Thinking Through New Literacies for Primary and Early Years

Jayne Metcalfe, Debbie Simpson, Ian Todd, Mike Toyn

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857258106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Thinking Through New Literacies for Primary and Early Years is an accessible text that encourages readers to consider deeply what is meant by ?literacy? today. It explores the many different ways in which teachers and children develop their own literacy. Specifically written for education students in the later years of their course, the text draws on research and practice to explore the challenges and opportunities involved, while helping to develop the reader?s own critical thinking skills. The book begins by asking ?what?s new about new literacies?? and goes on to explore some technological innovations designed to support the emergent reader and writer. It considers verbal literacy, speaking and listening, and visual literacy. Readers are encourages to think through the issues surrounding inclusion and the legal and ethical issues raised by this post-typographic age. Throughout, practical guidance runs alongside structured critical thinking exercises to help the reader reflect on both theory and practice. About the Thinking Through Education Series
Thinking Through Education is a series of texts designed and written specifically for those education students entering the second or final phase of their degree course. Structured around sets of specific ?skills?, each chapter uses critical thinking and reflective exercises to develop greater subject knowledge and critical awareness. Each book contains links to the Teachers? Standards providing students with a clear transition from study to practice. Jayne Metcalfe is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cumbria. Jayne is involved in e-safety training of student teachers. Debbie Simpson is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cumbria. She is currently the acting Programme Leader for the Primary PGCE course. Ian Todd is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cumbria, with a specialism in English and an interest in the teaching of ICT. Mike Toyn is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cumbria where he also coordinates the teaching of primary ICT.

1	What’s new about new literacies? Debbie Simpson

Chapter Focus

This chapter will introduce you to some definitions of what it means to be literate, and encourage you to take a critical approach to the ways in which the term ‘literacy’ is used in education policy documents, in the media, in school and in everyday conversations.

The critical thinking exercises in this chapter focus on:

• analysing widely held assumptions about what it means to be literate, including your own;
• identifying the key features of The New Literacy Studies;
• considering the relationship between literacy and technology;
• articulating the implications for educators.

The key ideas discussed are: literacy definitions, literacy models, ‘new’ literacies, texts, technology and pedagogy.

This chapter is particularly relevant to the following Teachers’ Standards (2012):

Part 1: Teaching

A teacher must:

1	Set high expectations which inspire, motivate and challenge pupils set goals that stretch and challenge pupils of all backgrounds, abilities and dispositions
2	Promote good progress and outcomes by pupils plan teaching to build on pupils’ capabilities and prior knowledge demonstrate knowledge and understanding of how pupils learn and how this impacts on teaching
3	Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge demonstrate a critical understanding of developments in the subject and curriculum areas, and promote the value of scholarship demonstrate an understanding of and take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher’s specialist subject.

Introduction

This chapter begins with a case study that introduces themes of literacy, technology and pedagogy, which will be explored in greater detail in this and subsequent chapters. In this chapter we explore ideas about what it means to be literate, and how definitions of literacy have changed over time. We identify some of the assumptions that lie behind these definitions and consider how our own ideas about literacy have been influenced by background, education, experience and training.

We turn then to the field of New Literacy Studies (NLS) from which the term ‘new literacies’ emerges, and identify its key features. We consider how sociocultural perspectives encourage us to think of literacy as a social practice rather than as a set of skills to be mastered. We critically evaluate the old literacy/new literacy dichotomy, and discuss whether there is room for both perspectives in the primary classroom. Finally we consider the role of digital technologies in the teaching of literacy, and consider key pedagogical issues and implications for practitioners.

CASE STUDY

At a primary school in Blackpool, in the north west of England, children and teachers gather for the first ever KidsMeet event, where children take the place of teachers and present to each other (and to the world via video-link) something they have learned in class that inspires them, has made a difference to them or that they think is worth sharing with everyone else.

There are 12 presentations from children aged 5 to 11 years old, on a range of topics from drama games to Twitter. Most children speak in small groups, although one pupil does a presentation all on her own.

Year 6 pupils talk about their ‘digital pencil-cases’ (known in ‘teacher talk’ as ipods and ipads), which are great for publishing their writing straight to a blog and for responding to comments from their world-wide audience. They are also keen to show off how the audio features of their digital pencil-cases make their ideas accessible to all ages. The youngest presenters, from Year 1, demonstrate outstanding ICT expertise as they provide a live demonstration of audio and image editing, and explain how this has inspired and enriched their retelling of Cinderella.

The presentations in the hall break off as a live video conference call is received from Birmingham, where four Year 4 boys introduce the series of video tutorials they have created, demonstrating how to write ‘exciting sentences’. Back in the hall, children from a school in Bradford demonstrate how to make computer mini-games with a program called Kodu, while pupils from a primary school in Liverpool show how they use Google Apps to work collaboratively when researching, creating and presenting their topic work on evacuees. A Year 6 pupil recommends the use of Popplet to organise topic work, and last but not least, Year 5 children talk about their play scripts, and show a mini horror movie they have made based upon the Brainpop Moby series. They talk about how they learned to edit, act, script, write, direct and produce their movie.

This KidsMeet event (since followed by others around the country) provides a snapshot into some of the inspiring work taking place in primary classrooms every day. You can read more about this first meeting at http://lordlit.com/2011/06/17/741/. However, if you enter the phrase Blackpool Kidsmeet into a search engine you can browse the pupil and teacher blogs, videos and photos to get a full flavour of the event directly from its participants.

Kidsmeet is a pupil-focused event designed by teachers to provide children with opportunities to showcase their learning. The primary focus is on literacy, including speaking and listening, and the use of new technologies to support and enhance learning. During this chapter we will analyse some ideas about literacy and technology in order to better understand the rationale behind this and similar initiatives.

