11 October 2022<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Cathy Burnett<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n As I explored in a post at the end of May, the Schools\u2019 White Paper<\/u><\/a>\u00a0adopts a particular stance on what \u2018counts\u2019 as evidence. I argued that it\u2019s important not to discount evidence\u00a0that doesn\u2019t fit this mould but which could be highly relevant to teachers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n The importance of engaging with a range of research was very much on my mind in early July when I\u00a0attended the United <\/u>K<\/u>ingdom Literacy Association<\/u><\/a> (UKLA)\u00a0annual international conference in Birmingham. The conference included\u00a0over 100 presentations by teachers, researchers, teacher educators, librarians, literacy charities\u00a0and many others from across the UK and overseas.\u00a0These featured a vast array of topics, themes and research methodologies. The UKLA conference is always an inspiring and stimulating\u00a0event 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\u00a0useful for teachers and schools to encounter a range of research on different topics and drawing on varied methodologies.<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Petra Vackova and I were there to share initial findings from Research Mobilities in Pr<\/em>i<\/em>mary Literacy E<\/em>d<\/em>ucation<\/em> and really valued the chance to discuss the early stages of our project with\u00a0delegates. 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<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Dr <\/u>Lauran Doak<\/u><\/a>\u00a0from 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,\u00a0to create multimodal stories using a combination of photo, text, video, and audio-recording.\u00a0Each family was given twelve weeks to explore the app in any way which seemed engaging to their child.\u00a0Dr 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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Dr <\/u>Michelle Cannon<\/u><\/a>, Dr <\/u>Sara Hawley<\/u><\/a> and\u00a0Dr <\/u>Theo Bryer<\/u><\/a> from UCL reported on a project<\/u><\/a> 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.\u00a0Through their presentation they highlighted embodied, affective aspects of children\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n 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\u00a0supported and sustained opportunities to use digital media as part of literacy provision, not only might\u00a0they gain\u00a0opportunities 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<\/em>\u00a0children to express their thoughts, experiences and ideas.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n I can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n 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.\u00a0They are small in scale and\u00a0exploratory in nature. And yet both studies, I suggest, provide \u2018evidence\u2019 for teachers and schools to reflect upon.\u00a0Fine-grained descriptions generated through rigorous analysis provide important insights into what children and young people achieved in the context of these projects. They also\u00a0prompt serious questions about the range of opportunities we offer for children to make meanings using diverse media, about how we conceive literacy,\u00a0about the time and resources we make available, and about how we support children to articulate and build on what they do.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \u2018Evidence\u2019 as it is understood in the White Paper (if approached critically)\u00a0can 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\u00a0for which such evidence just isn\u2019t available. And importantly we need to complement these kinds of evidence with other kinds\u00a0\u2013 such as the qualitative evidence from these two small-scale studies\u00a0– that raise questions about the range and scope of the curriculum and\u00a0which could help us articulate how children create and compose,\u00a0and what seems to matter as they do so. This kind of evidence may help us gain a deeper understanding of what might \u2018work\u2019 for individual children. It also invites us to think about \u2018what else\u2019 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 \u2018what works.\u2019 We can also draw on research to expand our ideas about what – and\u00a0who \u2013\u00a0literacy education might need to work for.<\/em>If we focus only on evidence-based teaching\u00a0that charts the impact of specific approaches using existing measures, then we risk getting stuck in a spiral that prevents us from seeing what else <\/em>might be important.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n 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<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Reference<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Biesta G. (2020). Educational Research: An unorthodox introduction. London: Bloomsbury.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 11 October 2022 Cathy Burnett As I explored in a post at the end of May, the Schools\u2019 White Paper\u00a0adopts a particular stance on what \u2018counts\u2019 as evidence. I argued that it\u2019s important not to discount evidence\u00a0that doesn\u2019t fit this mould but which could be highly relevant to teachers. The importance of engaging with a … Continue reading Not just \u2018what works\u2019 but \u2018what else\u2019 in literacy education<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"publish_to_discourse":"0","publish_post_category":"","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-primary-literacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":767,"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions\/767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.shu.ac.uk\/rmple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}