The Writing Practices of Technical Vocational Teachers in a discoursive perspective
Author(s):
Ellen Beate Hellne-Halvorsen (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2015
Format:
Paper

Session Information

02 SES 02 B, Reflections on Vocational Teachers' Professional Development

Paper Session

Time:
2015-09-08
15:15-16:45
Room:
324. [Main]
Chair:
Ludger Deitmer
Discussant:
Trine Deichman-Sørensen

Contribution

The theme of my presentation is the writing practices of vocational education and training teachers (VET-teachers) in upper secondary school in Norway. According to the Norwegian School system, and the latest reform from 2006, (The Knowledge Promotion -13 years), all teachers have to work with basic skills, among others writing skills, in their subjects in school. The focus is on VET teachers in school context in selected vocational education and training programmes; Design, Arts and Crafts, Health and Social Care and Technical and Industrial Production. Training writing skills and writing activities traditionally has been regarded as less important comparing to vocational work practice. VET-teachers don’t regard as their main task to work and develop writing skills to their students, but all have the more or less the same opinion that writing competence is important in work life. The research questions are: What explain the attitude of teachers for not including writing in their subjects? How do other, more abstract elements as culture and traditions, influence their attitude and practices towards writing? The discourse theory of J.P. Gee will be used to lightened these questions and theme. In Technical and vocational education, there are different teachers with different background and traditions, belonging to different cultures. Discourse analysis and theory will be used to identify different communities of meaning and attitude towards writing practices in school, or secondary discourses in Gee term.   

Method

The research represents a sociocultural approach to writing, and can be placed under the broad Anglo-American research area on literacy, The New Literacy Studies. This means for this study to consider writing as a social practices. The study is a qualitative research study, using methods as to different kinds of interviews and classroom observations of VET-teachers training and teaching. Recordings (interview) and note taking did the collection of data. Add to this, I have also analyzed documents as curricula in different subjects. The analysis is based on more or less predefined sociocultural categories, both within more general social and cultural approach to writing, and also by using some of the categories or tools developed within discourse analysis. This means that the categories are theoretical based categories.

Expected Outcomes

The main outcomes will be to lighten VET-teachers strongly belonging to their subjects and to the competence aims of curriculum. Their writing practices included and integrated in subject training and teaching, indicate relatively tight boundaries between different discourses in the school context. VET-teachers are not very positive and they do not consider as their task to work and develop students´ writing competences. They seem not to care very much about bad or lack of writing competences of their students. One reasons can be tight boundaries between discourses or meaning communities, which make cooperation between teachers of different subjects very difficult.

References

Barton, D. (2007). Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language (Second ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Barton, D., & Hammilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated Literacies: Reading and writing in Context (pp. 7-16). London and New York: Routledge. Bloome, D., & Bailey, F. M. (1992). Studying Language and Literacy through Events, Particularity, and Intertextuality. In R. Beach, J. L. Green, M. L. Kamil & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Literacy Research (pp. 181-214). Urbana, Illinois: National Conference on Research in English. Brandt, D. (2001). Sponsors of Literacy. In E. Cusham, E. R. Kintgen, B. M. Kroll & M. Rose (Eds.), Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook (pp. 555-571). Boston and New York: Bedford/St.Martin´s. Brandt, D., & Clinton, K. (2002). Limits of the local: Expanding perspectives on literacies as a socila practice. Journal of Literacy Research, 337-356. Gee, J. P. (2005). An introduction to Discourse analysis: theory and method (Second ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Gee, J. P. (2008). Social lingvistics and literacies: Ideology in Discourses (Third ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Gee, J. P. (2011). How to do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit. New York and London: Routledge. Hamilton, M. (2000). Expanding The New Literacy Studies: Using Photographs to explore literacy as social practice. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated Literacies (pp. 16-34). London and New York: Routledge. Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice (1995 ed.): Cambridge University Press. Street, B. (2001). The New Literacy Studies. In E. Cusham, E. R. Kintgen, B. M. Kroll & M. Rose (Eds.), Literacy. A Critical Sourcebook. Boston and New York: Bedfors / St. Martin's. Street, B. (2003). The limits of the Local-´Autonomous´ or ´Disembedding´? International Journal of Learning, 10, 2825-2830.

Author Information

Ellen Beate Hellne-Halvorsen (presenting / submitting)
Oslo and Akershus University Colllege of Applied Sciences
Department of vocational Teacher Education
Oslo

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