Legitimate Texts Research Articles

Connecting multiliteracies and engagement of students from low socio-economic backgrounds: using Bernstein's pedagogic discourse as a bridge

Many students in Australia from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds have historically been alienated from learning and education because of the narrow definition of literacy and of what counts as legitimate texts. Consequently, traditional pedagogy, curriculum and assessment practices disengage many students. To address this issue, we embedded multiliteracies utilising information and communication technologies (ICTs) into three low SES classroom programmes and found that the associated classroom messages greatly enhanced the students’ engagement in learning and their view of themselves as learners. This approach worked better than the traditional approaches because students created multimodal texts that changed what was seen as legitimate school texts and thus credited them as literate individuals. This paper discusses students as co-constructors of knowledge, who used ICTs for an authentic purpose. It considers changes in students’ engagement and achievement as the result of shifts in the pedagogic discourse and the way that the discourses of power played out in the classrooms, via the messages students received about their knowledge, ability, control, voice and place. The multiliteracies-based unit of work utilising ICTs provided spaces for students to develop new literacy practices and to view school as a place for them.

Seeing epistemic order: construction and transmission of evaluative criteria

This paper focuses on formative assessment in the field of higher education. It examines Bernstein’s work on vertical discourses and knowledge structures with the view to deepening understanding of the concept of assessment for learning. The first part of the paper draws on Vygotsky’s work on concept development and Bernstein’s work on knowledge structures to explain why ‘generalisation’ and ‘hierarchy’ are central in knowledge acquisition. It then explores Bernstein’s claim that, within the vertical discourse, different knowledge structures (hierarchical and horizontal) afford greater or lesser visibility of their epistemic structure, and thus of their evaluation criteria of what counts as a legitimate text. The second part of the paper investigates the ways epistemic expectations are signalled through the practice of evaluation to first‐year university students in a professional education course and proposes that markers do not offer students stuffiest access to recognition rules necessary for producing legitimate texts in the future. Drawing on Maton’s distinction between semantic gravity and semantic density, the paper offers an example of how markers could recast what is present in students’ work to offer students access to key ordering principles in vertical discourses.

An Activity Theory Approach to surfacing the pedagogical object in a primary school mathematics classroom

This paper develops a methodology for using Activity Theory (AT) to investigate pedagogical practices in primary school mathematics classrooms by selecting object-oriented pedagogical activity as the unit of analysis. While an understanding of object-oriented activity is central to Activity Theory (AT), the notion of object is a frequently debated and often misunderstood one. The conceptual confusion surrounding the object arises both from difficulties related to translating the original Russian conceptualisation of object-oriented activity into English as well as from the different interpretations of the object currently in use within two contemporary approaches in activity theory. This paper seeks to clarify understandings of the object by exploring notions of object oriented activity. To this end, the paper traces the historical development of the object through Leontiev (1978; 1981) and Engeström’s (1987; 1999) expansion of Vygotsky’s original triadic understanding of object oriented activity. Drawing on Basil Bernstein’s (1996) notion of evaluative criteria as those rules that transmit the criteria for the production of a legitimate text, the paper goes on to elaborate a methodology for using AT to analyse observational data by developing the notion of “evaluative episodes” as pedagogical moments in which the pedagogical object is made visible. Findings indicate that an evaluative episode can serve as an analytical space in which the dynamism of an activity system is momentarily frozen, enabling one to model human activity in the system under investigation and, hence, in this study, to understand pedagogy in context.

Where There's Wonder and Where There's Not

I believe writing personal stories about learning helps prospective teachers develop a more fine-grained understanding of teachers’ work as it relates to supporting student learning. When I meet them, my students are about a year away from student teaching. As is to be expected, their memories of school fuel their motivations. They often declare that they want to emulate or reject a particular teacher. However, the memories that they bring of particular teachers may be under-examined. As they begin storytelling they tend to write more from the perspective of the successful or damaged learner rather than that of the teacher. Because we eventually study the stories, the implicit message is that our stories are legitimate texts in teacher education. Stories become public. We read them aloud; we write about them in personal correspondence. We cite them in subsequent work. Put simply, stories teach. Stories—the telling, writing, reading, and discussion of them—provide openings for studying teaching. Given this belief, I integrate opportunities for stories into nearly every class I teach. In fact I begin courses by asking my students to write a personal learning story. Here is the assignment:

Interactive Fiction and the Reluctant Reader

getting them to use that ability often enough to become fluent readers. Unfortunately, many children have not had the opportunity to find personal satisfaction in the books they read to the extent that they choose reading as a recreational or free-time activity. Research suggests that the amount of time students spend in independent, silent reading in school significantly relates to growth in reading achievement (Leinhardt et al. 1981). The reading students engage in out of school is also related to gains in reading achievement. A recent study of fifth graders (Fielding et al. n.d.) has indicated that the average minutes per day spent reading books was the best predictor of reading comprehension, vocabulary size, and gains in reading achievement between second and fifth grade. Unfortunately, most students spend very little time reading during free time. In the study of fifth graders, 50 percent of the children read books for an average of four minutes per day or less, 30 percent read two minutes per day or less, and fully 10 percent reported never reading any book on any day. For most children, reading from books occupied one percent of their free time, or less. Carole Edelsky and Kelly Draper (n.d.) argue that students are more likely to become fluent readers if they are exposed to texts written for real purposes. But how are teachers going to motivate students to engage themselves with legitimate texts? We believe that interactive fiction could offer students who are reluctant readers a