Key idea: Literacy

Isn’t literacy just about learning to read and write?

Few educational practices have greater ability to prompt passionate debate than the teaching of reading and writing.

No educational practice is neutral. All learning is based on some assumptions and the process of becoming literate is no exception. Even arriving at a definition of what it means to be literate is not straightforward, as you will discover in this chapter. Each day-to-day practice that you perhaps take for granted in our schools is the product of sometimes fiercely contested social and political processes. Few educational practices have greater ability to prompt passionate debate than the teaching of reading and writing.

Today we regard ‘literacy’ as a highly desirable condition and ‘illiteracy’ is portrayed as a scandal, disease or epidemic to be eliminated at all costs. Prior to the twentieth century, however, it was feared that mass literacy might lead to social unrest, by raising the expectations of the poor through access to subversive and radical literature and encouraging them to question the political and social status quo. The notion that literacy should be acquired in early childhood, and that an individual’s failure to do so would have calamitous consequences for them personally and for society as a whole, is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Three main reasons are usually offered for the importance of mass literacy. These are linked to the economic and social well-being of the state, and to personal advancement. It is now held to be self-evident that a literate workforce is a productive workforce; essential to a nation’s economic well-being. The performance of UK pupils, relative to those from other countries in international league tables of literacy, is watched anxiously, and slippage ‘down the international tables’ is a matter for media comment and political concern. Secondly, literacy is seen as a social good. Links have been made between childhood poverty and low literacy levels, and there is particular anxiety regarding the high levels of illiteracy among inmates of prisons and Young Offenders Institutions. Young white males from lower socio-economic classes in particular are believed to be marginalised through their poor literacy skills and resulting exclusion from employment and education. Finally, literacy is valued as a route to self-actualisation. Personal fulfilment is held to be a direct consequence of literacy, and is linked to an individual’s ability to read and write fluently for pleasure, for personal empowerment, to express creativity and to engage fully in a world dominated by print.

Critical thinking exercise 1: exploring definitions of literacy

Consider the following tests of literacy that have been used separately at different times and by different people to assess literacy capability in populations and individuals. Do any of them surprise you?

A literate person can:

1. read and write his or her own name;
2. read, write and speak in English at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual and in society;
3. with understanding both read and write a short, simple statement on his everyday life;
4. understand, interpret and deduce information from a given text;
5. name one person by name or title who is part of the judicial branch of government in Alabama;
6. communicate proficiently, including with technology.

Variously, these ‘literacy tests’ have been used: to assess historical [1], national [2] and global [3] rates of literacy in populations; to select children at age 11 for grammar school education [4]; as a test applied to people of African American ethnicity in order for them to be granted voting rights [5]; to assess suitability for an administrative post [6].

Discuss which, if any, of these definitions seem to you to be reasonable tests of literacy. What assumptions or hidden agendas can you detect in the statements? Which of the three priorities for literacy, economic, social and self-actualisation, do you think are prioritised in these statements?

Comment

Definitions of what it means to be literate have changed over the years as society itself has changed. Being recognised as a literate person depends upon who is measuring literacy, and how, and why. Organisations that devise tests of literacy often go into detail about the results of their testing and the conclusions that can be drawn from their results, but they rarely spell out the assumptions that underlie their models of literacy.

To further illustrate the contentious nature of literacy and literacy tests, consider the dispute focusing on recent proposals in the UK (2011) for a reading assessment test for children aged six. Proposals by the Department for Education (DfE, 2010) aim to ‘eliminate illiteracy’ through assessing reading at age six to make sure that all children are on track. The proposed test will focus on the ability of children to decode words, using a ‘non-word reading test’. This is a test that includes nonsense words such as mip, glimp or zog to assess children’s ability to pronounce straightforward spelling patterns.

This proposed reading test has been criticised strongly by a number of prominent voices from politics, education and literacy studies, among them an all-party parliamentary group for education and the UK Literacy Association (UKLA). To understand the background to the debate and how some of the tensions arise, you will need to examine contrasting theoretical models of literacy.

Key idea: Models of literacy

Understanding the polarised views of literacy helps to gain an insight into the way that literacy is defined and how it can be developed.

Models of literacy can be classified into two main types: autonomous models and social models. An autonomous, or individual, model of literacy identifies a person as ‘literate’ if they have mastered a set of discrete skills, of which foremost is the ability to relate spoken sounds (phonemes) with symbols (graphemes) or such as alphabetic characters. All writing is a visual representation of language and all languages which have a writing system (orthography) rely on a shared agreement that symbols and sounds stand in a systematic relationship to each other. Some languages, such as modern Turkish, have a stable, one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds; others, such as English, have a more complex system with many exceptions and irregular forms. For example, consider the sound which is pronounced ‘ay’ (as in ‘day’) in the following words: way, maid, save, great, rein, reign, eight, fete, straight, champagne, grey. It has been found (Seymour et al., 2005) that it takes children roughly two years longer to read English than to read Finnish which has a more regular system. This relationship of sounds to letters has been likened to a ‘code’. Children are said to have ‘cracked the code’ when they can reliably encode and decode common patterns of sounds...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the authors
• Introduction
• 1. What’s new about new literacies? Debbie Simpson
• 2. Technological interventions in early literacy Jayne Metcalfe
• 3. Verbal literacy Ian Todd
• 4. Finding things out – information literacy Mike Toyn
• 5. Aural and oral literacy Jayne Metcalfe
• 6. Visual literacy Ian Todd
• 7. Lost in cyberspace? Children and social media Jayne Metcalfe and Debbie Simpson
• 8. New literacies and inclusion Debbie Simpson and Mike Toyn
• 9. Considering pedagogy, ethics and the law in the ‘remix’ culture Debbie Simpson
• References
• Index