EBSCOhost: How Illiteracy Became a Problem (And Literacy Stopped Being One)

EBSCOhost: How Illiteracy Became a Problem (And Literacy Stopped Being One)

Doing what comes un/naturally. The risky teacher: ‘to innovate is to stimulate’

Doing what comes un/naturally

The risky teacher: ‘to innovate is to stimulate’

The is in response to a colleague who asks about being a risky teacher – the question was aimed at Trainee PCET teachers but I have responded with reflexive reference to my own teaching.

Personally I think that risk is a vital part of anything that we are to do well. I keep referring to work on expertise and hope to find those references again. There are some things you read that amount to epiphanous moment. This body of work was one.

The talk about experts being people who achieve and retain expertise by pushing themselves consistently beyond their comfort zone. They retained expertise not by staying in a state of ‘unconscious competence’ but actually through I guess much further down the scale – conscious incompetence or conscious competence.  They spend a great deal of time sifting and sorting through problems. They are good at framing problems. The expert is actually ne who is acutely aware that they do not know. But the basis of the expertise lay in their capacity to analyse and frame situations clearly.

So – I have been tracing for so many years – in one context or another. And when not directly teaching, have been managing, organising and supporting teaching.

The last two years feels like they have been the most intensive teaching years I have had in a long time. Last year as exhausting, his year I have had time to consolidate. But, this is all about the being an academic It has felt the most exciting and exhilarating thing I have ever done. I cannot imagine ever getting tired of it.

The risks:

Challenging views of literacy

I have worked to introduce the idea of literacy as social practices to my students. With some success. I teach differently and they learn differently in the small group, seated around a table style. For the first time, I felt like I understood and was conscious of them struggling to get to grips with something, Teaching about literacy as social practices is a risk because it potentially flings them into an overly theoretical frame and does not acknowledge their need for training as first aid – to help them manage their teaching situations better. It may produce resistance (all other things being equal) and may place more focus on concerns other than direct classroom encounters. I have risked the approach and while I feel conscious of having plenty to learn. I am pleased with how it has worked and feel very empathetic with them as they struggle to get to grips.

Digital literacy

I have risked working with ICT. I am I realise almost equating risk and experimentation. But I enjoy ICT and feel it offers enormous potential. I am please with my year 1s and twitter. I like the way the wiki and the blog have been embedded on eBridge. I enjoy this blog enormously and I look forward to promoting it as an academic blog. I think it means leaving the link all over the place. I was particularly pleased with the UoH Blog and look forward t how this may be developed in time. This has worked well thought I think the blog needed to be followed through with a link to assignments and other Modules. Twitter needs an equally as pronounced framing.  Every week I need to tweet an intro to the session.  

Of course I am now pleased with Azumah’s PCET podcasts and will spend time on Thursday developing these more.

The risky teacher – to innovate is to stimulate – doing what comes un/naturally.

Teachers are more creative when they consolidate. As a teacher once my session is planned, I can feel a little relaxed and then begin to explore other approaches and resources. I have the freedom and space to play with it and see what emerges.

Teachers can make a conscious choice to do things differently on a year on year basis. I think it does not matter very much what – the point is to create and cultivate an approach, a learning culture which you and your student get used to. I realise that my students are so used t me recording sessions I now no longer need to ask permission.

Teachers need to remind themselves to inhabit a space that is just outside their comfort zone. This may mean not doing what comes naturally. Sitting down as a teacher rather than standing. Not suing PowerPoint. Letting a discussion flow for longer than normal. Allowing moments of silence and space between thought.

Some data – some analysis

·       They return to this point, that’s the reality isn’t it.  Whatever you say, they’ve still go to develop and exhibit these skills.

·       Student success is about relationship – student tutor relationship and student - student relationship

There are contradictory discourse flying around. Different ideas that contradict. They are learning – learning is risky. Taking risks with ideas. Taking risks in developing a new identity. Taking risks with developing a new set of foundations o which to base your pedagogy and base you sense of self. It seems t make sense that students may well have different ideas and that these ideas may contradict.

The group may not have  experience of skills for life, but amidst the cynicism, they have integrity. I hear think of the teacher who resigned her lost (hurly hrs) meaning less money in preference to a) giving up the diploma course b) delivering what felt like a poor quality course because she did not have time to do a good job.

