Session Information
31 SES 02, Reading, Literature and Digital Language Learning in the Classroom
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper deals with the aims and rationale for participating in literature projects in schools, and gives special focus to a specific group of students, who attends schools at detention homes for young people. The study investigates the justification behind a literature project in schools at these detention homes as a way to examine how risk and deficiency are produced in the identification of students in need of literacy/literature. Axiomatic truths about the value of reading and of literature does not only construct what a person will gain from engaging with the reading of literature but also what the person put at risk by not doing so. This raises questions about what the lacks and needs are that need to be fixed and fulfilled with literature?
The study elucidates how this specific group of students and their problems are constructed in the documents guiding the reading project and examines the relation between the legitimation of reading literature and the intended learner, what lacks and needs the legitimation produce and, given this, what identities of the student, the school, the institution and of reading that are enacted.
The pedagogic interests of the study are primarily two central aspects of education; what educational content, in this case literature, is expected to entailand who the intended learner is, that is, how a specific group of students are constructed in relation to the construction of reading literature.
Literacy pedagogy is expected to play an important part in educating students to full and equitable social participation (The New London Group, 1996; Jewitt 2008, Vasudevan & Campano 2009) especially since pupil’s and student’s lack of literacy skills has been a topic of political and pedagogic discussion in many Europeans countries as well as in the EU Commission of late (European Commission 2008; Wahlström 2014). The intended outcome of reading literature is expected to provide something more than the actual content of what is read, although literacy policy and standardized curricula are often permeated by discourses of student and family deficiency (Vasudevan & Campano 2009; Gutierrez 2001).
The rationales for reading position the learners more or less far from the goals or effects that are in aim and invokes questions about the marginalizing effects that the rationales themselves might have for certain students. It also raises questions about what literature is in these rationales. What is reading?
The detention homes in focus of the study receive young people with psychosocial and/or substance misuse problems and who show tendencies towards criminal behavior. A large amount of these students have a problematic school history, for example, 50 per cent have had continuous remedial teaching, 45 per cent have been suspended from school for longer periods of time, and most of the students have incomplete school reports (Hugo, 2013). The reason for placing the study in this specific setting is not only that this is an educational space where questions about democracy and education are brought to its head, but also because literacy and literature are emphasized as important educational content in this setting (Svensson et al 2009).
The study draws on theories about Literacy (New London Group 1996; Gee 2000; Gee 2015; Clarke 2002). and Critical Literacy (Janks 2013; Simpson & White 2013; Luke & Carrington 2002;), about what counts as literacy and what it means to be literate and also about the social and political agency that comes from being literate.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Barton, David, Hamilton, Mary & Ivanic, Roz (1999). Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. London: Routledge. Clarke, Julia (2002). ‘A new kind of symmetry. Actor-network theories and the new literacy studies’. Studies in the Education of Adults. 34(2). Cope, Bill & Kalantzis, Mary (Eds.). (2000). Multiliteracies. Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge. European Commission (2008). ‘Improving Competences for the 21st Century: an agenda for European cooperation on schools’. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee of the Regions. COM (2008) 425. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. Fenwick, Tara & Edwards, Richard (2010). Actor-Network Theory in Education. London and New York: Routledge. Fenwick, Tara & Edwards, Richard (Eds). (2012). Researching Education through Actor-Network Theory, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Gee, James Paul (2000). Teenagers in new times: A new literacy studies perspective. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 43(5). Gee, James Paul (2014). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. Theory and Method. London and New York: Routledge. Gee, James Paul (2015). Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. London and New York: Routledge. Gutierrez, Kris D (2001). Smoke and Mirrors: Language policy and educational reform. In Larsen, Joanne (Ed.) Literacy as snake oil: Beyond the quick fix. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. Hugo, Martin (2013). Meningsfullt lärande i skolverksamheten på särskilda ungdomshem. Statens institutionsstyrelse, forskningsrapport nr 1. Janks, Hilary (2013). ‘Critical literacy in teaching and research’. Education Inquiry, 4(2). Jewitt, Carey (2008). ‘Multimodality and Literacy in School Classrooms’. Review of Research in Education, 32. Latour, Bruno (2007) Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press Law, John (2004). After Method. Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge. Mol, Annemarie (2002). The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham and London: Duke University Press. New London Group (1996). ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures’. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1). Simpson, Alyson & Whyte, Simone (Eds.). (2013). Language, Literacy & Literature. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Vasudevan, Lalitha & Campano, Gerald (2009). The Social Production of Adolescent Risk and the Promise of Adolescent Literacies. Review of Reseach in Education, 33. Wahlström Ninni (2014). ‘Equity: policy rhetoric or a matter of meaning of knowledge? Towards a Framework for Tracing the ‘Efficiency-Equity’ Doctrine in Curriculum Documents’. European Educational Research Journal, 13(6).
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