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This article explores the possible relationships between geography, literacy, pedagogy, and poverty. It characterizes poverty as a wicked problem, which sees economic inequality escalating in a number of neoliberal democracies. Key insights from theorists of economic inequality are summarized. The enduring nature of poverty in particular places is noted, and the associated risks of "fickle literacies" are considered. A case study of one child growing up and attending school in a location with intergenerational unemployment is discussed as an example of the risks associated with literacy policy and pedagogy in an era of global educational reform. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Massey, it is argued that despite the discourses of standardization, teachers can continue to educate culturally diverse young people in ways that help them to negotiate and imagine positive and productive ways of learning together. The possibilities for working against deficit views of people in poverty are explored through three classroom examples of place-conscious pedagogies which position young people as critically literate cosmopolitan citizens. The article concludes by advocating the need for translocal research alliances to work explicitly for social justice through place-conscious pedagogies and critical literacy education.

Given the global escalation of gaps between rich and poor, contemporary work in critical literacy needs to overtly question the politics of poverty. How and where is poverty produced, by what means, by whom and for whom and how are educational systems stratified to provide different kinds of education to the rich and the poor? Yet rather than critical literacy, international educational reform movements stress performative standards on basic literacy. In this context literacy researchers need to ask policy-makers hard questions about taken-for-granted rhetoric that surrounds poverty, literacy and education. At school, regional and state levels, educational leaders need to argue for fair resourcing and decision-making for their communities and students. In classrooms teachers need to weave critical questioning and inclusive learning interactions into the fabric of everyday life.

As educators encounter a policy landscape where increasingly the education lexicon includes keywords such as data, evidence, quality, and standards, it is interesting to revisit Garth Boomer's contribution regarding teachers as researchers. In "Fair Dinkum Teaching and Learning," Boomer (1985) clearly named at least two key problems that the author believes still face the educational community. First, drawing on the sociologist Basil Bernstein, he explained that schools typically contribute to the reproduction of educational success and failure, whereby some students come "to believe that they are capable of seeking, possessing, and banking on knowledge" (Boomer, 1985, p. 122) and "the other group, those who fail, tend to believe that knowledge is 'elsewhere,' not to be possessed, to be deferred to, rebelled against, or distrusted." Second, he named the divide between what he called "big R" research, which he saw as "a postgraduate luxury," and what actually goes on in schools (which he argued are not thinking and learning institutions). In this article, the author revisits what she has learned from her collaborative work with teacher-researchers, with Boomer's key messages in mind.

Mandated literacy assessment is now a ubiquitous practice in many western educational systems. While educational researchers, principals, teachers and education unions continue to offer vociferous resistance in some nations, in others it is now commonplace in the educational landscape and built into the rhythms of the school year. This paper is taken from a current project in which we are looking ethnographically to see how national policies are mediated in different institutional contexts--specifically in state and regional policy sites and in schools. Here we discuss some of the ways in which mandated literacy assessment, specifically the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), is reorganising principals' work. First, we examine the ways in which the principal is positioned in official policy documents to show the way that the actual uses of test result are euphemised in these materials, emphasising mainly individual support for students, while inserting principals into a web of responsibilities to mediate participation in the tests. We then move to examine the way that the work of one principal in a diverse school setting is impacted to show how a great deal of new work has arisen; work that is very complex in a setting where families are not confident with literacy themselves and having to deal with English as a second language. We show that principals, especially, are asked to take responsibility for both increasing school and student performance on the one hand, while maintaining the fiction that the tests are simply for student support on the other. Much of this work is becoming normalised and invisible even while the major burden is felt by professionals in schools serving poor or diverse communities. This paper attempts to make such processes more visible to scrutiny and evaluation by the teachers and school leaders. (Contains 2 tables and 1 note.)

This paper argues for the need for critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability that often promotes reading comprehension as readily assessable through students answering multiple choice questions of unseen texts. Based upon a 1 year study investigating literacy in Years 4-9 the ways strong-performing primary schools develop serious and in-depth reading for learning are explored. School and teacher features which allow for the development of sophisticated pedagogical repertoires and space for critical reading comprehension, without losing the complexity of curriculum offerings, are outlined. How one experienced middle primary teacher operates strategically, ethically and critically in supporting her ESL students to learn to read is illustrated. The teacher's work is situated within the complex accountability demands faced by classroom teachers. This was accomplished by a teacher whose pedagogical repertoire has been assembled across a career teaching in low-SES high ESL communities in a school with a balanced literacy program and high level of collegial support. Risks for schools and teachers whose circumstances work against their capacities for prioritisation and strategic decision-making are identified and discussed.

