Becoming l(IT)erate : pre-service English teachers and ICTs

One of the recommended principles for classroom practice from the Digital Rhetorics Project is &lsquo;Teachers First&rsquo;, emphasising the need to prioritise the requirements of teachers in learning new technologies and in understanding their relationship to literacy education (Lankshear, Green and Snyder 2000, p. 121). While most of my pre-service English Education students use digital technologies for their own purposes and understand the benefits of doing so, it is not always straightforward regarding how technology can be effectively utilised in their classroom and for what purposes. This article reports work conducted with pre-service English Education teachers in an elective unit that focuses upon digital technologies in secondary classrooms. Using Green&rsquo;s 3D model of literacy as a way of understanding the complex interrelationships between the cultural, critical and operational aspects of literacy, the students experiment with digital technologies such as mobile phones, wikis and blogs.<br /

Putting pre-service teachers first

One of the recommended principles for classroom practice from the Digital Rhetorics Project is &quot;teachers first&quot;, emphasising the need to prioritise the needs of teachers in learning new technologies and understanding their relationship to literacy education (Lankshear, Green, &amp; Snyder, 2000), p.121). While most of my pre-service English Education students use digital technologies for their own purposes and understand the benefits of doing so, it is not always straightforward as to how technology can be effectively utilised in their classroom and for what purposes. This paper reports on work conducted with pre-service English Education teachers in an elective unit that focuses upon digital technologies in secondary classrooms. Using Green\u27s 3D model of literacy as a way of understanding the complex interrelationships between the cultural, critical and operational aspects of literacy, the students experiment with digital technologies such as mobile phones, wikis and blogs.<br /

Understanding the complexity of social issues through process drama

Middle level teacher Joanne O&rsquo;Mara uses process drama as a means for her students to explore multiple perspectives. In the teaching vignette she shares here, her class challenges their understanding of deforestation through dramatizing Judith Nichol&rsquo;s A Poem for the Rainforest.<br /

Narratives come to life through coding: digital game making as language and literacy curriculum

Children are often positioned as consumers of digital games, but what happens when they become the creators and producers of their own games? This chapter describes a digital game-making project in a Year 3/4 classroom where young students made their own digital games using the block coding program Scratch. While this project cuts across several curriculum areas, it was primarily designed as a Language and Literacies project with written composition at the centre.The case study data used in this chapter was collected from one teacher, Nick, and his Year 3/4 classes over a three-year period. While coding work in schools is generally located in Science, Technology and Mathematics education (STEM), Nick drew upon the affordances of Scratch to develop a strong language arts/ literacies focus through a game-making unit. In this way, the unit cuts across the curriculum, addressing many of the STEM standards in addition to those of Language and Literacy

Closing the emergency facility: Moving schools from literacy triage to better literacy outcomes

This article focuses on the tensions between national and international testing, educational policy and professionalism for middle school English teachers. I argue that state and federal government(s) are responding to the impact of Australia\u27s falling results on the international testing in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) through the usage of their own testing program, the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The publication of NAPLAN results on the MySchool website in a searchable and comparable form has been detrimental to many schools and has pushed these schools into &quot;emergency mode&quot;, as they struggle to improve their scores. At the same time, the results from recent PISA examinations reveal extensive inequities in educational outcomes across Australia, as well as some consistent general trends in the Australian data. I use the metaphor of the hospital emergency department to explore this situation. Drawing on Sahlberg\u27s (2011) notion of the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM), I explore this metaphor becoming a pandemic. I draw on Gillborn and Youdell\u27s (2000) usage of educational triage and cast different and multiple educational professionals playing the role of the triage nurse-the alternate federal and state government education ministers responding to international and state test results in triage; and principals of poor performing schools operating their school as though it is an emergency department; poor literacy results triaged Code Red receiving immediate focus and attention, but &quot;treated&quot; in terms of immediate survival and a focus on basic skills. I argue that the international testing provides better markers for how we are doing as a nation, and what might be done to improve our international standing with respect to our literacy scores. I argue that true gains in literacy and the development of more complex literacy skills are not made through triaging literacy through an emergency department, but through a long-term focus on school redesign

An emergency response to literacy : NAPLAN on MySchool

This article considers the &lsquo;unintended consequences&rsquo; of the publication of the NAPLAN results on the &lsquo;MySchool&rsquo; website, and what that has meant for leadership teams, teachers, students and parents in many schools. This article is written from the data cited in the VATE submission to the Australian Federal Senate Inquiry into &lsquo;unintended consequences&rsquo; of NAPLAN, but does not represent the official position of the association&nbsp;&ndash; it represents my own views and the views of some of the membership who responded to the survey. This said, most of the data we collected was extremely negative towards NAPLAN, and there were fewer than five of the 88 respondents who had positive things to say about NAPLAN. Obviously teachers who felt the effects more strongly were more motivated to participate, but even accounting for this, the data collected showed a significant number of teachers and schools who were experiencing extremely negative impacts from the testing and publication regime. In this article I have theorised that one of the consequences of this has been to push some schools into acting in an emergency mode, triaging their literacy curriculum in an attempt to perform better in NAPLAN

Classroom teachers as co-researchers : the affordances and challenges of collaboration

The article outlines the aspects of the research design that engage with teachers in schools and discusses some of the challenges and affordances that the relationships (between the teachers, the schools, the research partners and the researchers) experienced in the project, Literacy in the 21st Century: Learning from Computer Games. The article has a particular focus on the teachers\u27 work as co-researchers, their descriptions of working in the project and some of the issues for teachers and researchers in working in this way. The data used for the analysis includes the teacher writing, interview data and researcher observations. The teachers who participated in the project designed and delivered curriculum using computer games in various ways including making their own games, evaluating games, analyzing game structures, and examining the culture around games and the ways in which games and other technologies are merging. Some of these curriculum units are described elsewhere in this issue (Beavis &amp; O\u27Mara, 2010). This article\u27s purpose is to follow the teachers\u27 professional learning experiences rather than detail these curriculum designs, which the teachers will describe elsewhere. The paper concludes with our personal reflections on the affordances and challenges of working this way for us in our different roles in the research team.<br /

Shifting practices and frames: literacy, learning and computer games

Digital culture and the online world have profound implications for contemporary notions of literacy, learning, and curriculum. The increasing integration of digital culture and technologies into young people’s lives reflects the energy and excitement offered by online worlds. Online forms of text and communication are shaping students’ experience of the world, including expectations and experiences about learning and literacy. While print literacies remain important, for schools to prepare students to participate in critical and agential ways in the contemporary and future world, they need also to teach them to be fully literate in digital and multimodal literacies, and at ease and in control in the online world. Computer games and other forms of digital games teach and exemplify multimodal forms of literacy. Schools can capitalise on their potential and work with them productively. Doing so, however, entails recognising the messy complexity of schooling and the practicalities of classroom lives. This chapter reports on a 3-year project in five schools concerned with literacy and computer games, and discusses the important role of teachers as on-the-ground leaders in pioneering new conceptions of literacy and curriculum change, and the importance of school structures and support to enable such change to happen.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of Education and Professional StudiesNo Full Tex