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Purpose – This chapter provides the reader with an overview of the process involved in creating a Literacy Center to help students to rise above challenges and flourish academically. It focuses on instructional planning that brings the curriculum to life for P-12 students and emphasizes their strengths and interests.

Methodology/Approach – The authors describe the process of creating a Literacy Center that focuses on students’ strengths and enhances student achievement. They communicate the factors involved in (1) initiating the planning process, (2) designing a policy manual, (3) creating instructional frameworks, and (4) enhancing literacy development through support from home.

Practical implications – This chapter includes a detailed overview of the creation of a Literacy Center, a process that could be replicated by the educators who read the chapter. This description provides educators with insights that could facilitate the planning process and provide ideas for lesson planning and curriculum development in a Literacy Center.

Social implications – The chapter suggests how faculty could work together to create a Literacy Center to enhance student achievement in the community. This could potentially help P-12 students in many locations to acquire the skills and strategies they need in order to turn challenges into strengths. This will help Literacy Centers to provide effective, research-based literacy instruction and promote outstanding literacy leadership in our schools.

This project was designed to study situated literacies, using New Literacy Studies (NLS) in a community school and included five distinct, progressive phases. This chapter reports on the Preparatory Phase. We led in-service sessions to share insights for student-centered instruction from a constructivist perspective with faculty members whose experience with literacy instruction had primarily been reflective of the skills-based paradigm. The focus of the first phase was to prepare the teachers to employ literature circles to revitalize literacy instruction and achievement. During this first year of this longitudinal study, teachers began gradually introducing constructivist methodologies into their literacy instruction and discussing them with us in the in-service sessions. All aspects of this project emphasized synergistic collaboration, featuring community building and collaborative sessions with teachers. Literature circles with high-interest literature by indigenous authors enhanced the learning activities and mini-lessons prepared teachers and their students for this exploration. In-service sessions laid the foundation for the project, and these sessions provided opportunities for ongoing collaboration. As we invited teachers and administrators to participate in constructivist pedagogical approaches featuring literature circles, we emphasized collaborative discussions to determine the most beneficial books, materials, and pedagogical strategies for students. Teachers and students experienced the power of synergistic collaboration as they explored engaging literature and shared their schema in meaningful discourse. This experience revitalized literacy achievement as students became more engaged in learning, and teachers noted the impact of their enthusiasm for learning. Students and teachers have experienced the power of synergistic collaboration while reading and writing during literature circles. Connecting culture and literacy with the power of synergistic collaboration invariably increased the learners’ engagement with and enjoyment of reading, writing, speaking and listening. This research-based design can serve as a template for incorporating cultural heritage into literacy education for all who educate indigenous students.

Writing is an act of expressive communication achieved through the medium of print. It is but one of three modes of linguistic communication. The other expressive mode is speaking, while listening and reading comprise the two receptive modes. The purpose of this chapter is to present the impact of a study in which students read and discussed expository poetry. Then they exchanged ideas relating to scientific concepts in the poems with students in a different group via pen pal letters. We analyzed these pen pal letters over four weeks to determine the influence of writing opportunities in an atmosphere rich in all four aspects of linguistic communication, involving authentic communication between students and within a community of learners.

Six of Brod Bagert’s unpublished poems concerned with science concepts were read by students in Collaborative Discover Groups (CDG) in two third-grade classes. After the groups discussed the poems, a mini-lesson on one of the Six Traits of Writing followed, and the students responded individually to a teacher-generated prompt related to the specific poem. The responses were in the form of pen pal letters to students in another class who had just read the same poem, received the same teacher-directed mini-lesson, and had had a similar discussion in their respective CDG. The data gleaned from these letters provide information demonstrating the effect of emphasizing all linguistic facets synergistically in a social, communicative setting. Both the processes and the findings will be discussed.

Analysis of the pen pal letters third-grade students wrote over four weeks showed the following patterns. (1) There was an increase in the discursive nature of the writing. (2) The incidence of rhetorical questioning, using A + B = C reasoning, and evaluative thinking was present in the fifth set of letters, and not in the first. Additionally, the number of sentences per letter increased from the first to the fifth, and the number of words per letter increased from approximately 50 words per letter to 75 words per letter. It appears that the linguistically synergistic communicative processes employed in this study are reflected in the increased sophistication and communicative nature of these writings.

The data revealed the importance of including the sociocultural tenants in the classroom, emphasizing that reading, writing, speaking, and listening are all a part of the same phenomenon. Together they strengthen and support each other.

The purpose of this paper was to examine and reflect on the visual social research method of photovoice, which is a qualitative research process increasingly being used by government and nongovernment organizations to enable participants who are often from disadvantaged groups, to capture their lives, experiences, and issues through photos and associated written stories. Visual methods such as photovoice provide both opportunities and risks with ethical considerations and concerns that are both ethical in nature for those taking the photographs, and for those in the photographs. There are also associated ethical challenges for researchers to conform to ethical guidelines, while conveying stories that are in the public interest. Ascertaining why visual information should be considered in relation to ethics can be argued as important, as the receiver processing the visual information will process, perceive, and respond in a variety of ways, and possibly in different ways to what the sender aimed to convey. It was argued here that due to the strong ethical guidelines for photovoice projects, it is more of a deontological-based research approach. A key ethical concern associated with photovoice is that it is touted to participants as a vehicle to achieve social change, yet there is no guarantee that this change will occur, as ultimate power rests in the hands of decision makers. Photovoice ethical processes were discussed, with reflections by the author on ethical issues that have occurred in her own research, and suggestions to organizations on what to consider to ensure a photovoice project proceeds with ethical consideration to ensure an empowering experience as an influencer for social change.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a study of support received by 60 young adults who experienced sexual, physical or emotional abuse and neglect in childhood. It is focussed on the support provided by friends in particular, and draws out relevant learning for child sexual exploitation (CSE).

In all, 60 young people completed a questionnaire, complemented by a two hour follow-up interview to explore experiences of formal and informal support in disclosing abuse. In total, 13 young people were recruited on the basis of their prior participation in a larger, associated study of child abuse and neglect, with the remainder recruited via open invitation.

There is rich information in the interviews about the ways that friends provided support to participants. Friends provided practical, moral and emotional support. They intervened to keep their friends safe. They offered emotional “escape” and a conduit to adults who could help keep them safe. Importantly, friends recognised that participants were in distress even when they did not know the participants were being abused.

The results highlight that friends have a crucial role to play in helping children to keep safe and to feel safe, provided that they are equipped with information and knowledge of how to respond and where to seek help.

The paper is original in considering the role of friends within a community safety framework. In addition, the study sample is larger than other studies of its kind, and considers a wider variety of child maltreatment experiences than previous studies, making clear links to CSE.

The literature on academic international research teams (AIRTs) has drawn conclusions and made recommendations based on cross-sectional “snapshots” of the research team process – observations made prior to the conclusion of the research project. Several large-scale AIRTs have now evolved through a life cycle including result-related publications. We evaluate and extend the literature using a project life cycle perspective, in which each stage exhibits different challenges and opportunities that influence the quality, reliability and validity of the final research output and the overall viability of the knowledge-creation project. We conclude with recommendations for the effective management of AIRTs and, indeed, perhaps all multinational, globally distributed teams engaged in both basic and applied knowledge creation.