Literacy Practices Research Articles

Emotionally Empowered Learners: Promoting Emotional Literacy Practices at Government Primary Schools

Emotionally Empowered Learners: Promoting Emotional Literacy Practices at Government Primary Schools

PENINGKATAN PEMAHAMAN LITERASI KEUANGAN PADA SISWA SEKOLAH DASAR

MI KH Badrussalam is one of the educational institutions at the elementary level located in Malang City. This madrasah has been established since 1926 during the colonial period. In 2022, MI KH Badrussalam has a total of 52 students and 7 teachers. One of the problems of this madrasah related to students is the lack of students' understanding of financial literacy. This is due to the unfavorable economic conditions of the family, so that many financial literacy practices cannot be carried out optimally. However, this does not stop madrasah from continuing to try to grow students' skills in managing finances. Based on the description of the problems above, the PPM team provides training related to financial literacy to increase students' understanding of good financial management. There are three methods that will be used in this activity, namely lecture, discussion and question and answer. The PPM team and partners believe that this training on financial literacy can provide benefits for both parties. The result of this training is that students' knowledge and skills regarding financial literacy increase.

Philosophy of digital literature

There were a vision, a philosophy, and an intellectual trend that lie behind every phenomenon in the universe as a pressing need for its age and general features. The digital literature is the literature of the age and its openness to other worlds made the study seek to understand and clarify that philosophy which sits behind the digital literature, attempting to go beyond what is known in terms of literary practices. This study aims to reveal this philosophy which was embodied from the current philosophy based on freedom and absolute openness, leading to appearance of the digital literature that reinforces this philosophy which constitutes its formation and release. Therefore, the study intended to explore the digital texts in some digital platforms to reveal these practices and their differences through the selected digital literary texts. The study also traced the impact of this philosophy on the text by observing the act of interaction and how it is done by the interactive creative recipient, whose interaction exceeded the previous negative receiving, and was close to the space of the writer in producing, reading, and interacting with the text. At its beginning, the study showed the relationship of philosophy with literature, art, and knowledge. Then, the study attempted to elucidate the philosophy of digital literature and sought to reveal its characteristics and effects, using the analytical descriptive approach. It also utilized a semiotic approach and the convergence theory to analyze texts and read them critically. The study concluded with the results and recommendations.

THREE IMAGES OF POLISSIA. A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN POSTCOLONIAL COLORS

The paper examines the images of Volyn Polissia and its inhabitants in the works by the writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Based on the methods of comparative and postcolonial studies, the research focuses on the novels “Friendship” (1905) by Lesia Ukrainka, “Malashka” (1881) by the Polish writer G. Zapolska, and “Olesia” (1898) by the Russian author A. Kuprin. The phenomenon of the Volyn-Polissia text provides an opportunity to clarify the topic in historical and cultural dimensions. The narrative structures of the three stories are considered as matrices for perceiving, understanding, and describing reality. The peculiarities of literary practices in topographical and anthropological cataloging of the ‘other’ were also investigated.For a long time, Polissia was under the control of neighboring states. The approach of the Polish and Russian authors to the ‘appropriated territories’ was distinctively invasive (imperial). The positions of cultural and state dominance legitimized the ‘other’ as a secondary and subordinate figure. Thus, the efforts of the colonizers were directed at lowering the native and elevating the stranger. The stranger, as represented in the characters of G. Zapolska and A. Kuprin, was a carrier of higher morality, intelligence, culture, etc. Through total control, he acquired the ‘right’ to rule over those ‘inferior’ to him. In the stories “Malashkaˮ and “Olesiaˮ, which are very similar in their main points, this mechanism is clearly revealed in the female images. The depiction of the local population as wild, aggressive, and drunken ‘creatures’ also attests to the authors’ views.In contrast, the story “Friendship” is perceived as a tale of the national affirmation of the Ukrainian region. Lesia Ukrainka doesn’t idealize the residents of Polissia but clearly shows their distinctiveness. The writer’s characters are Ukrainian and Polish girls of the same age. They have different destinies due to their differing backgrounds. The depicted worlds are independent, which is evidenced by the life of their representatives.