In an era of normative standardised literacy curriculum continuing to make space for culturally responsive literacy pedagogy is on ongoing challenge for early childhood educators. Collaborative participatory research and ethnographic studies of teachers who accomplish innovative and inclusive early childhood education in culturally diverse high poverty communities is urgent for the profession. Such pedagogies involve complex understandings of the cultural and political histories, and the dynamic potential, of the places in which school communities are located. By incorporating the study of local histories and biographies and researching neighbourhood changes teachers adapt mandated curriculum to maintain community knowledges and allow for positive identity work at the same time as they meet the authorised systems objectives. When teachers work with children as co-researchers through the study of people's lives in particular places and times, the community and its complex histories become a rich resource for young people's literacy repertoires.

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary schooling contexts that, in current times, are beset with "crisis" conditions and constrained by policy rationales that make it difficult to pursue issues of justice. Within the project, university investigators and teachers collaborated in action research that drew on a range of conceptual resources for redesigning curriculum and pedagogies, including: funds of knowledge, vernacular or local literacies; place-based education; the "productive pedagogies" and the "unofficial curriculum" of popular culture and out-of-school learning settings. In bringing these resources together with the aim of interrupting the reproduction of inequality, the project developed a methodo-logic which builds on Bourdieuian insights. (Contains 2 notes.)

Since the mid-1990s, government policies in the USA, Canada, England, and Australia have promoted the need to produce an ICT skilled workforce in order to ensure national competitiveness in globalised economic conditions. In this article, we examine the ways in which these policy intentions in 1 state in Australia were translated into a techno-determinist and technocentric plan which focused primarily on getting wired up and connected. We summarise the findings from 2 projects: an investigation of a state-wide principals' professional development programme and an action research study investigating literacy, educational disadvantage, and information technologies. We found significant differences in the distribution of the physical and human capabilities between schools which made the task of engaging with ICT harder for some than others. Nevertheless, we suggest that some school leaders did develop innovative practice. We suggest that policy deficits made it difficult for school leaders to grapple with the dimensions of and debates about the kinds of educational changes that schools and school systems should be making. (Contains 1 figure, 2 notes and 1 table.)

This paper argues that teachers' recognition of children's cultural practices is an important positive step in helping socio-economically disadvantaged children engage with school literacies. Based on 21 longitudinal case studies of children's literacy development over a 3-year period, the authors demonstrate that when children's knowledges and practices assembled in home and community spheres are treated as valuable material for school learning, children are more likely to invest in the work of acquiring school literacies. However, they also show that while some children benefit greatly from being allowed to draw on their knowledge of popular culture, sports and the outdoors, other children's interests may be ignored or excluded. Some differences in teachers' valuing of home and community cultures appeared to relate to gender dimensions.

As part of the Commonwealth's drive to enhance Australia's competitiveness in the global economy, Australia is five years from implementing "National Benchmarks" to leverage measurable literacy outcomes from schools. This "back to basics" agenda is in tension with another drive to foster advanced thinking skills in children. Teachers are being positioned as deskilled technicians on the one hand and model "new economy" workers on the other, whilst working to meet the needs of diverse student populations. This article discusses the impact of these tensions on "Riverside Primary School" located in a culturally diverse, socio-economically disadvantaged suburb of Adelaide. A case study of student-teacher interactions during a literacy lesson is used to illustrate how dominant educational and political discourses operate at a classroom level to construct children as "normal", "gifted" or "slow".

The fact that children growing up in poverty are likely to be in the lower ranges of achievement on standardised literacy tests is not a new phenomenon. Internationally there are a myriad of intervention and remedial programmes designed to address this problem with a range of effects. Frequently, sustainable reforms are curtailed by deficit views of families and children growing up in poverty. This article describes an ongoing research study entitled "Teachers Investigate Unequal Literacy Outcomes: Cross-Generational Perspectives", which made teacher researchers central in examining this long-standing dilemma. It outlines the research design and rationale, and analyses how two early career teachers worked their ways out of deficit analyses of two children they were most worried about. It argues that disrupting deficit discourses and re-designing new pedagogical repertoires to reconnect with children's lifeworlds is a long-term project that can best be achieved in reciprocal research relationships with teachers. (Contains 1 note.)

