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To explain how cumulative efforts contribute to learning and literacy development.

A representation of how efforts lead to lasting growth is discussed through a variety of historical and current perspectives across content disciplines. This chapter includes depictions of how positive experiences can promote further success and recognizing one’s cumulative efforts and the effects from those are fundamental to educational attainment.

The value one places on tasks such as reading or writing is often aligned to the frequency with which those events occur. Students view their time and effort as capital; they are students’ most valued possessions, and how they allocate these commodities is a choice.

For students to become avid readers and writers, we must utilize a host of strategies to impress the notion that these activities are worth their attention, time, and investment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the sonic vibrations, infectious rhythms and alternative frequencies that are often unheard and overlooked within mainstream educational spaces, that is, perceptually coded out of legibility by those who read/see/hear the world through “whiteness.”

“Plugging into” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) posthuman theories of affect (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Henriques, 2010) and assemblage (Weheliye, 2014), the author argues that “literate bodies,” along with all forms of matter, continually vibrate, move, swell and rebel (Deleuze, 1990), creating momentum that is often difficult not to get tangled up in.

This paper maps out how a specific sociohistorical concept of sound works to affectively orient bodies and impact student becomings, namely, by producing students as un/successful readers and in/human subjects. At the same time, the author attends to the subtle ways by which first graders rebelliously move (d) with alternative sonic frequencies to resist/disrupt mandated literacy curricula and white, patriarchal ways of knowing, being and doing.

This paper highlights the political nature of sound and how, within mainstream educational spaces, certain sonic frequencies become coded out of white supremacist models for knowledge transmission, which re/produce racialized (gendered, classist, etc.) habits and practices of listening/hearing. Literacy educators are invited to “(re)hear” the social in more just ways (James, 2020) by sensing the affects and effects of more-than-human “sonic bodies” (Henriques, 2011), which redirect us to alternative rhythms, rationalities, habits and practices that challenge normative conceptions of what counts as literacy and who counts as successfully literate.

This study looks at the development of critical literacy for three pre-service teacher participants, relevant support systems, and pedagogies. It considers how pre-service teacher participants construct knowledge on critical literacy within the methods course. The participants started with their own literacy histories in order to began developing internalization and critical consciousness within the methods and field experience course. Throughout the course, the participants took social action by using some of the critical literacy approaches that were presented as instructional strategies in the methods course. However, the participants were still internalizing two essential components of critical pedagogy in their own teaching: problem posing and dialogue. They acknowledged the value of problem posing and dialogue in their own learning but had some difficulty using these methods in their own teaching. The implications from this study suggest that teacher educators and future teachers take a stance on critical education and push for structural changes in common teaching practices and school curriculum mandates.

To explain how an innovative practice-based approach to teacher preparation called the Adaptive Cycles of Teaching utilizes video reflection as part of multiple cycles of teaching across high impact literacy practices.

The faculty research team adopted a design-based research approach to develop and test the ACT model through iterations of design, implementation, analysis, and redesign. The chapter outlines the curriculum and findings from the initial iteration of design.

Teacher candidates experiencing the ACT model developed a strong knowledge of core literacy practices and were able to implement them with children. They continued to need additional scaffolding with respect to the quality of their instructional discourse and the gradual release of responsibility.

Continued research on the ACT model will allow us to refine the ways in which video use can enable preservice teachers to reflect and analyze their teaching and learning.