Working with constructs of inclusion for understanding teachers’ literacy practices and their impact on student learning

ABSTRACT The paper explores teachers’ language literacy practices in underprivileged, inner-city schools in Athens, Greece, and their implications for student learning and educational inclusion. The current developments of global/European and national education policy agendas on literacy and inclusion inform the research questions of the study. Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse frames our analysis on the reproduction of social inequalities through schooling and informs our discussion on the discursive means and the pedagogic practices for their interruption. Findings, based on interview data and classroom observations, indicate that global discourses on inclusion, (re)articulated in the disadvantaged school settings of the study, invest the notion of inclusion with three different meanings: a. inclusion as assimilation and absorption into the dominant culture and society; b. inclusion as therapy for students’ emotional ‘traumas’; and c. inclusion as recognition of difference. We argue that these constructs of inclusion shape teaching practices that either promote or undermine student learning and empowerment.

Listening to teachers talk about multimodality and multimodal texts: considerations for the national English curriculum

AbstractMultimodal texts are an integral part of children’s lives. Rapid advancements in media and mobile technologies have increasingly expanded children’s capability to view, share, design, and produce multimodal texts. However, Australia’s updated English curriculum falls short of offering teachers a metalanguage to help children understand the complex ways linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial modes work together to convey meaning. This article reports qualitative research on teachers talking about multimodal texts within their pedagogy and literacy practice. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with eight early years and primary Australian teachers. Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is the analytic framework utilised in the research. From teachers’ talk, findings show that if children are to be effective multimodal text users, analysts, designers, and creators, the curriculum should not privilege particular modes and their associated metalanguage but provide teachers with a metalanguage for all modes of meaning-making.

Finding an (Ecological) Niche in the Postdigital Taskscape: The Role of Strong Literacy and Poor Pedagogy in Primary School Pupils’ Online Literacy Practices

This paper uses a postdigital, postphenomenological lens to examine what happened when an online platform, a wiki, was used to support writing practices in an inner London Key Stage 2 classroom. It understands a postdigital approach to education as one which takes account of the imbrication of technology in our everyday life without valorising it or making hyperbolic claims about what it can do. Avoiding utopian or dystopian accounts, it unpicks what happened when students were allowed to compose multimodal texts beyond the classroom on topics that interested them. Using a postphenomenological approach, it looks at the materiality of the technology in praxis in the different spaces where it was used. It uses as a heuristic Ingold’s concept of the taskscape, recently developed by various scholars as a site not of romantic bucolic human activity but as somewhere where sociomaterial practices are contested as we wrestle for resources within our immediate environment. As students travel between these different taskscapes of home, school and the wiki, it examines how they enact the affordances around them in their transformation from apprentices to more skilled practitioners of literacy. It follows their trajectories-of-becoming when they move between these taskscapes, growing into knowledge as they weave lines of literacy across online and offline spaces. It argues that reviving Gibson’s notion of the ‘ecological niche’ allows us to understand why some find the paths between these spaces easier to tread than others.

Preparing Students for Communicating in Business: A Framework for Informing Literacy Practices

Preparing students to communicate in business has often been an overlooked area within literacy studies. With current calls by Cardon et al. (2024) to focus on core competencies in the business communication classroom with the emergence of generative AI, it is more important than ever to remember Berkenkotter and Huckin’s (1994) explanation that students will always learn in a form of “situated cognition embedded in disciplinary activities” (p. 3). This project, as a result, provides a framework to explore student experiences with business communication before students arrive on a college campus to better inform higher education stakeholders.

