Many school-age children who come to the United States from other countries find the shift in home, community, and institutional constructs to be a challenge (Cairney, 2002; Derderian-Aghajanian & Wang, 2012). Despite this, these children and their families bring significant strengths, resources, and rich funds of knowledge to the table. This…

Internationally, assessment and the use of diagnostic data are recognized as critical capabilities for teachers. This is not a recent development, with assessment recognized for some decades as playing a significant role in informing learning and learners.This paper will examine whether teachers and members of the school leadership team utilize…

Whilst the faculties of literacy and numeracy are rightly recognised as worthy of pedagogical nurturing, this article champions a more venerable articulacy -- "visualcy" -- crucial to a healthy culture, arguing that the one domain of human inquiry which distinguishes the visual arts from other disciplines is surely that surrounding the…

In this paper, I first examine how the dominant view of children as incompetent is constructed in the field of sociology, highlighting the constructions of them as playful, vulnerable and passive. Then, I deconstruct these dominant constructions and argue that they do not do children justice. To restore justice to children through reconstructing…

This paper discusses feedback for developing L2 writing. It presents data from a serendipitous audio-recording of one L2 master's student's tutorial with her dissertation supervisor at a UK university, which is extracted from a 13-month linguistic ethnography. Following "academic literacies" scholars, I view the tutorial as a…

This study examined the literacy practices of children ages 5-11 as they engaged in out-of-school use of virtual worlds. The purpose of the study was to explore the nature, purpose, and role of literacy in children's use of a virtual world. In this article, I reflect on how children's use of literacy practices in the virtual world constructed and…

This qualitative research looks at the effects that language choices and cultural practices have on identity development in the education of minority students in the United States. It examines the educational journey of Irma, a Latina educator. Through the analysis of interviews with the participant, this paper intends to show the effects of…

Learning to be literate involves understanding unequal power relations that privilege some literacy practices over others. A deficit model associates literacy with skills and motivation, emphasizes standardized literacy accomplishments, and prescribes outcomes. These practices discount the validity of individuals' definitions of and uses for…

Reviews a book of anthropological studies on literacy in traditional societies. (RA)

Uses examples from seventeenth century English literature to illustrate the ideal master-apprentice relationship and discusses the factors which made the real relationships different. London apprentices were usually literate and they had their own thriving subculture. Literacy weakened the master's traditional authority, and the subculture…

Examines literacy construction and use in four subcontexts in a preschool classroom. Sees a reciprocal dynamic between the patterned life of each subcontext and the patterns of literacy accomplished there. Notes that teachers and students have their own reasons and purposes for invoking literacy as a social tool. (RS)

When literacy specialist Jennifer Allen agreed to meet weekly with five boys who wanted to share their out-of-school writing with her, the weekly all-boys lunch-time writing group was born at Albert S. Hall elementary school in Waterville, Maine. She had intended to run the group as a writers' workshop and teach mini-lessons. But from the…

Australian teacher education, like the rest of the university sector in Australia, is under significant pressure and highly politicised. In this paper, we examine ethical dilemmas facing teacher educators who, in a context of difficult and eroding work conditions, grapple with literacy needs of pre-service students. We focus particularly on…

The relationship of status of the aged to societal literacy in a sample of 122 cultures appears spurious because of effects of variables indexing societal complexity. Conclusions are: societal literacy has no independent effect on status of the aged; and the overall relationship between the two appears curvilinear. (Author)

Describes the "sociological imagination," which suggests an ability to create possible reconstructions of larger social forces which affect peoples' lives, through a story about Muhammad Ali. Discusses the importance of stories and their role in society. Utilizes three more stories to address various issues in relation to literacy…