There is a sense of this is reality. These exams, this funding regime. A lot of talk about funding. Colleges learning how to maximise funding through reframing courses, not because this is what makes sense pedagogically but because this is what secures resource. A sense that resistance is futile. This is a fixed set of circumstances. Social ordering that has the appearance of obduracy.

Yet, the tick box mentality firmly in the background – the other students notes what matters. This is reality and this is what matters is relationship – student / student and teacher / students as the thing that underpins success. I am unclear about this reading of the text. But this does not matter. What it signifies is that this student notices and chooses to accentuate this.

Student success is about relationship. I might as an exercise get them to explore and explain these comments next week. It is about relationship – this means that if they succeed, they succeed because they have good relationships with the teacher and other students in the class.

Why do I pace these statements in opposition to each other?

One seems grounded in ‘reality’ the other seems to draw upon something much less fixed, the ambiguity of relationship. I think here he is saying more than relationships being un problematic – this is snot neutrality as such but relationship as a direct motivator.

Notes from session and data

I seem to have developed a habit of writing late night. I always think of myself as a morning person – but somehow I write at night and the ideas have a kind of flow to them.

So, I think this evening about my teaching. It was such a stimulating and enjoyable session they enjoyed it and ended up by saying thanks – something they do to always say. It worked they all worked with me to unpick the puzzle I presented.

I am listening to the session now and so these are notes – partly observational notes and partly notes that may form part of data analysis.

Notes

Good teachers

Asked a central question and then sit back and let them explore. Return to the central question that becomes something of a theme throughout the session the question itself was based on the thread of their discussion. I picked up what they were talking through, encapsulating the issue and feeding it back to them.

I assume they are familiar with theories of learning and they may well not be, but I do briefly outline the nature of the theories.  I need to reframe and order my learning theories.

I like the pauses. You give them time to think about things.

I am good at listening to what they say, reframing it and linking it to what others say. I note similarities and differences.

I have a clear sense of the key points I want to make but I know the kinds of issues that emerge will offer scope and space for this discussion – so what s the importance of learning theory and literacy learning

I do interrupt a bit and speak over – I hope I acknowledge more, my body language may achieve this.

I am too argumentative – but I am good at leading them to a point through effective questioning. What I think I need to clarify in my mind what are the outcomes I want to achieve – are they knowledge based or competence based

The session feels structured. I have a sense of direction – I allow them space to explore but then move things on hen a natural pause or lull a]occurs. The session feels varied and as if you are following their agenda. This was an excellent discussion.

What a difference the environment makes; what a difference. The room is open, we all sit together. At the end of the session one student comments about how nice it is to see me that I am not hidden behind the computer – as happens with the layout of the other room. Thought I never stay put but am bound by the PPt.

Un/reconciled literacies

They return to this point, that’s the reality isn’t it.  Whatever you say, they’ve still go to develop and exhibit these skills.

Student success is about relationship – student tutor relationship and student - student relationship

Differences in reading – we read the same thing but notice different elements in the extent; what we note depends on our experience and what we choose to highlight as significant.

They are acutely aware of the culture and context within which literacy and language persist.  As a teacher this is how I frame spelling & it’s significant – but these are the wider social implications


Drafted Thursday 10th November @ 3.00am

#WResearcher Meme #3 How do you read to learn / learn to read: uncovering / unfolding

How do you read to learn / learn to read: uncovering / unfolding

The idea of an academic having to learn to read is counter-intuitive but resonant. Academic reading is unlike any other reading that we do. In fact – if we adopt the stance of the New Literacy Studies, it is not unreasonable to say that all reading is deeply contextual and particular  to a specific domain. This means, and I think this is true, that the reading I do for my job – reports, emails, assignments, policy papers and texts to inform my teaching, is quite unlike the reading to do for academic research – extended, exploratory, open ended texts, books, bibliographies, research reports, conference listings, chapters, published papers, my own work in the course of revision.

Becoming and remaining an academic involves a process of learning to read.

