Canada International Conference on Education (CICE-2011)

http://www.ciceducation.org/Home.html


View Sculpting a Literacy Practice as a starting point - an opening up of the area. Look again and redraft the paper you have sent to Derek and work it into a proposal for this conference. 

Student Writing - Lillis

The aspect of desire she explored was other than what I had imagined. 


What we want is closely aligned to what we feel are the possibilities and potentialities afforded by the context of our lives. 


Desire for educational often deferred, it is shaped in terms of other desires. The dream of salvation through romance becomes transformed into the dream of salvation through education. 


Feminist critique of essayist literacy - coded as binary

• logic over emotion
• academic truth over personal experience
• linearity of circularity
• explicitness over evocation
• closing down of possible meanings as opposed to opening up
• certainty over uncertainty
• formality over informality

Writing viewed from an either/or perspective. Unmarked form - the norm. 

addressivity - who am I writing to and is there anybody in this text. Essay as more then merely 'rat-trapping' what the lecturere has said: ventriloquating. 

Suggests 4 types of dialogue, to meet the demands and desires of 

• tutor-directive dialogue aimed at talking the student-writer into essayist literacy practice
• collaborative dialogue aimed at populating the student-writers text with her own intentions
• tutor-directive dialogue aimed at making language visible
• dialogue which facilitates student talkback as part of a long conversation

I must say that I don't find Lillis style of writing easy. I don't find the text engaging or compelling though I like what she writes about and what she has to say - how she writes about it in terms of content (it is her style that seems to jar) 

I like the way she reference's text. She seems to have a reader in mind - so often she quotes names, year as is standard - but she also quotes the chapter. 

The discussion really opens up the extent to which it is almost impossible to separate content from construct in essay writing. The dangers of an abstract approach. What I write is caught up with how I write. The cultural style of different disciplines, but also the connection between self, action, text - meaning. 

I am nervous and excited about research - postDoc. 

Table 7.1 on page 165 is also very interesting. 

• Dominant       è  resistant   

• Skills  è creative expression  è socialisation (teaching as implicit induction) è socialisation (teaching as explicit induction)  è academic literacies

• HE as homogeneous: reproduce dominant discourses  è HE as heterogeneous make visible, challenge, play with (& subvert) dominant discourses 

A Dream Deferred, 

by Langston Hughes

Here I think of educational desire. here I mean secret longings, private ambition, unrealistic aspirations. 

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up 
like a raisin in the sun? 
Or fester like a sore-- 
And then run? 
Does it stink like rotten meat? 
Or crust and sugar over-- 
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags 
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Student Writing: access regulation desire

I'm reading this book slowly - somehow my reading seems to weave in between everything else I need to read. The first few chapters are quite intense - they are strongly theoretical and I guess this is the pattern but somehow my sense is that they theory feels better placed after the data. It didn't frame the work in the way I would have liked. I will go back and read the first few chapters again. 


I get the overall shape of the text. 


Student writing - Access & the idea that regulations the claim to be explicit and transparent and asses only your capacity to do what is required. Actually, she suggest that gaining access to the requirements are less then straight forward. They are 'mystical'. 


Student writing - Regulation - here she argues that what can be said is subject to these unwritten rules, that learners are none-the-less required to comply with. This is in terms of the use of language, the impersonal third person absent I. There are a few concrete examples of this kind. Also referred to is the emotionalism that has to be regulated. Avoiding certain comments that may be unwelcome - 'the critique of an absent education system'. My comment that IOE 2nd markers comment 'you are not at liberty to say that'. Good for me that I really didn't care. And said it anyway. My super supervisor was different. She just said it jumped out.


Haven't read desire yet. 


I'm not a massive fan of her style of writing and she is clearly a linguist. But it is opening up the area for me - gently. 


Theresa Lillis: Student Writing - Access, Regulation & Desire. 

‘Talking literacy: living literacies’

I use this title - a working title - to explore the tension between how we talk about literacy & what we experience as literacy. 


An earlier title and one that I think gets to it more clearly: 


Sculpting a literacy practice from Folk, Policy and Ethnographic constructions of literacy


I like the idea of this as achieving aspiration I have had for some time - not least of all being able to actively include learners in the research process. 


Talking Literacy: Living Literacies

1. digital cameras - please offer a pictorial account of how I approach writing an essay. Please frame the essay as you will - you decide the starting point and the finishing point. Think about who might be involved.  What resources do you draw upon and what experience is included in the text. What are the technical requirements. What does the process feel like. The task is to offer a graphic account of what is involved in writing as essay. 
2. The next stage is to record an interview in which you discuss wit me the pictures. I ask you questions abut them. Can you put them in order. Can you tell me why this is included. What did you want to include that you were unable to. I notice these pictures don't include etc - is this deliberate. You may photo post-its if something happens that you are unable to record.
3. There is one session in the scheme of work that includes - if I were to walk in your class while you were teaching literacy, what would I see; what would be going on that I would not see? 
4. I will record a tutorial before the work is submitted. The tutorial will be normal. I will ask a few questions before and after the tutorial. What do you understand this assignment to require. How does this relate to you practice as a teacher. What preparation have you done for this? After the tutorial - has your understanding of the task changed? What will you do next? 
5. I will mark the work and may include aspects of the work as data. I am most interested in the assignment and the reflective commentary on-teaching and my observation schedule. 
6. I want to offer a talk back session. That is I want to offer my feedback - but I want it to be an exchange. When I do that feedback, I want to be able to record your response to it. 