Exploration of Critical Skills For Teachers In Digital Literacy Practices Education Program

The increasing penetration of the internet and digital devices significantly impacts learning in technological media. Teachers play an important role in improving their competencies through training programs supported by the government. Dompet Dhuafa's Digital Literacy Education Training for Trainers program aims to improve digital literacy among Sekolah Guru Indonesia (SGI) activists. The program includes training in copywriting, learning video creation, the concept of Society 5.0, and future internet professions. The top five participants' work was certified by the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, highlighting a novel approach as few participants developed strong comprehension and critical thinking skills. This research explores the critical thinking ability of the best participants in the digital literacy program, specifically in creating learning videos that obtain intellectual property rights. The method used was phenomenology, in-depth interviews were conducted with five top participants. The findings of this study revealed three main components affecting the implementation of the program: mastery of critical thinking, lack of mastery of critical thinking, and difficulties in improving participants' critical thinking skills. These results underscore the importance of critical thinking in educational training and the challenges in developing this skill among teachers.

Bending stories, disrupting boundaries: spatial reclamation as literacy practices beyond the rows and rules

AbstractIn this article, we explore the dynamic interplay of youth agency, spatial justice, and literacy practices across community spaces through micro‐analysis of photographs and interviews of children and youth. Through a lens of spatial reclamation, the study investigates how children and youth disrupt adult‐designed spaces to restory and reclaim narratives, ultimately reshaping the socio‐spatial landscape. Combining the concepts of restorying and spatial justice, we explore the awareness and agency children exhibit when challenging dominant expectations, particularly examining instances of rulebreaking and safety negotiation. Examining two distinct settings—a school playground and a community protest—the study reveals how youth engage in embodied performances that rupture anticipated discourses in place. The findings underscore the multilayered nature of youth rulebreaking as a form of resistance and as a form of leadership, emphasising the potential for transformative socio‐spatial impact as youth reclaim narratives through new co‐constructions of space. Across age groups and geographies, Black and Brown youth and children emerge as leaders in reshaping spaces through their acts of resistance, redefining boundaries, and leading peaceful protests. The article calls for a nuanced understanding of how spatial justice intersects with restorying, urging educators and researchers to reconsider acts of reclamation as literacies across adult‐dictated spaces.

A Manual Training Method as Literate Practice: Rhetorics of the Sloyd Training School for Teachers, 1904-1914

The Sloyd Training School, an early twentieth-century private school for teachers in Boston, attempted to legitimize the Sloyd method of handiwork. Specifically, its Alumni Association’s publication Sloyd Record brought together educators across the country to make a case for Sloyd’s relevancy and impact on the academic and professional development of students, particularly students who were working poor or receiving educations in non-traditional settings. Its contributors painted Sloyd as a form of knowledge and a resource, as a literacy, and their rhetorical effectiveness was predicated upon Sloyd’s ability to be painted as such in its far-reaching effects and comprehensiveness.

Курсив как средство актуализации высказывания в поэзии М. Цветаевой

The purpose of the study is to identify the peculiarities of the functioning of italics as a means of actualizing statements in the poetry of M. Tsvetaeva. Marina Tsvetaeva is one of the few poets who widely use italics in their literary practice. The selection of the most significant word in terms of meaning is found not only in the poet's poems, but also in her artistic and epistolary prose. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time in M. Tsvetaeva's poetry, italics are studied from the standpoint of the actual division of the sentence. Despite the fact that the graphical means of M. Tsvetaeva was described in the aspect of actual division, the object of analysis was her original punctuation system, not italics. It is proved for the first time that italics, emphasizing the semantic and intonation center of an utterance, acts as a distinctive element in the system of actual division of a poetic text devoid of specific means of expressing actual division - word order and intonation. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed for the first time that the font change is used by M. Tsvetaeva's poetic text is used not only to highlight an informatively important word, but also as a way of conveying a certain intonation, and as a means with an expressive stylistic function.