Literacy skills are essential if students are to access knowledge and achieve academic success in middle school science. A key difficulty with interpreting literacy practices in any discipline is the problem of conceptualising what constitutes literacy. Our study contributes new understandings to the discipline of science where there are ongoing debates concerning the meaning of literacy and confusion regarding what constitutes essential literacies in the field. Our scoping review first identifies how literacy in middle school science is conceptualised in empirical studies published between 2006 and 2019 and, second, addresses a significant gap in understandings by identifying how dominant discourses inform practice. Specifically, our findings show the dominance of a narrow conception of literacy in the science classroom relating to skills-based pedagogic instruction. Based on our review, we conclude that the field of science requires a broadening of what constitutes literacy, and engagement with New Literacy Studies which focuses on literacy as a social practice closely interwoven with student identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fields of science and literacy education continue to be shaped by pervasive gender inequality. Previous research has documented how the formation of a 'science identity' is contingent on access to science capital while research in literacy education continues to highlight how boys struggle in their literacy acquisition. Despite a robust scholarship on gendered literacy practices and gender in STEM subjects, to date, there has been little investigation of the relationships between boys' science identity/ies and their literacy practices. We draw on a case study of 24 middle school boys living and learning in two different regions (e.g. metropolitan, rural) where we focus on how boys conceive of themselves as learners in two curriculum areas: science and literacy. Bridging multiple areas of scholarship (e.g., science literacy, science identity, boys in schooling), we concentrate on the participants' self-belief in science and self-belief as readers and consider the way they inform each other in reference to place. The implications of our study concern how the science literate boy comes to be in reference to the construction of discursive performances of science masculinities and how they are maintained alongside literate identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines teachers' work as part of the everyday life of classrooms, schools and communities—as curriculum design, dynamic pedagogies and as an oeuvre which is assembled over time. One of the hardest aspects of the everyday work of teachers, and perhaps one of the most under-rated and under-studied, is listening, really listening. This article firstly explores the dangers of teachers not listening. Secondly, it highlights the contributions of teacher researchers who take students and their worlds seriously. We argue that teachers listening to students in the context of their communities can underpin responsive pedagogies and creative curriculum design, which in turn can allow students to assemble repertoires of complex communication practices for representation, participation and taking action. Finally, we speculate about how, over time, teachers, as artists, assemble an oeuvre—an assemblage of curriculum design and responsive pedagogies which could inform teacher education and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that geographical theories are generative when to comes to understanding how educational disadvantage is produced and reproduced across generations. Spatial theories can inform critical interrogation of the ways in which students and their families from particular places, such as communities of poverty are represented in the media. Yet spaces and places can also become rich curricular resources when treated as assets for designing and enacting pedagogies of care and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining how young children learn to write is increasingly important as global society moves further towards a knowledge economy, where the production of texts of various kinds is an increasingly ubiquitous practice in everyday life and work. While there has been recent policy and practice focus on children's writing performance in standardised tests, in this article, the authors focus on what can be learned by listening to children's voices as they are engaged in 'draw and talk' methodologies. While children's drawings have a material reality, they are also representations of children's perceptions of their experiences with learning to write. In this article, the authors explore the processes, practices and relationships involved in learning to write, depicted in children's drawings when they are asked to draw themselves learning to write. The authors identify representations of writing, evident in the children's drawings focusing the relational, the material and the spatial elements of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enduring nature of the problem of inequality in education suggests that new ways of understanding and ameliorating it are needed. Nonrepresentational ontology is yielding new insights in other fields but is yet to gain traction in education. The requisite ontological shift would attend to inequality as a specific material effect of