Search results

The purpose of this paper is to report on how early years practitioners worked with the ORIM Framework to support work with parents to promote early literacy experiences.

Co-produced Knowledge Exchange (KE) was used to develop and evaluate work with parents to facilitate their young children’s literacy. Information was gathered in discussion groups, interviews with parents and practitioners and feedback from all the parties involved.

Practitioners and families engaged with each other in the further development of an established literacy programme, and families demonstrated “ownership” of the co-produced knowledge after the end of the project.

Project design in co-produced research and KE is necessarily flexible. The focus is on practitioners’ knowledge and ownership of the process, sharing knowledge with parents and enhancing children’s experiences.

Practices that can enhance parental engagement in their children’s early literacy are varied and multiple and ORIM can be used flexibly to plan, develop and evaluate innovative and community – (and family –) specific practices.

Where parents have more knowledge of children’s early literacy development they are in a better position to support them; for learning communities there are implications in terms of future development of work with families to support early literacy development.

This paper contributes an original approach to the co-production of research with early years practitioners. It also identifies specific issues around the ethics of ownership in co-produced research.

Early literacy and numeracy development among children may be the best measure of a child's well-being. The purpose of this research was to examine the impact of child factors, quality of care and household factors, and community factors in early childhood on the development of literacy and numeracy skills of children in Bangladesh.

For this study, the authors used data from Bangladesh's 2019 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. The association between response variables and selected covariates was examined using the chi-square test. To determine the risk factors for early child literacy and numeracy development, the authors applied two-level logistic regression models.

Among the total of under five children (n = 9,449), in general, 29.1% of the children were growing in the development early childhood literacy and numeracy in Bangladesh. Children (36–47 months), male children, children with moderate stunting, children with severe and moderate underweight status, mothers without education and primary education, and mothers from the poorest, poorer, middle and richer households were less likely than their counterparts to develop children's early literacy and numeracy skills. In contrast, women from the eastern and central regions, children who read at least 3 books, and early childhood education had higher odds of children's literacy and numeracy skills development than their counterparts.

The results from this study suggest that children's, community, quality of care and household level significant factors should be considered when trying to improve children's literacy and numeracy skills development in Bangladesh.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how public libraries have been instrumental in early child school literacy teaching and learning. Most African public schools do not usually afford enough core textbooks and supplementary readers.

This was a qualitative case study in Western Kenya amongst public library staff members, public primary school teachers and parents of library children clients. The following questions were addressed: What is the book situation in public primary schools in the study site? What school-type literacy-related services are offered by the sampled public library? and What are library staff members’, teachers’ and parents’ feelings about the public library services offered? Observations, interviews and document studies were used to collect data. Data were analysed thematically.

Public schools do not have enough core textbooks and the situation is worse for supplementary readers; the public library branch studied offers critical school-type literacies to school children both at the library building as well as at public schools registered with it; and library staff members, teachers, and parents express positive feelings about the services offered.

This was a case study whose findings might not apply to the larger situation and the study did not confirm actual literacy benefits of the library services amongst school children by, for instance, conducting literacy tests. The findings are, however, an index to the possible situation in the macro context.

The relevant stakeholders should find ways of co-opting public libraries as associates of public schools in literacy teaching. This relationship is not straight forward in Kenya.

The findings reported are from original research.

Set in a Mexican-American community of a US Gulf Coast state, the purpose of this paper was to describe how three young siblings and their family members constructed their spiritual, ethnic and communicative identities within the context of a virtual family literacy program during COVID-19.

This project was approached as an illustrative case study that focused on one family’s engagement with a children’s book in which the protagonists retell the legend of the Catholic patroness of the Americas, Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The case study illustrates how the children's spiritual/religious identities were inseparably intertwined with their home literacy practices and their identities as communicators with others. The children’s everyday spiritual/religious practices, routines and activities motivated familial conversations and dialogue that engage and support children’s literacy development.

Although there is a large corpus of scholarship about secular early literacy program for families with preschool children, there are few that describe the recognition and inclusion of families’ spiritual/religious identities.

This paper aims to propose a reading of children’s small toy/puppet play that takes account of bodily movements within classroom assemblages. The researcher/author created representations of episodes of activity that focused on children’s ongoing bodily movements as they followed their interests in one Early Years classroom in England.

By drawing a contrast between a traditional logocentric interpretation of puppet play and an embodied theorisation, this paper provides a way of understanding young children’s literacy practices where these are seen as generated through bodily movement and affective atmospheres within classroom assemblages.

Analysis suggests that affective atmospheres were produced by the speed, slowness, dynamics and stillnesses of children’s hand movements as they manipulated the small toys/puppets. Three interrelated contributions are made that generate further understandings of embodied meaning making. First, this paper theorises relations between hand movements, materials and affective atmospheres within classroom assemblages. Second, the technique of analysing still shots of hand movements offers a way of understanding the semiotic and affective salience of hand movement and stillness. Finally, the paper offers a methodology for re-examining taken-for-granted pedagogical practices such as puppet play.

Together these contributions re-explore literacy as an embodied and affective endeavour, thereby countering logocentric framings of early literacy.

The purpose of this paper is to show how different approaches to information literacy, such as are mediated through web‐based tutorials, are used as tools in negotiating the information‐seeking expertise of university librarians.

