creative practices – Research Mobilities in Primary Literacy Education

December 2023

Gill Adams, Parinita Shetty, Cathy Burnett

Since the field of primary literacy research in England (and elsewhere) brings together so many different communities, we are constantly looking for creative new ways to communicate our research findings to diverse audiences. In this podcast episode, Layla Gharib talks to Cathy about how she visualised the findings of a scoping review of literacy research that Cathy produced.

About a year and a half into the project, when we’d generated data on teachers’ encounters with research in primary literacy and were deeply engaged in analysis, we wanted to work with an artist to represent the complexity of teachers’ encounters with research and the way these were entangled in their work and their personal lives. We were fortunate that Lo Tierney was able to take on this work.

Continue reading Reflections on working with an artist

June 29, 2022

Julia Gillen

creative practices, International research, Literacy, reading, social justice, Teachers

I’ve been fortunate in the last couple of months to gain insights into endeavours that share with our project an interest in bridging primary literacy research and practice.

On 3^rd May I attended a virtual event coordinated by Dr Shelley Stagg Peterson of the University of Toronto and hosted by Dr Rachel Heydon, Western University, Canada, entitled, “Building Bridges between Literacy Research and Practice: diverse perspectives.” I thought this an extremely worthwhile, inspirational and rich event and so quote its description:

“We are teachers and teacher educators with many decades of experience teaching young children to read and write. We bring diverse perspectives on the roles of oral language, phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, critical literacy, multimodal texts, comprehension, motivation, writing and spelling to literacy learning. We wish to support teachers in continuing to provide equitable literacy learning environments to ensure that all students receive the instruction they deserve. The goal of our presentation is to provide evidence from our classrooms on ways to bridge the science of reading-based recommendations of the Right to Read Inquiry’s report with research on literacy teaching and learning.”

Continue reading Glimpsing bridges between primary literacy research and practice on distant shores