Learning to teach in ways that are academically, linguistically and culturally responsive to diverse learners in today’s schools is a complex and challenging endeavor for novice and experienced teachers. In recent years, educators in schools and universities have been collaborating to create more powerful ways for prospective and practicing teachers to explore and develop what some call “best practice” in teaching and learning (Zemelman, Daniels & Hyde, 1993, 1998). Meanwhile, the advent of new technologies has provided exciting opportunities to invent innovative ways to document, explore and enhance our understanding of teaching as a professional practice. Many educators have written about the rich potential of hypermedia to document the everyday work in which teachers engage – curriculum development, planning, teaching, assessment and reflection – in ways that preserve the highly contextualized and situated nature of teaching practice (Lacey & Merseth, 1993; Lampert & Ball, 1998; Spiro & Jehng, 1990). Video clips of classroom teaching and artifacts associated with it (e.g. student work, the teacher’s reflections, planning documents, district curriculum) can be accessed by computer in flexible, non-linear ways. Moreover, the use of hypermedia materials affords opportunities for novice and experienced teachers to engage together in taking an inquiring stance to investigate practice and to generate new understandings and insights that can inform future practices (Lampert & Ball, 1999). Lacey and Merseth (1993) argued that hypermedia is a curricular innovation that addresses “three currently held beliefs about teaching and learning to teach: namely, that teaching is complex and context-dependent; that engaging in the construction of knowledge about teaching is a powerful way to learn it; and that learning to teach can be greatly enhanced by participation in a community of inquiry” (p. 547).

The purpose of this New Zealand study is to analyse the influence of the literacy course from an initial teacher education degree, to support beginning teachers to view themselves as policy actors, not mere policy subjects. In our role as teacher educators, we sought to support beginning teachers to find freedom within the constraints of official literacy policy to include multiliteracies.

Using de Certeau’s dialectic of strategies and tactics, the authors critically analysed the influence of the literacy course. The data included an assignment from the literacy course, an end-of-literacy course survey and a follow-up interview six months into their first teaching position with a group of five beginning primary school teachers.

The findings shed light on our apparent inability to support beginning teachers to see themselves as policy actors/subjects. The analysis reveals the beginning teachers’ tactical responses to our strategies intended to position them as policy actors. The analysis also illustrates how the tactics the authors deployed were viewed as strategies by the beginning teachers, ironically further solidifying the literacy policy they had sought to critique and destabilise and (re)positioning them as policy subjects.

de Certeau’s framework supported the illumination of the complex interplay of strategies and tactics deployed by ourselves and beginning teachers as the authors sought to support them to identify the freedoms within the constraints of official literacy policy. Any future attempt to develop beginning teachers as policy actors/subjects will benefit from the careful examination of the strategies and tactics at play in initial teacher education.

The Library Business Corners (LBC) service for entrepreneurs in the Western Cape of South Africa uses public libraries as a channel for information and expertise. It is a “grass roots”, community‐driven, approach which has been adopted elsewhere in South Africa. Similar services have appeared addressing the same, or similar, groups of users, often concentrating on the use of information and communication technology.

Developing an effective service for entrepreneurs depends critically on the quality of staff and their contacts. The opportunities and problems of the LBCs’ approach are identified and a response to the emergence of similar services is considered. The “balanced score card” model is used to explore the vision and strategy of the present services and the potential contribution of information literacy.

Financial support for LBC work is scarce and unlikely to increase. The challenge is to create a sustainable service by the LBC team as points of presence, using the existing or reduced financial base. Concentration on increasing capacity at the point of delivery of information through knowledge of the business environment and information literacy is essential.

The paper describes the first application of the “balanced score card” technique to a public library business information service in South Africa.

To examine how reading in electronic formats differs from traditional reading of print.

Concepts about digital print are discussed alongside research studies in fields related to multisensory technologies and electronic means of communication. A model of online reading is proposed integrating aspects of information foraging theory. Pedagogical applications are needed to integrate e-reading theory within classrooms.

With the varied text structures, directionality concerns, and interactive text features, our attention must turn to the theoretical foundations that underpin digital literacy learning today. Online foraging schemes can explain how information is sought and retrieved when reading new information from digital mediums.

Teachers must address the current, digital literacy needs of their students, thus preparing them for challenges in the 21st century. Varying text structures within digital formats as well as providing as-needed facilitation are the scaffolds that students need today. Using technologies such as digital games, tools, and contexts advances the mission of resource-based teaching and learning.