A textual analysis of 31 web‐based Scandinavian tutorials for information literacy has been conducted. The similarities and differences identified are analysed as linguistic expressions of different approaches to information literacy. The approaches are seen as constructions based on a dialogue between the empirical data and the theoretical departure points.

Four approaches to information literacy emerge in the results: a source approach, a behaviour approach, a process approach, and a communication approach. The approaches entail different perspectives on information literacy. They impart diverging understandings of key concepts such as “information”, “information seeking” and the “user”.

A reflective awareness of different approaches to information literacy is important for both researchers and LIS practitioners, since the approaches that come into play have practical consequences for the operation of user education.

The present study supplements the information literacy research field by combining empirical findings with theoretical reflections.

In a fast-moving world where technology has become intertwined with our daily lives, meaning information is available at our fingertips, information overload (Khabsa and Giles, 2014) is just one of many challenges that this technological overhaul has presented for learners from the primary classroom up to studies within higher education (HE). This paper aims to present skills needed by both pupils and students to navigate their information journey, and discusses how educators can support the acquisition and development of these skills.

Drawing on key literature in the fields of education and academia through the process of systematic review and adopting the analogy of a journey to represent lifelong learning, this bipartite paper explores how both primary school pupils and university students are required to access information in their very own information journeys in this “Information Age”.

The similarities and differences between child and adult learners are considered. This paper shares practical strategies for promoting the smarter use of information – and a shorter journey – for these “travelers” along the way. This paper essentially aims to raise questions in the minds of educators as they help to prepare their learners to learn.

This paper offers an interesting insight for teachers and lecturers as the crossover between two sets of learners, primary-age pupils and students in HE, is considered in terms of how we, as educators, can help to provide more effective and efficient information journeys, and therefore promote successful learning. A five-stage model is presented for the information journey.

Critical literacy foregrounds the relationship between language and power by focusing on how texts work and in whose interests (Luke, 2012, p. 5). It is highlighted as an “important skill” within Scotland’s national educational framework for 3-18 year olds, the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), yet, as this paper aims to show, what the concept means is far from clear for policy users (Scottish Government, 2009e).

Using a lens that draws from critical discourse analysis, critical content analysis (Luke, 2001; Beach et al., 2009; Fairclough, 2010) and Ball’s method of policy analysis (2015), the authors find that the term “critical literacy” has been applied incoherently within key CfE documentation, including the frequent conflation of critical literacy with critical reading and critical thinking.

The authors argue that the CfE’s use of “critical literacy” is a misnomer, given that the version presented is an amalgamation of literacy-related competences drawing largely from psychological and not socio-political perspectives of literacy.

This is a missed opportunity, given the Scottish Government’s stated commitment to social justice in policy terms (Scottish Executive, 2000; Scottish Government, 2016), not forgetting the powerful benefits that a critically literate stance could bring to Scotland’s learners at this time of communicative change and challenge.

While the authors offer a contextualized view of the ways in which the term “critical literacy” has been incorporated into Scottish educational policy, they propose that its implications go beyond national boundaries.

The purpose of this paper was to highlight ways two novice secondary English teachers negotiated the politics of college and career readiness along with the literacy needs of students, in the age of accountability.

This three-year longitudinal qualitative case study focused on two participants in English teacher preparation and their first two years in the classroom.

The findings focus on participants’ definitions of college and career readiness as it pertains to their English Language Arts classrooms. Next, the focus is on two themes: tensions these novice teachers experienced as they attempted to build classrooms focused on postsecondary readiness, and the ways in which they worked to bridge the gap between their definitions of college and career readiness and the realities of their classrooms.

Connections among high stakes testing environments, postsecondary readiness and literacy teacher education are important to the field. Studying the experiences of novice teachers can fill a present gap at the intersection of these concepts.

Curriculum in teacher education should introduce standards, as well as provide a platform for negotiating and critiquing them. Three focus areas to help pre-service teachers mitigate tensions between minimum skills assessments, college readiness and literacy are personal experience, collaboration and reflective partnerships.

There has been little to no research done on the tensions between preparing all students to be college and career ready and the minimum skills based priorities that govern many school systems and its impact on novice teachers. This classroom reality is important to literacy teacher education.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the writing development of Hong Kong kindergarten students over 12 months. They attended 18 kindergartens territory-wide and were followed from June 2002 to June 2003 for the collection of three waves of teacher-rated data at six-month intervals.

First, the construct validity of the translated and culturally adapted version of Morrow’s (2012) checklist which assesses writing development was confirmed, considering that the students attended Hong Kong kindergartens who wrote in the Chinese language. The multilevel analysis, which employed corrected measures captured through Wolfe and Chiu’s (1999a, 1999b) five-step Rasch scaling method for a common frame of reference, estimated the effects of the factors, namely, student age, gender, class level and schools.

The children’s progress over the second six months was also apparently much smaller than the first SIX months for this cohort. The dramatic slow-down in the second six-month period for both cohorts might be partly attributed to the peculiar arrangement of schooling at that time.

The recommendation from this study is that random sampling and student test scores on writing need to be taken for the identification of the general trend of young children’s writing development in Hong Kong, as well as other Chinese communities alike.

The profile of the student’s emergent writing development at each six-month follow-up and over the 12 months was explored. Differences between the groups based on age, gender, class level and school in terms of student writing development on average were statistically significant.