Not just ‘what works’ but ‘what else’ in literacy education

11 October 2022

Cathy Burnett

As I explored in a post at the end of May, the Schools’ White Paper adopts a particular stance on what ‘counts’ as evidence. I argued that it’s important not to discount evidence that doesn’t fit this mould but which could be highly relevant to teachers.

The importance of engaging with a range of research was very much on my mind in early July when I attended the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) annual international conference in Birmingham. The conference included over 100 presentations by teachers, researchers, teacher educators, librarians, literacy charities and many others from across the UK and overseas. These featured a vast array of topics, themes and research methodologies. The UKLA conference is always an inspiring and stimulating event not least because of its warm, inclusive atmosphere that makes it possible to exchange ideas, engage in genuinely critical dialogue and explore possibilities with colleagues with diverse experience and perspectives. This year, it provided plenty of opportunity to reflect on why it is useful for teachers and schools to encounter a range of research on different topics and drawing on varied methodologies.

Petra Vackova and I were there to share initial findings from Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education and really valued the chance to discuss the early stages of our project with delegates. In this post, however, I want to reflect on two fascinating and thought-provoking presentations I attended, both of which were funded by UKLA Research Grants.

Dr Lauran Doak from Nottingham Trent University analysed what happened when she invited five children and young people (aged 6-16) with learning disabilities to engage with Pictello, an iPad app, to create multimodal stories using a combination of photo, text, video, and audio-recording. Each family was given twelve weeks to explore the app in any way which seemed engaging to their child. Dr Doak described a variety of ways in which stories were created. Through doing so, she not only explored the possible value of such activities to children and families but also argued that we need to recognise the contribution made by children to these stories as a form of authorship.

Dr Michelle Cannon, Dr Sara Hawley and Dr Theo Bryer from UCL reported on a project in which they collaborated with children in an inner London primary school to develop a Year 6 play which integrated digital animation into the narrative and set design of a more conventionally structured production. Through their presentation they highlighted embodied, affective aspects of children’s meaning making and also the detailed, careful work of children in creating animations. They emphasised the importance of attending not just to what children produce but to the processes they go through, and highlighted the role of ongoing review as a means of developing compositions and refining skills.

Together these two presentations raised important questions about how we understand authorship and composition and about what count as texts in the literacy curriculum. They both suggested that, if children are given supported and sustained opportunities to use digital media as part of literacy provision, not only might they gain opportunities to engage purposefully, creatively and critically with a range of texts in their current and future lives, but we would also expand opportunities for all children to express their thoughts, experiences and ideas.

I can’t begin to do justice to either project here except to say that each generated subtle nuanced findings that I know would be of interest to teachers in thinking about the opportunities available for children to communicate their experience and develop their ideas.

What is clear however is that neither of these studies would meet the criteria for inclusion in the kind of systematic review that is often used to support recommendations for evidence-based practice. They are small in scale and exploratory in nature. And yet both studies, I suggest, provide ‘evidence’ for teachers and schools to reflect upon. Fine-grained descriptions generated through rigorous analysis provide important insights into what children and young people achieved in the context of these projects. They also prompt serious questions about the range of opportunities we offer for children to make meanings using diverse media, about how we conceive literacy, about the time and resources we make available, and about how we support children to articulate and build on what they do. 

‘Evidence’ as it is understood in the White Paper (if approached critically) can provide useful information to support pedagogical choices and resourcing decisions in relation to the existing curriculum. But we do need to recognise that there are many aspects of literacy for which such evidence just isn’t available. And importantly we need to complement these kinds of evidence with other kinds – such as the qualitative evidence from these two small-scale studies – that raise questions about the range and scope of the curriculum and which could help us articulate how children create and compose, and what seems to matter as they do so. This kind of evidence may help us gain a deeper understanding of what might ‘work’ for individual children. It also invites us to think about ‘what else’ might be important in literacy education. As Gert Biesta (2020) has argued for many years, we need to draw on educational research to do more than identify ‘what works.’ We can also draw on research to expand our ideas about what – and who – literacy education might need to work for.If we focus only on evidence-based teaching that charts the impact of specific approaches using existing measures, then we risk getting stuck in a spiral that prevents us from seeing what else might be important.

With this in mind, I have conducted a scoping review that attempts to map the range of literacy research that might be relevant to literacy education in primary schools. I shall be writing more about this in future blogs and providing a summary but for now the review can be accessed here.

Reference

Biesta G. (2020). Educational Research: An unorthodox introduction. London: Bloomsbury.