Transdisciplinary perspectives on ‘the narrative’ and ‘the analytical’ for critical literacy

This paper reports on the design of a multimodal metalanguage developed by teacher education researchers to support pre-service teachers’ understandings of critical literacy and critical health literacies in a changing communication landscape. The design of metalanguage constitutes the first stage of an ongoing transdisciplinary project, Multiliteracies Across Teaching Areas (MATA), which aims to design and implement cohesive disciplinary multiliteracies pedagogies across teaching areas of an initial teacher education (ITE) programme. The focus on metalanguage design is motivated by concerns shared by critical literacy scholars and scholars in health literacy to balance deconstruction of texts with actionable response through the ‘deep moral grammar of narrative’ Kindenberg and Freebody (Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 44(2), 90-99, 2021). Such concerns also align with recent World Health Organisation calls for the use of solution-oriented literacies to empower communities. These sociocultural understandings of critical literacy and Kindenberg and Freebody’s (Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 44(2), 90-99, 2021) call to balance ‘the analytical’ and the narrative’ in critical literacy practice provide the starting point for designing metalanguage for transdisciplinary research in Health and Physical Education (HPE) and English. We firstly review relevant models of the critical informing both subject areas to establish synergous understandings and then analyse expectations of critical practice in descriptions and elaborations of the HPE and English curricula. We provide an overview of the semiotic resources available for transdisciplinary conversations within the English curriculum with clarifying ‘bridging’ terminology informed by social semiotic descriptions. Through close analysis of four representative texts selected for critical literacy practice by English and HPE teacher educators in the MATA project, we demonstrate how such metalanguage was shared to build understandings of both critical analysis and actionable response. Along with analytical features to build and analyse issues according to disciplinary criteria, we show how stories are used to build rapport with their diverse audiences and to motivate their peers to take positive health action.

Digital Village Construction Right Research on the Impact of Digital Literacy among Rural Residents

In the current era of digitalization, the creation of digital villages has become a major driving force behind rural rehabilitation, as well as a crucial component of modernizing rural areas and agriculture. Given how quickly the digital economy is growing, digital literacy is now a fundamental skill that every person should possess. By fostering and enhancing the digital literacy of rural communities, it is possible to close the digital divide that exists between urban and rural areas, generate endogenous motivation, enhance digital production, and achieve rural rejuvenation. China's rural resident's digital literacy practice there are still more problems. This paper deeply analyzes the connotation and characteristics of digital village construction and expounds that there are obstacles to the improvement of rural residents' digital literacy, such as imperfect digital infrastructure and weak digital awareness of rural residents. Finally, this paper puts forward corresponding suggestions for rural residents to improve their digital literacy: The first point involves bolstering the development of rural infrastructure to enhance the digital hard power of the countryside, and the second point is to promote communication between urban and rural informatization.

Breaking the racial silence: putting racial literacy to work in Australia

ABSTRACT Race structures the lives of Indigenous peoples and other negatively racialized people in Australia. The language of race permeates institutions, workplaces, and is embedded in everyday life. Racial literacy as pedagogical praxis resists the racial contract that secures whiteness as a structure of possessive power. We explore the state of racial literacy in Australian education, and the obstructions and opportunities for educators to do anti-racism work. To this end, we draw on the preliminary findings from an ongoing research project, Breaking the Racial Silence, and use them to inform a theoretical framework for conceptualizing educators’ racial literacy practices. We bring to the fore effective strategies, practices, and programmes used to interrogate race and racism. Despite the efforts of educators, racial literacy in formal and informal education is oftentimes suppressed and concealed by languages and practices that sustain the practices and pedagogies of whiteness.

