Session Information
99 ERC SES 05 E, Language and Education
Paper Session
Contribution
As practitioner-researcher working in Post-16 vocational education with 16-19 year olds and their teachers, my research aims to understand the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of literacy embedding. ‘Embedding’ is the deliberate teaching of literacy objectives as an integrated element of the vocational curriculum, and is found to produce enormous benefits for students’ vocational and skills qualification achievement when carried out effectively (Casey et al., 2006).
The last national embedding policy ended in 2011 with the discontinuation of the Skills for Life strategy (England and Wales). Since then, along with a decade of funding challenges, literacy embedding has been sidelined in favour of the 2014 GCSE English re-sit policy; GCSEs are end-of secondary school academic qualifications. The aim of this policy is to push as many students over the GCSE English pass-line as possible. This is a laudable aim, but unfortunately, there is little evidence that the policy produces literacy learning which students can transfer to their vocational subjects (Verhoeven, 2022). Vocational subject teachers comment that their students lack the literacy skills to do well in their courses, but that the teachers themselves lack the knowledge to support their students. With scant resources in post-16 education now focused on the GCSE English re-sit, embedding knowledge developed during the Skills for Life years may have been lost.
These suppositions are anecdotal – the last large-scale study into post-16 literacy embedding was conducted during the Skills for Life years in 2006 with the Casey et al. report. Skills for Life was an excellent starting point, but did not conceptualise literacy in terms of vocational epistemologies. There is compelling theoretical and empirical research which finds that subject epistemologies are directly related to text structures. Genre theory and Disciplinary literacy research, informed by Functional Linguistics, reaches this conclusion (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012; Swales, 1990; Tardy, 2011). This suggests that students should be taught explicitly how to ‘analyse’, ‘evaluate’, and ‘compare’ along with associated text and syntactical structures.
My research attempts to break new ground by using this theoretical grounding to focus on vocational subject teacher development. There are international implications; Genre and Disciplinary Literacy research is currently applied to academic subjects, particularly in the USA and Australian contexts, but not yet, as far as I know, to vocational education and training. I am attempting to understand:
- What knowledge do vocational subject teachers need to do embedding?
- How can teachers be supported to develop this knowledge?
In this vein, my research is informed by the teacher knowledge frameworks proposed by Shulman (1986), and developed in relation to literacy by Carney and Indrisano (2013), as well as Clarke and Hollingsworth’s model of teacher change (2002).
My research will hopefully result in a dual-framework: 1) a curricular and pedagogical toolkit for teaching vocational subject genres; 2) a ‘schedule’ of teacher genre knowledge required to embed literacy, with suggested approaches for developing this knowledge. My ultimate intention is to produce practical and theoretical findings which will support students’ literacy development in the vocational education context. This work is driven by a social justice agenda. Known as the ‘Cinderella sector’, FE is under-researched and under-resourced (Atkins & Flint, 2015). Its students tend to come from socio-economically deprived backgrounds, and are more likely to drop out of university after one year and gain a lower class degree than their academic subject counterparts (Myhill et al., 2019). This is the vocational-academic dimension of the attainment gap. My research aims to address this particular form of inequality.
Method
Using one college as a case study, my research is based around a teacher-development project with a group of teacher participants, with whom I have been working as a literacy coach. Taking a critical auto-ethnographically orientated approach, this qualitative study treats the researcher (Rose) as an active participant of the research: I am 1) researcher (subject), 2) a research participant (object) and 3) a research instrument (means). This research is ‘critical’ in the sense that I am not just describing and analysing cultural practices, but attempting to shape them, using Genre theory to develop teachers’ beliefs and knowledge. My fieldwork took the form of a nine-month literacy coaching program in which I worked with seven teachers in one college. These teachers volunteered to work with me, agreeing to a range of teacher development activities: 1-1 dialogic coaching meetings, my observation of their lessons, group meetings, reciprocal (group) lesson observations, and co-planning & delivery of training workshops to other teachers. The coaching model I use is rooted in the principle of dialogic co-construction; practitioners develop understandings, beliefs and practices through a collaborative “professional knowledge-creating process” (Lofthouse et al., 2010, p. 29). However, I view constructionism critically in that there are objective realities related to the knowledge demands of qualifications and occupations. My fieldwork has produced data in the form of recorded coaching dialogues, lesson observation notes, teaching materials, images of students’ work, researcher reflections and fieldnote ‘jottings’. Along the way, I have conducted theoretical sampling by recruiting additional participants to explore various insights. I am now in the initial phase of analysing these data. Taking a grounded approach, I am using thematic open coding and analytical memos (Charmaz, 2006), having transcribed my recorded data. I am drawing on all the data sets, with the inclusion of qualification documentation such as exams, mark schemes and specifications, to produce my insights and findings. In terms of validity, I do not intend to generalise about the nature of teachers’ knowledge; my data indicate that teachers’ knowledge of genre is variable and spiky. However, I believe I can extrapolate on the various factors that influence teachers’ knowledge development from this case study.
