies

Recruiting, retaining and supporting early career teachers for rural schools

The staff of Australia’s rural schools include many early career teachers who are keen to begin their careers in geographically diverse communities. Despite often high levels of motivation to take up a rural position and many well-funded government incentives to do so, recruiting and retaining teachers remains a challenge across Australia. Against this backdrop this chapter explores the key question: How can we better prepare and support the next generation of teachers for our rural schools? The chapter firstly explores the perennial issues of rural staffing and then critically examines a range of incentives for both pre-service and in-service teachers to attract them to rural schools and communities. One of the reasons incentives appear to be failing could be that they do very little to transform the preparation and education of pre-service teachers to better work in and for rural schools and their communities. To date, teacher education providers and schools have put little effort into changing their preparation and induction models. The chapter concludes with possibilities for a ‘system’ change to address the rural staffing ‘crisis’ and raises the need for a new transformative approach to link more meaningfully initial teacher education, professional experience in and with communities and in-service professional learning (including teachers and teacher educators)