practices of knowing, rather than a social, natural, or discursive reality requiring representation. In this paper, we investigate the potential of such a shift to advance our fundamental commitment to social change through equity and justice. Drawing mainly upon the work of Karen Barad, we offer a reconceptualistion of educational inequality as a doing, not a thing, which becomes meaningful as it is defined by the circumstances required to measure it. We re-examine data collected during a recently completed longitudinal study of schools in the northern-rustbelt-suburbs of Adelaide, specifically the phenomenon of teaching literacy in the classrooms of two teachers in one school in our completed study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital literacies abound in playing a foundational role in the rhythm and pattern of our lives, yet debates continue about how to harness them to teach and learn literacy. In an effort to humanize digital literacies, this department column offers a vast array of topics, from participatory work that pushes educators and researchers to communicate in local and global spaces to ways of redefining core reading and literacy skills through a screen-based, multimodal logic. This column also provides a venue for research and practical applications that depict technology use as a part of the fabric of being human. The column helps educators reconceptualize the ways that children learn with technology, media, and new communication systems; honors educator success stories and burning questions and issues; and reimagines literacy futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter we detail our understandings of inclusive pedagogical practices that enable all students to assemble complex literate repertoires. We discuss generative concepts from international related literature (e.g. Au, Dyson, Janks, Luke, McNaughton, Moll, Thomson). We then present descriptions of two lessons as examples of how inclusive pedagogical practices might look in primary and secondary classrooms. The focus will be on how texts work to represent the world in particular ways and not others - and the implications of this for the inclusion of diverse student cohorts in developing complex literate repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-stakes literacy testing is now a ubiquitous educational phenomenon. However, it remains a relatively recent phenomenon in Australia. Hence it is possible to study the ways in which such tests are reorganising educators' work during this period of change. This paper draws upon Dorothy Smith's Institutional Ethnography and critical policy analysis to consider this problem and reports on interview data from teachers and the principal in small rural school in a poor area of South Australia. In this context high-stakes testing and the associated diagnostic school review unleashes a chain of actions within the school which ultimately results in educators doubting their professional judgments, increasing the investment in testing, narrowing their teaching of literacy and purchasing levelled reading schemes. The effects of high-stakes testing in disadvantaged schools are identified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how mandated literacy assessment is reorganising teachers' work in the context of Australia's National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy, which was implemented in 2008. Students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are tested annually, with school results publicly available. The wider policy context and the emergence of different forms of interconnected educational work associated with the testing phenomenon are described. Taking an institutional ethnography approach, the local effects of the federal policy regime are examined through a case study of one school. What mandated literacy assessment does to educators' work in a culturally diverse low-socioeconomic school community is discussed. Key themes include strategic exclusions of students from the testing process, appropriations and adaptations of literacy theory, work intensification and ethical mediation of results. Questions concerning equity are raised about the differential effects of policy in different school contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an era of normative standardised literacy curriculum continuing to make space for culturally responsive literacy pedagogy is on ongoing challenge for early childhood educators. Collaborative participatory research and ethnographic studies of teachers who accomplish innovative and inclusive early childhood education in culturally diverse high poverty communities is urgent for the profession. Such pedagogies involve complex understandings of the cultural and political histories, and the dynamic potential, of the places in which school communities are located. By incorporating the study of local histories and biographies and researching neighbourhood changes teachers adapt mandated curriculum to maintain community knowledges and allow for positive identity work at the same time as they meet the authorised systems objectives. When teachers work with children as co-researchers through the study of people's lives in particular places and times, the community and its complex histories become a rich resource for young people's literacy repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