The kinds of issues I will want to explore in the text: 

• different perceptions of what the task requires; 
• aspects of the task that are implicit -that are not directly stated but presumed to be understood
• ambiguity in what is required ie what does 'depth'? 
• the different meanings implied by 'be explicit' Lillis pg 57
• that famous quote in my head - how can I discuss with myself? 
• I also like Wolfe's 4 discursive lenses: the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst
• research as a 3 way conversation between empirical data, self and theory
• I am interested in desire - educational desire

EBSCOhost: Publications: Adult Education Quarterly

EBSCOhost: Publications: Adult Education Quarterly

The Discourse, Power, Resistance conference

Discourse, Power & Resistance Conference

13 – 15 April, 2011: How do trainee literacy teachers negotiate the literacies associated with their course.  

This research is situated within the context of a University Diploma in Adult Literacy based at a University in North of England. In it I explore with trainees their ideas about literacy. The paper emerges from a theoretical background that treats  literacy as social practice rather than skills and as such elaborates on the social practices of trainee literacy teachers. I explore the extent to which trainees own experiences of literacy can provide a resource that enables them to reconstruct literacy in ways that resist the limitations and impositions of policy. That is, an interest that surrounds this paper is the extent to which trainee teachers may draw on their own experiences of literacy in their attempt to construct a literacy pedagogy. 

There are several interweaving threads that run through this text. The central question - how do trainee literacy teachers negotiate the literacies associated with their course - implies a series of hunches. Most notably, I am interested in the resources that trainees draw on when conceptualising literacy as a subject to be taught. Policy constructions of literacy constitute the truth regime within which trainee teachers practice. I have an interest in identifying other sources of information for them to draw upon. The ethnographic research of the NRDC and the many ethnographies of literacy as social practice. But arguably these have little to do with practitioners. My broad idea is that their own experiences of literacy - my be another source of information for them to draw upon. 

I need to prepare an outline for 17th December 2010. I need to talk to the other professor. 

Locating the unexplored spaces between pedagogy, identity and text

What connections do trainee literacy teachers make between the literacies they do as trainees and the literacies they teach as professionals: an exploration of the dis/connections between academic experience and pedagogic construction. 


OK - so this is a rather clumsy opening. But it is just an opening. 


I realise that I am entering a crowded terrain - there are years of writing and research about academic literacy, non-traditional students and literacy as social practice. So what I need to explore is what is distinct abut this contribution. 


Well - in part - I want to draw on the connection between literacies in two quite distinct spaces: as experience and as pedagogy. I am secondly writing within the context of teacher education - with an indirect role to play in supporting student writing. 


I want to disrupt this notion of traditional / non-traditional student arguing that it has normative overtones and in any case for CPPD has little resonance. 


The problem and solution to student writing is constructed as 'textual'. There is little question about the contexts, participants and practices associated with the production of texts. 


So part of the discussion might raise the extent to which the essay - as meaning making - is a preferred device in HE but it is privileged without any inherent claim to superiority in terms of its capacity to develop pedagogy. 


This is a good moment for me to explore and be creative with my methodology. I like visual methods - a digital camera. Naturally occurring data. 


Tutor-researcher exploring students experiences of meaning making in academic writing. I this I seek to move beyond the idea of the essay as a neutral means of conveying propositional information, as distinct from a means of solidifying particular kinds of social relationships. 


I need to write this up as a concrete and well thought through proposal and perhaps to draw on an exchange between myself and students to contextualise the discussion. 


OK - so the idea is there. 


I now need to read the get background and contemporary context for this discussion. And to record a discussion with my students. In reality - I will open with this next year. 

the learner conference-2011

Well - we all start somewhere - I am looking for a focus and I want to outline a paper that I will present here. Now I need to decide - do I churn out a paper I already have - or do I choose something I have already done and re-slant it? 

I want to start work from my literacy students. I treat their becoming academic writers as a process of learning. 

Excited

Again. I must calm down. I am looking forward to internally examining a Doctoral Thesis - an EdD. Something to do with reflection and FE professional practice. This is a silent boast, the external is Paul Gilroy. I'm not sure whether I will have any contact with him, but I am excited about his existence and excited about doing the examining, I also feel quite impressed with 'the professor'. I have no idea of his espoused politics. But his actual enacted politics ... I like.