Expected Outcomes
I am still in the early stages of analysis, yet my emergent findings point to difficulties and inconsistencies in how vocational subjects conceptualise their epistemologies. This seems to impede the effective teaching of functions such as ‘evaluate’, ‘analyse’ and ‘compare’ – functions which dictate text structures. My supposition is that vocational subject teachers work in an environment which is quite hostile to literacy embedding, and so struggle with the ‘what’ and ‘how’ knowledge requirements to teach these functions explicitly and systematically. My data suggest that a large amount of knowledge about genre is tacit for teachers; it is largely concealed from their active knowledge base, and is therefore not taught explicitly. In other words, students are performing functions such as ‘evaluate’, analyse’ and ‘compare’, but since they are not being taught these functions explicitly, students remain dependent on writing frames, and rarely learn to achieve these functions independently. This probably explains their relatively weak achievement at university. This suggests implications for in-service teacher training: rather than focusing solely on pedagogical development, as is often the case, CPD should also work on teachers’ curriculum knowledge development. My provisional findings support what critics of vocational ‘Learning Outcomes’ based qualifications theorise; that the Learning Outcomes model misunderstands knowledge, conceptualising it as atomised and ‘flat’ (Allais, 2014). Hopefully I can develop these theoretical understandings in terms of procedural knowledge (genre). On a more positive note, my data are producing some useful insights relating to the development of the dual-framework, which is one of my aims. I am in the process of developing a ‘schedule’ of genre-knowledge for teachers, which I will use to produce an embedding curricular and pedagogical framework.
References
Allais, S. (2014). Selling out education: National qualifications frameworks and the neglect of knowledge. In Selling Out Education: National Qualifications Frameworks and the Neglect of Knowledge. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-578-6 Atkins, L., & Flint, K. J. (2015). Nothing changes: Perceptions of vocational education in England. International Journal of Training Research, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/14480220.2015.1051344 Carney, M., & Indrisano, R. (2013). Disciplinary literacy and pedagogical content knowledge. Journal of Education, 193(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/002205741319300306 Casey, H., Cara, O., Eldred, J., Grief, S., Hodge, R., Ivanic, R., Jupp, T., Lopez, D., & McNeil, B. (2006). You wouldn’t expect a maths teacher to teach plastering ... embedding literacy, language and numeracy in post-16 vocational programmes - the impact on learning and achievement. In National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy, Institute of Education, University of London: London. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory : A practical guide through qualitative analysis. Sage Publications. Clarke, D., & Hollingsworth, H. (2002). Elaborating a model of teacher professional growth. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18(8). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0742-051X(02)00053-7 Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (1993). The powers of literacy : a genre approach to teaching writing. University of Pittsburgh Press. Lofthouse, R., Leat, D., & Towler, C. (2010). Coaching for teaching and learning : A practical guide for schools. Myhill, D., Banerjee, P., Herbert, D., Robinson, C., Kaniadakis, A., Lawson, H., Venner, S., Morris, R., Mackenzie, H., & Kinderkhedia, M. (2019). Transforming transitions : A HEFCE Catalyst Project. http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/collegeofsocialsciencesandinternationalstudies/education/research/transformingtransitions/TransformingTransitionsFinalReport.pdf Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2012). What is disciplinary literacy and why does it matter? . Topics in Language Disorders, 32(1), 7–18. Shulman, L. (1986). Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14. Swales, J. (1990). Genre Analysis : English in academic and research settings. Bell & Bain Ltd. Tardy, C. M. (2011). Genre analysis. In Ken Hyland & Brian Paltridge (Eds.), The Continuum compendium to discourse analysis (pp. 54–68). Continuum International Publishing Group. Verhoeven, B. (2022). The politics of GCSE English Language. English Today, 38(4). https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078421000110
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