At the start of my MA I was acutely conscious of this. On one occasion, we had a session where our lecturer sat with a small seminar group and together we read a few paragraphs from a chapter. We then went on to discuss it in detail. The approach was not unlike an activity I might well have undertaken with a group of adult literacy students, although of the course the level and nature of the text and direction of the discussion was significantly different. We were reading about Bourdieu and together unpicking habitus.

I am here making a deliberate and provocative connection. The adults who come to my literacy class have a particular set of quite specific practices they have acquired in relation to reading. Joining an adult literacy class signifies a desire on their part to change, to become someone different. A changed approach to reading is part of that process. This is not unlike the aspiration to become an academic, someone who wants to be something other than who they are at the moment:  a prolifically published writer, a highly regarded academic, a quoted and referenced expert – reading is part of achieving this changed sense of self.

I am here also making a disconnection. With the adult literacy student the actual content of the text is of little importance. What matters is their capacity to explore it independently. That they can read, that I read in identification terms is as important as what I read. Oh, it has to  be interesting - but this is a loop, if it is not interesting, I won't read it. As an academic there is an interplay between what I read and that I read. I invoke the iconic image of the academic standing in front of her books displayed decoratively in the background on rows of shelves. It is being a reader that matters.

Academic reading, reading to learn, is a very particular kind of reading.

Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis explicates the work that texts do. How they position readers – that is the writer constructs an ideal reader inviting the actual reader to fall in with the qualities assumed of that construct. This is what readers habitually do. Usually as readers we are unaware of this process. Once we become aware, we may question the assumptions and negotiate an alternative stance. But this still positions us; if we are not the desired, imagined reader constructed by the writer / the text - then we are forced to re/define ourselves as the actual, desired, imagined, self-constructed reader. We then have to negotiate our readerly selves into an alternative position in relation to text and relation to the text's imagined reader. This happens with – for example policy texts. Texts that talk about education in instrumental terms, about qualification as if it were their exchange value rather than their use value that matter. When policy texts are well written, they are compulsive, seductive, they draw the reader in with warm faltering words. You find yourself engrossed and willingly accepting the stance the writers of policy texts take, the normative truth regime they create around you and them. We are seduced by such texts when we are disarmed by them, when our critical faculty is temporarily quietened and we willingly sign up to their agenda.

Doesn’t happen often and certainly doesn’t happen with anything this particular government has written

The point is that in starting the EdD I found I had to be very structured, explicit about the reading I was doing. These academic texts were not policy texts but still I was seduced. The trouble is – I can be faddy, a 'buy-one-get-one-free' person. I would read text (a) and I love it. I enthuse and think yes! that's it, that's it.  Then I would read text (b) a scathing critique of text (a) and have the same excitement and sense of gosh golly – that is so true. At some point I realise I have to fall out of line. It helped to devise strategies to enable a more distanced, less emotional reading. 

Remembering, that in reading these texts part of what I am doing is creating a new identity for myself: an academic.

We were advised by a lecturer on how to read. Advised to ask a series of questions. I had to translate these into a template. I need to fling words across paper (or screen). It's not all in my head. I need to let it happen on paper, through my finger tips as well – otherwise too much of it disappears.

The questions – I have still have all those notes, somewhere.  

·         What is the main argument out forward by the writer?

·         How is this argument developed?

·         How well is it supported?

·         How does this connect to other things you have read?

·         Does it convince you?

·         What other reactions do you have to it?

·         What key concepts does the author develop or use?

·         Any particular vocabulary that you want to make a note of?

These questions stopped quite early – I didn’t need to be so specific, so focussed and interrogated the text in different ways. Usually in ways that was more related to the question I had in mind for a research project and paper.

This is a kind of uncovering, or at least an unfolding; it seeks to make bare what is hidden. Hidden: not through artifice as such. But is a natural process. We present the text not the draft and redraft that created it. We present a completed garment; the stitching is on the inside. Reading involves reminding yourself of the inherent sociality involved in learning. These are not truths being presented but biographies.  Someone persuasive attempt to persuade you – the reader –that this is how it is, a plausible account of how things might, just possibly might, be.  The inherent sociality of learning means reading is not a process of reading as such, as in decoding text and understanding what it means, it is a social process of conversing with someone, the person or persons who have written the text.

