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This thought-provoking book will provide masters students, teachers and researchers with a toolkit and theoretical framework for teaching literacy through children's literature. It features innovative ideas for developing student and teacher experiences with literature and popular culture texts in the classroom, providing practical examples and teaching aids throughout. Taking a collaborative approach, Curtin explores how teachers and learners can engage with literature and its authors for the development of literacy in classroom practice. Connecting reader and writer identities and worlds through interviews with and suggested classroom activities from authors themselves, this text combines author, teacher and learner perspectives in the development of creative pedagogies that extend understandings of literacy beyond reading, writing and text. Exploring fairy-tales, comic books and graphic novels, children living in literature (i.e., texts which portray children, their lives and experiences), popular culture, young adult fiction, and non-fiction and digital texts such as blogs etc, this text develops a sociocultural understanding of literacy as a lived and contextually dependent practice where meaning is derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Different contexts for literacy are explored, including reading and writing strategically (to learn about literacy and literature), widely (for personal purposes) and deeply (to transform understanding) (Short, 2011). This text will be an invaluable resource for teachers, researchers or anyone interested in reading and writing stories. The author interviews will also be of particular interest to older learners themselves as a way to develop their understanding of their own reading and writing practices. Pedagogies can be adapted to any age group, ranging from the early years to young adult.

Assessment in Practice explores timely and important questions in relation to assessment. By examining the relationship between identity, culture, policy and inclusion, the book investigates the conflicted and fractured battleground of assessment, and challenges current and practiced understandings of assessment practice. The authors encourage the reader to reconceptualise assessment as a sociocultural practice. Each chapter studies a key theme in the understanding of assessment policy and practice from a sociocultural perspective and provides questions to prompt reflection on the key assessment concepts outlined in the book. Using culture as both a lens and analytic tool, the chapters examine topics such as The social order of assessment, how assessment works in the world and how learning could be assessed Perspectives on social justice and assessment, with a particular focus on social class and other potential inequalities on the experiences of assessment for young people Discussions of ability and the assessment of students with special education needs as well as the role of inclusivity in assessment practice Written by leading academics from University College Cork, the third volume in the successful Routledge Current Debates in Educational Psychology series is an essential read for researchers and postgraduate students in educational research and education psychology.

This ground breaking book is unique in bringing together two perspectives on learning - sociocultural theory and neuroscience. Drawing on both perspectives, it foregrounds important developments in our understanding of what learning is, where and how learning occurs and what we can do to understand learning as an everyday process.Leading experts from both disciplines demonstrate how sociocultural ideas (such as the relevance of experience, opportunity to learn, environment, personal histories, meaning, participation, memory, and feelings of belonging) align with and reflect upon new understandings emerging from neuroscience concerning plasticity and neural networks. Among the themes critically examined are the following: Mind and brain Culture Ability and talent Success and failure Memory Language Emotion Aimed at and accessible to a broad audience and drawing on both schools of thought, Networks of Mind employs case studies, vignettes and real life examples to demonstrate that, though the language of sociocultural theory and that of neuroscience appear very different, ultimately the concepts of both perspectives align and converge around some key ideas. The book shows where both perspectives overlap, collide and diverge in their assumptions and understanding of fundamental aspects of human flourishing. It shows how neuroscience confirms some of the key messages already well established by sociocultural theory, specifically the importance of opportunity to learn. It also argues that the ascendency of neuroscience may result in the marginalization of sociocultural science, though the latter, it argues, has enormous explanatory power for understanding and promoting learning, and for understanding how learning is afforded and constrained.