School-age populations in many nations are becoming increasingly diverse (in terms of languages, countries of origin, ethnicity, faith traditions and so on) especially in low socio-economic communities where recent arrivals tend to be accommodated. In Australian classrooms, it is not unusual for a single classroom to include children who speak many different languages. Their family trajectories to their current dwellings and lifeworlds may be very different from each other. Catastrophic weather events and other disasters change the very landscapes in which families and teachers work. At the same time, what constitutes literacy continues to evolve as new technologies and communication media enable different forms of meaning- making. Yet simultaneously, what counts as literacy is increasingly "fixed" by the normative demands of high-stakes, standardised tests. This paper employs Hilary Janks' (2010) synthesis model of critical literacy to explore some of the risk and possibilities for innovative and equitable pedagogy inherent in this contemporary demographic, policy and practice mix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the need for critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability that often promotes reading comprehension as readily assessable through students answering multiple choice questions of unseen texts. Based upon a 1 year study investigating literacy in Years 4-9 the ways strong-performing primary schools develop serious and in-depth reading for learning are explored. School and teacher features which allow for the development of sophisticated pedagogical repertoires and space for critical reading comprehension, without losing the complexity of curriculum offerings, are outlined. How one experienced middle primary teacher operates strategically, ethically and critically in supporting her ESL students to learn to read is illustrated. The teacher's work is situated within the complex accountability demands faced by classroom teachers. This was accomplished by a teacher whose pedagogical repertoire has been assembled across a career teaching in low-SES high ESL communities in a school with a balanced literacy program and high level of collegial support. Risks for schools and teachers whose circumstances work against their capacities for prioritisation and strategic decision-making are identified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mandated literacy assessment is now a ubiquitous practice in many western educational systems. While educational researchers, principals, teachers and education unions continue to offer vociferous resistance in some nations, in others it is now commonplace in the educational landscape and built into the rhythms of the school year. This paper is taken from a current project in which we are looking ethnographically to see how national policies are mediated in different institutional contexts - specifically in state and regional policy sites and in schools. Here we discuss some of the ways in which mandated literacy assessment, specifically the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), is reorganising principals' work. First, we examine the ways in which the principal is positioned in official policy documents to show the way that the actual uses of test result are euphemised in these materials, emphasising mainly individual support for students, while inserting principals into a web of responsibilities to mediate participation in the tests. We then move to examine the way that the work of one principal in a diverse school setting is impacted to show how a great deal of new work has arisen; work that is very complex in a setting where families are not confident with literacy themselves and having to deal with English as a second language. We show that principals, especially, are asked to take responsibility for both increasing school and student performance on the one hand, while maintaining the fiction that the tests are simply for student support on the other. Much of this work is becoming normalised and invisible even while the major burden is felt by professionals in schools serving poor or diverse communities. This paper attempts to make such processes more visible to scrutiny and evaluation by the teachers and school leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary schooling contexts that, in current times, are beset with 'crisis' conditions and constrained by policy rationales that make it difficult to pursue issues of justice. Within the project, university investigators and teachers collaborated in action research that drew on a range of conceptual resources for redesigning curriculum and pedagogies, including: funds of knowledge, vernacular or local literacies; place-based education; the 'productive pedagogies' and the 'unofficial curriculum' of popular culture and out-of-school learning settings. In bringing these resources together with the aim of interrupting the reproduction of inequality, the project developed a methodo-logic which builds on Bourdieuian insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has recently been an emphasis within literacy studies on both the spatial dimensions of social practices (Leander & Sheehy, 2004) and the importance of incorporating design and multiple modes of meaning-making into contemporary understandings of literacy (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996). Kress (2003), in particular, has outlined the potential implications of the cultural shift from the dominance of writing based on a logic of time and sequence in time to the dominance of the mode of the image based on a logic of space. However, the widespread redesign of curriculum and pedagogy by classroom teachers to allow students to capitalise on the various affordances of different modes of meaning-making—including the spatial—remains in an emergent stage. We report on a project in which university researchers' expertise in architecture, literacy, and communications enabled two teachers in one school to expand the forms of literacy that primary school children engaged in. Starting from the school community's concerns about an urban renewal project in their neighbourhood, we worked together to develop a curriculum of spatial literacies with real-world goals and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The educational research and policy scene in Australia over the past decade has featured a number of contradictory developments. National policy has sponsored more interdisciplinary and applied research, while moving down a Research Quality Framework pathway which prioritises measurable quality and impact measures. At the same time, recent international and national policies in literacy education have been dominated by a psychological (rather than socio-cultural) view of literacy, wrapped within a discourse that valorises "evidence-based" practice. As literacy researchers coming from an ethnographic, collaborative and critical tradition, we have had to be strategic to secure funding to continue our research agenda in innovative, ethical and scholarly ways. This paper uses the case of a recent research project to explore some of the ways in which our approaches have been contradictorily positioned within this policy context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the resurgence of interest in creativity in education. It is included in the research and scholarship as an element of pedagogy and practice. This is in recognition of the role of creativity in economic and social development for the improvement of schools. Creativity and literacy innovations are analyzed in cultural contexts.

In this article we explore the relationship between literacy, place, and teacher identity as they intersect around Special Forever, a professional learning program with a focus on environmental communications and place based education. Teachers participating in Special Forever speak from different positions, histories, and alliances as local landowners, farmers, users of Murray-Darling Basin resources, and environmental activists; they teach in places to which they are connected in multiple ways and in which they have particular investments that shape the design of their environmental communications curriculum. We draw on an analysis of the Special Forever Guidelines for schools to discern how the Murray-Darling Basin is represented within the program, and read this alongside interview data in which teachers speak about the complex relationships they have with ‘their place’ in the Murray-Darling Basin. We suggest that the interrelationships between the politics of places, the politics of literacy pedagogy, and the multiple subject positions that teachers negotiate deserve closer attention if we are to develop more grounded approaches to critical literacy and place-based pedagogies. Furthermore, we argue that an important element for making literacy critical is attending to the politics of the places that are important to children and their teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]