And so the final take on reading: unfolding

One that is I think at odds with what I would normally associate with reading, but which explores uncovering, unfolding. Fairclough suggests that the reading associated with critical discourse analysis is no more than what readers do with texts anyway. The process formalises, records and annotates this. We read text as social theorist and as ‘consumers’ professionals charged with implementing the policies they display. But what about reading data. How do we read data – this is surely all at once reading to learn and learning to read. What Faorclough describes as a process readers engage in anyway perhaps does not appreciate the extent to which the reading, re-reading, annotating and recording of readings changes the process. It slows it down. It compels connections. It is not dissimilar to the Rorschach ink splodge test. Do we create images from the random splattering of human life to meet a deep seated yearning for order, coherence, narrative thread?

May be so.

Reading data: what and how do we do this?

I refer here to something I posted earlier this week. I have now gotten over my anxiety about the UCET presentation. What is left is not the frustration of a paper that felt truly terrible – but the pride with having broken my self-imposed silence: good. And more – with looking again at my analysis and seeking to understand the source of my discontent.

To clarify. Last Thursday I presented a paper at a conference, University Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET). The paper presented was a background paper, a contextualising draft. The data that will eventfully shape the paper had only just been gathered and was largely not collated. I had 1 quote from research participants based on earlier interviews. I have often chosen to avoid speaking to peers in public situations –  if I possibly can. And so this presentation thing is quite a challenge to me. But mostly, when I present, the nerves and dread are vindicated: the session goes well, the feedback is good and I feel exhilarated. I did not enjoy UCET. I felt stilted and that I did not cover new ground. I felt it was simply a re-churning of what I already know and that I think those who chose to attend the session also knew. It ended 20 mins early and I missed whole chunks of the paper out. This feeling of dread – post presentation dread has stayed with me.

But once it subsided – a little. I thought again about the quotes I bought with me. The tiny bits of data. 

I was asking the data one question – reading the data with a particular focusing mind. As such I fear that the elephant in the room (far from couching in the corer trying to hide) was sitting and sipping coffee without my noticing. The text does not address the question I was asking – and actually does not do so for a very particular reason. That is the context within which the participants work does not allow them the exploration an answer to this question implies. In one instant at least, a participant is clearly deeply unhappy with his professional situation. Is distressed by it and seems to feel in something of a cul-de-sac. Mostly the qualification they achieve is a means of moving toward something, for him it is means of escape.

Research participants find it difficult to answer the question – what do I mean by literacy and how to I reconcile literacy as social practice and literacy as skills – because – any attempt to move beyond literacy as skills is curtailed. They recognise it but – as one participant has said, ‘at the end of the day, I still have to tick that box’.

In the assemblage that is a policy driven, research based literacy pedagogy – professionals are compelled to play dead: to appear as if they have committed the epistemic suicide that Taylor-Webb so evocatively talks about.

Drafted Wednesday, 09 November 2011 03:04:57

First edit Wednesday, 09 November 2011 22.17.25


ALBRIGHT, J. & LUKE, A. 2008. Pierre Bourdieu and literacy education, Routledge, Taylor & Francis: London.
BARTON, D. 2007. Literacy : an introduction to the ecology of written language, Malden, Mass. Oxford, Blackwell.
TAYLOR & WEBB, P. 2007. Accounting for Teacher Knowledge: Reterritorializations as epistemic suicide. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 28, 279-295.

something I am passionate about

What do you feel passionate about: write about it

I went to Leeds University in the mid-80’s to do my PGCE in Sociology and English. I loved studying there. I think they must be one of the teacher training departments that the government  felt most bothered about. Not because of the standards they achieved.

My PGCE has had a profound impact on me.

In two ways

Firstly - all my lecturers were out and out left wing progressive Marxist. I have this impression of an entire year of lectures all of which were focussed on a single subject elaborated upon in extraordinary detail  - the education system served to effectively filter people according to race, gender and class. In was an inherently unequal system that served the interests of capital. We had a lecturer who once offered a different slant. He went through all the arguments that analysed discriminatory processes and ridiculed them.   He was a lively lecture, witty and entertaining. But his message was clear and chilling. We discussed it afterwards in seminars: if all these social explanations for inequality were unsound, the argument he was for was one that established the educational order as natural as the outcome of intelligence. Middle class, male and white students did better because they were more suited to academic education.  But he was a one voice and one we rejected. Everyone else elaborated on variations on the theme education, sociology and inequality.  I can’t quite remember the Sociology team but I do remember the English teaching team and they were great.  But I was happily indoctrinated by Leeds University and year later, I thank them for it.