“I'm a Kid Citizen of Two Countries”: A Case Study of Bilingual Kindergarteners’ Discussions about Dual Citizenships

Despite the increasing emphasis on social studies in Early Childhood Education, there has been a serious paucity of empirical studies on how culturally and linguistically diverse children develop their emergent understanding on their identities and citizenships in different racial and cultural surroundings. The main purpose of this article is to explore the intersections of bilingualism, early literacy practices, and social studies education by examining bilingual children’s conversations about dual citizenships and ethnic identities during read-aloud sessions. The data were collected by video/audio recordings, open-ended interviews, and children’s artifacts over a period of four months. The findings suggest the potential of bilingual discussions about dual citizenship as a means to help young bilinguals develop their emergent understandings of their rights and responsibilities as young dual citizens.

“We don’t have it in my mother tongue”

This study explores the experiences and evolving stance of a newly arrived adolescent student, Hamid, regarding the use of his first language as a tool for learning in the transition from introduction classes to vocational education and training (VET). The article is based on fieldnotes and interviews from a larger linguistic ethnographic fieldwork and draws on a critical sociolinguistic framework. It reveals that while Hamid initially intended to distance himself from his first language upon transitioning to the mainstream school system, it ultimately emerges as an indispensable linguistic capital for navigating the language and literacy practices of VET. Such a finding challenges prevailing educational policy and practice in Norway, which prioritizes linguistic scaffolding based on students’ first language(s) only at the outset of their educational trajectories and assumes its diminishing relevance over time spent in the country. In the analysis, Bourdieu's (1977) concept of capital is employed as a conceptual lens to interpret Hamid’s experiences and reflections. Furthermore, the study considers how scaffolding (Bruner, 1966) and disciplinary literacy interact and influence Hamid’s stance.

Standardisation and the role of language editors in synchronising Võro hybrid literacy practices

ABSTRACT Our paper focuses on the standardisation of Võro, the most spoken and cultivated South Estonian language. According to the 2021 census, there are ca 100,000 Võro and Seto speakers with varying bilingual backgrounds from activist L1 speakers – who have been developing Standard Võro and language technologies (LT) for language transfer – to people with receptive knowledge, L2 speakers, whose Võro (and Seto) literacy can be described as hybrid. The bulk of speakers, however, have only embraced reading and writing Võro in their adult life and are socialised into Standard Estonian literacy. Standard Estonian was cultivated mostly from North Estonian varieties whose speakers outnumbered their South Estonian counterparts. In this paper, we aim to understand the process of standardisation and especially the role of language editors in it by reviewing and examining the principles of codification and analysing interview data.

(Im)migrant women’s translingual literacy practices as problem-solving and learning resources: perspectives from a community-based English literacy program

ABSTRACT This paper calls for an expansion of translingual studies to include the examination of learners beyond university contexts to further our understanding of translingual literacies and practices. The authors present findings from a larger ethnographic study about practices and repertoires that (im)migrant women mobilize and employ when learning how to write in a community-based English literacy program. The study provides insights into the intersections of their identities as mothers and professionals and their literacy learning. Findings show how these women drew on diverse modalities and literacies to navigate new conventions for writing and challenges they face as (im)migrants in the United States, illustrating how their practices are linked to their professional and gendered identities. The findings illustrate the need to expand translingual studies to further theorize multilingual lives, language learning, and literacy practices cultivated in non-traditional education programs.

Being Flamingos and Trees: Marginalized Groups Respond to Landscapes Using Inclusive Multimodal Literacies and Arts

In research about landscapes and the environment, scientific ontologies and epistemologies prevail, thus largely excluding contributions from marginalized groups, or creative expressions of what spaces mean to people. This article draws on qualitative place-based arts workshops, which used multimodal and multisensory methods with deaf children and disabled adults. The resulting co-created texts and artworks represent meaningful responses to specific local landscapes and their natural inhabitants. Considering literacies, power, and who can or cannot be an author, this article argues that such processes of creative co-production could be viewed as means of overcoming marginalization and enabling disabled people to engage with local landscapes. Inclusive literacy practices are presented as ways in to “authoring” marginalized groups’ responses to natural environments, with potentially transformative outcomes for the participants, decision-making processes, and the land itself.