I was one of two black girls on the course. I meet at Leeds (not at the University, in Chapeltown in a night club – the first person who was black and doing a PhD). It did not occur to me in those days that I would be even remotely capable of a PhD. At the time probably wasn’t.

Secondly – years later, this passion for, commitment to, insistence upon equality – continues to saturate me. This is what I am and it is what I do.  I qualified to teach in secondary schools but after spending 3 months in a school (on the PGCE course) I left because I realised these were not the relationships that I wanted to have with young people.  Having chanced upon adult education, I stayed because I loved it. The looseness of it. The informality of the teacher – student relationship. Boundaries are different in community education. Professionalism is defined in other ways. In community ed there is a commitment to equality. I liked the fact the students could join management committees and be members.  The commitment to equality was translated into practice: praxis in community education. I felt as a young strutting 20 something year old black girl, and a teacher that I was undermining the education system. There were several, but particularly, there were two black guys in my first cohort of students. They had just left school and joined the local adult education institute to take GCSE English and Sociology having failed a year earlier. They passed. I liked the fact that having failed after 10 years of schooling, they were able to pass after a year n adult ed. I guess with a bit more experience, it was not as simple as school = bad and discriminatory, adult ed = good and committed to equality. I loved being a teacher, the black girl and going out blusing in the evenings, I’d bump into my students who seemed pleased and surprised that I was part of my community. This is another line of narrative – but the Leeds was the first time I’d felt part of a black community. I loved it.

So now – some years later – what do I feel passionate about?

Well, thanks to the formative influence of Leeds University – equality is still my passion. I want to create change through the work that I do: through my teaching, through my writing, through the systems and structures I establish.

I’d forgotten this.

It’s important that I return to this and remember it. It’s my passion. Without it what I do has little meaning. The gratification that rewards what I do is constantly deferred. And what happens to a dream deferred?

More than deferred. It is made irrelevant.

I have recently started reading a colleague whose work I have read before Taylor-Webb, he writes these impassioned essays about teacher knowledge, the choreography of accountability, the anatomy of accountability. He writes about the performativity culture in schools and its impact on teachers.

I am most interested here in his ideas – these I recall at a distance and now loop back to connect to my research – on the reterritorialisation of teacher knowledge.  Asking and answering the question – what happens when teaching is made teacher-proof. What happens when teachers’ knowledge is made irrelevant. When teachers ‘deliver ‘ the commodity knowledge  that have been created elsewhere, by someone else.

He refers to this as epistemic suicide.

What happens when the dream of equality is constantly deferred? 

This is the opening quote from a paper I am now writing.

doesn’t always fit in. It’s great theory; it’s good. You know, we’ve talked about how to contextualise it and the wheel, all of that.  It was very refreshing. But my [manager], all she’s interested in is, ‘Oh! He failed. Can we get him back in?’ Not, ‘Can we develop this individual?’ ‘Can we get him back in? What do you think he failed on?’ And that’s the environment we’re in. And with the contracts coming up for renewal.           

It’s very target driven, when you are in a target driven environment professional judgement goes out the window, it suffers, because, that’s the main critique of my teaching, it’s not an excuse, it’s a business. They want more for less. It’s stressful; they are asking you for what you can’t deliver. It’s terribly stressful. I’ve had 10 years of it and I’m burnt out from it.  10 years.  It’s too long for this environment.  It’s too long. You should probably have a shelf life of 5 years.

I worked with this quote as an early example of some of the ideas trainees have in reference to their teaching. But I was asking the data one question while ignoring that it  was telling me something  else – ignoring it because this was not the question I was asking.

This student is clearly unhappy in his work. Clearly unhappy with teaching and clearly feels that the professional frame that surrounds him, what he is required to do – has no meaning for him. Worse still, has a meaning that undermines is sense of who he is and what he is meant to be doing,

He finds what he is learning refreshing – but this is made stale by the voice of his manager. 

He is asked to critique his teaching – his main critique is the environment the works in and the limitations that this imposes.

Situational analysis – I think – invites us to analyse situations to explore our themes. This implies a more open ended data analysis, rather than one that focuses exclusively on our concern but one that reads the situation. I may have an interest in conceptions of literacy, but may find that my answer lies in first of all analysing the situation in its entirety and reading the data in the first instance at face value.

I have chosen to answer my question I passing That is I am asking – not the direct question : what do you think of literacy, but in passing, what conception of literacy emerges in the course of this programme.

Everybody quotes Silverman – so I will maintain the tradition. This is just a nodded acknowledgement rather than detailed referencing. There are some narratives of methodology that I love and will refer to in another blog.  What I am thinking of here is the idea that if you ask a direct question, for example, if you ask about a culture directly you get everything included in our answer; its like asking fish what water is like. The answer offers little insight. Instead, put your hand in the water, compare it to land, send a dog or cat into the water. Heat the water up or cool it down. Add things to it. Or at least, invite the fish to tell you about his life in the water - what she can and can’t do.

And so in the quote about Joseph,   my trainee teacher,  provides an example of the epistemic suicide, the dis/connected ventriloquised self that teachers experience. This sense that there values are not even allowed full articulation. What does it mean to describe yourself as a holistic teacher? How do you in the context of a literacy class develop the whole person? What aspects of your professional judgement go flying out of the window?  What would your teaching be like if theory was able to fit the possibilities of practice? There is a sense of potentiality being stalled before it has tine to flourish. There is hankering, desire but no space to explore, embed and develop.

it’s not an excuse, it’s a business.

What strikes me here – is the professional cul-de-sac that Joseph seems to inhabit.  The trouble is there may be critiques of his teaching – even within he realms of a target driven culture – but the all pervasiveness of the context obscures the possibility of him seeing this.

So – with the desire to push the boundaries of my thinking, to cover new terrain – the ideas to further explore.

Taylor-Webb on teacher knowledge and epistemic suicide

The data may answer a question that wasn't actually asked, allow yourself to read the data in ways that enable it to speak to you – open up different explorations

Sometimes a question asked in passing is more valuable than a direct question: there is little to gain form asking a fish to analyse water 

Where and how and is there any point in creating space for teachers to explore their values and reasons for teaching, if these values are unlikely to find institutional expression

I like this image, I know too little about it.

Maeve Rendle, Blackpool: Rendle takes the inspiration for this, her first solo show, from a line in Marcel Proust's reflection on the nature of memory, In Search of Lost Time: 'I could not help being saddened by the fact that there was now nothing left of my former frame of mind.' Her series of installations is on show at the Grundy gallery, Blackpool, until 5 June 2010

The broken letters of a typewriter – I wanted to start thinking about the moments when literacies can be dysfunctional. I have to be careful here – because literacy is always told in terms of limitation, lack, deficit and I have no desire to fuel this. But, I want to explore the idea of independence. This seems to be something that those who come to literacy classes value. It can be a strong motivator.

It may also be a metaphor for the dysfunctionallity of skills based approach to literacy. The letters of the typewriter lay strewn and broken,  apart from the machine that enables them to perform. 

UCET 2011 November

UCET November 2011

Having something to say, that’s original and worth saying: and then saying it. Private thoughts in public spaces. Breaking the silence: being known.

It’s not enough to have something to say, it’s not even enough to have something to say that is original – you have to have something to say that is original and worth saying.

I have just presented a paper at the UCET conference. When I started at Hull the Research Director informed me that he did not have a high regard for people who simply attended conferences but nothing (in terms of REFable output) seemed to emerge from their attendance and that if I wanted to participate in such events I should aim to always present. This was good advice and so I am presenting and aim to do something as often as I can – ideally 2 or 3 times per year.  Without this prompting, I doubt I would be so fixated on this.

I managed to get through my MA and EdD without presenting anything, ever – until my final year when I had to do my viva.  My supervisor suggested that it was important that I presented at places before the viva as a trial run and so I spoke at Doctoral school conferences.  There’s a strange anxiety exhilaration, deflation and more anxiety that surrounds the experience. The only space that offers those same emotions but in an exaggerated hyper sensation: silence.

Did I not see a tweet – hell is not getting out of bed.  I’ve done silence. It’s not me.

I return to meme #1 – writing that pushes the boundaries – learning as living at the edge of our comfort zone:

A generative dance on the edge of a volcano.

·         There is a strong methodology question: entering a terrain in which I am already present and deeply implicated: situational analysis

·         I need a much closer reading of skills for sustainable growth – a critical discourse analysis

·         This is a trial run that I then see if I can work with other practitioners to pursue and develop: through RaPAL? Or the Y&H consortium. Can this be a range of activities that they try out with students and feedback on – as data; an exercise where I quote them and get them to analyse the quote

·         Does social practices present an overly romanticised view of literacy – does it ever acknowledge the dis-functionality that is directly attributable literacy as a distributed community resource. The anecdotes – toxic literacies, dysfunctional literacies, poisoned literacy portraits - the voices of students and teachers who after all - want change

·         I could have and wish I had asked much more about the people in the room. Got there perspective and geared my presentation around it.

·          Had the slide but bottled the discussion about my purpose and methodology – what this research is not.  It refuses instrumentality and ‘action research’. 

It’s hard to explain how mixed my feelings are just now. While I am pleased to be presenting and speaking about research on the other hand the anxieties that kept my silent for so long have not disappeared. They are as present as ever and produce a feeling of wretchedness after the seminar. It was not as good as I would have liked. 

Perhaps I did not push myself enough (not just at the last stage) to move beyond and develop an analysis that emerges after hours of sweat.  An analysis that I feel proud of, excited by.  But – such analyses are struggled through ... on the way there, there is this unwanted and seemingly useless stuff I have to feel my way through

As well as this and after a workshop I had to leave early but wanted to stay and attend,  I could for future refs try to predict who will be there and have alternatives approaches to meet those different audiences. 

I could have engaged more - conversation. Instead of a presentation – have an activity embedded – questions for participants and an activity

I could have made the presentation more stimulating by embedding video clips.  I could have invited them to be part of the data analysis.

I have just noticed the possibility of a link between how literacy is conceptualised and their own motivations for teaching; that these motivations may strongly influence their sense of what it is they are teaching – what we teach is connected to why we teach

Language and literacy teachers at the research, policy and practice - UCET Nov 2011

Language and literacy teachers at the research, policy and practice nexus, Dr Carol Azumah Dennis on Prezi

Data analysis: making the ordinary extraordinary

The analysis builds on my previous work regarding quality in teaching language and literacy in which I argued that teachers experienced tensions between quality-as-abstract textualisation and quality-as-an-embodiment. This was connected to how practitioners are required to textualise their experiences in contrast to the embodied actuality of their experiences.  In this analysis I explore further the notion of ‘embodiment’: the ways in which practitioners assemble the disparate narratives that define their pedagogy.

While paper sets up a polarity it doesn’t rest on one. There are clearly overlaps and affordances between socio-cultural and cognitive theories of ALLN.  Bracewell and Witte (2008) point out that writing is social and material as well as cultural. Literacy as embodied how incoherencies are woven into a narrative: teacher / writer / professional / student -

Data analysis explores moments when participants touch upon these different ideas. The whole discussion is about writing – offers support in the writing of the assignment, participant is a writer (aspires to get scripts published), and the assignment itself is about teaching writing.  My focus is on literacy as the subject they teach but explores their ideas about literacy from multiple perspectives including how they experience their own engagements with text.

Analysis

University Diploma is part of general policy driven initiative to improve quality of literacy teaching predicated on basis that way to do that is define a body of knowledge to be taught and then training teachers in how to deliver it. Define what they need to know and qualification to assure their competence. There is a strong possibility that teachers may come to the course with little general interest in broader ideas about language literacy or pedagogy – but with a narrow instrumental interest in ‘tips & techniques’ that improve their teaching.

Dis/connections between context, motivation & engagement 

Joseph: teaching but not a teacher.

Has been teaching for 10 years, but talks in terms of being at a crossroads in life and asking himself ‘what do I actually want to do?’ Makes references to his age, to time running out and ‘his clock ticking’ – hinting at something of a desperation to achieve goals that are not fulfilled by teaching literacy. The qualification has an exchange value – he teaches in prison and sees the qualification as a way out of this context. The quiet desperation is evident throughout as he clearly feels this environment constrains his pedagogy. He talks about feeling burnt out, and is of the opinion that 10 years in this context is too much. Whatever the bonhomie between himself and students, there is always a threatening undercurrent.   Other teachers in prison have insisted on ensuring they see students as students and that whatever else defines the context is not their concern. But the context is physically inescapable, from the process required to observe a class, to moving around, to managing a classroom situation.

Pearl: trying to live by ideas about good interaction, feedback and talk

Had worked for years in a school – admin – upon retirement teacher and wanted to change career and teach adult literacy.  She is doing the course out of interest and works in an open access workshop in her local AEI.  She teaches on a 1-to-1 basis. Over a period of time she has worked with a single student who she has a good knowledge of. The knowledge has not been gathered as a direct result of a broadened assessment – but has been gleaned indirectly through general talk about other aspects of the students work. Not treated as being central to how literacy is taught. Throughout the tutorial she makes regular references to the reading and mentions specific theories and ideas about literacy.

She attempts throughout the directly relate these ideas to what she does. The attempts are open to discussion: what she means by context, collaboration and success are clearly ideas in the shaping. The qualification required by her student lurks and defines her pedagogy but not in a way that she experiences as constraining. This tutorial represents a shift in which we have agreed that it is possible her student may ultimately be more able to pass the test or at least improve her literacy if there is less insistent and exclusive focus on trying out multiple papers all the time.

Once conceptions of literacy are embodied they become part of a complex nexus of other considerations that cannot be teased out as a singular variable.  What and how we teach is not solely determined by technical considerations of what curricular documents say, what and how we construct our subject or what the environment determines but a shifting combination of these.

Teaching, testing and targeting:

i)                     ‘It’s not an excuse, it’s a business.’

A point sometimes made about teachers who have been practicing since the inception of SfL is that – as they have not experienced any other framework, they may not always have access to frames of reference that would enable critique. This may resonate but as the opening quote suggests this is not the case with Joseph. More concerning is that at times he embodies what might be more fairly understood as an environmental limitation.

It’s very target driven, when you are in a target driven environment professional judgement goes out the window, it suffers, because, that’s the main critique of my teaching, it’s not an excuse, it’s a business. They want more for less. It’s stressful; they are asking you for what you can’t deliver. It’s terribly stressful. I’ve had 10 years of it and I’m burnt out from it.  10 years.  It’s too long for this environment.  It’s too long. You should probably have a shelf life of 5 years.

Joseph, Prison Literacy Teacher

ii)                   She doesn’t have literacy in her life at all

Pearl grapples with ideas about literacy and is aware of the importance for her students to experience resonance between in-college and out-of-college literacies.  But here she seems to suggest that what she does in college with her as a teacher – even when she ‘provides’ her with a context drawn from real life, is ‘literacy’ but the ‘unschooled’ tasks she performs at home is not.

Respondent:   [...] She didn't do any literacy work at all.  She didn’t have literacy in her life at all.  As far as things like letter writing or reading she didn't do any.  [...] 

Interviewer:  What about things like managing her house or managing her family, or paying bills, or does she work at all?

Respondent:  Oh she works, she’s a cook and a cleaner.  [...] I know that she functions in her job and in her daily life with these things perfectly well. 

Interviewer:    So with the literacy aspects of those things?

Respondent:  Yes, she does.  She has to write orders at work, she has to leave notes for people, she has to account for things that she’s done at work and as I say, make orders. 

BRACEWELL, R.J & WITTE, S.P 2008. Implications of Practice, Activity and Semiotic Theory for Cognitive Constructs of Writing Chapter 15 in ALBRIGHT, J. & LUKE, A. Pierre Bourdieu and literacy education, Routledge, Taylor & Francis: London.

GRENFELL, M., BLOOME, D., HARDY, C., PAHL, K., ROWSELL, J. & STREET, B. V. 2011. Language, Ethnography, and Education: Bridging New Literacy Studies and Bourdieu, Oxon, Routhledge.