Literacy teaching and learning in e-Learning contexts

Chapter 1: Background to the research

Introduction

This report presents the findings of a research project on literacy teaching and learning in e-Learning contexts carried out by CORE Education and the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) for the Ministry of Education in 2009.

The research project had two parts. One involved supporting the ten⁴ recipients of the 2009 e-fellowships⁵ to design and implement classroom-based inquiries into literacy teaching and learning. The e-fellows presented their findings as e-portfolios and these can be found at: http://efellows2009.wikispaces.com. They also presented their findings at the ULearn 2009 conference.

The other aspect of the project involved a meta-analysis using data collected from across the e-fellows’ classrooms, to see how e-Learning contexts can be used effectively to support literacy teaching and learning. The findings of this analysis are presented here.

Research aims and questions

The aim of the e-Learning fellowships programme was to:

"generate and increase the use of practical and quality evidence for the teaching community on how effective use of e-Learning can help teachers overcome specific challenges in their classroom practice and improve the learning experiences and outcomes for diverse students." (Request For Proposals, Ministry of Education, June 2009, p. 3)

The meta-analysis research questions were informed by this aim, the nature of the e-fellows’ inquiries, themes from the research literature, and conversations between NZCER, CORE, and the Ministry of Education. The overarching research question for this project is: How are e-Learning contexts used effectively to support the literacy learning needed for the 21st century?

The sub questions are:

• What can literacy learning look like in effective e-Learning contexts?
  
• What conditions support literacy teaching and learning in e-Learning contexts?
  
• How does exploring literacy teaching and learning in e-Learning contexts impact on teachers’ thinking and practice?

Theoretical frame

In framing our research we were conscious of the large body of literature addressing concerns about the capacity of current approaches to literacy teaching and learning to equip students for living and learning in the 21st century, and address the overrepresentation of particular groups in the tail of literacy performance.

We considered the literature on multiliteracies to be a useful starting point in assisting the e-fellows to frame their inquiries because it:

• focuses on new technologies, cultural diversity, and literacy;
  
• has future focused goals that align with those of The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007); and
  
• is grounded in practice, easily applicable to classroom contexts, and is relatively accessible.

Much of the multiliteracies research and literature has grown out of the early work of The New London Group (2000)—a futures thinking approach to literacy teaching and learning known as Multiliteracies Pedagogy.⁶

The New London Group argue that the traditional notion of literacy as learning to use a single national form of language, and as a stable system based on rules, does not adequately prepare students for participation in today’s society. This is because increased cultural and linguistic diversity in local communities, and the proliferation of multi-media and information technologies are generating a plurality of texts and influencing the way in which meaning is created and exchanged. New technologies have led to an increase in communication modes and texts are becoming increasingly multimodal. To succeed in today’s society students must be able to negotiate these multiliteracies and adapt to constant change. The New London Group (2000) identify two future focused goals for literacy learning:

• Creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community; and
  
• Fostering in students the critical engagement necessary to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment (p. 9).

There are four main components to the Multiliteracies Pedagogy: Situated Practice (immersion in meaningful experience), Overt Instruction (describing patterns in meaning through explicit teaching), Critical Framing (explaining the purpose of different types of text, and whose interests are served), and Transformed Practice (applying new learning to meet the goals of the learner). Transformed Practice occurs when students work on existing resources of meaning (available designs) to produce new meaning (the re-designed).

Because the term “literacy” is given different meanings in different contexts it is important to be clear about what we mean by “literacy” in this report. We define literacy as the capacity to learn and transform discourses. We draw here on the work of James Paul Gee (2008)—one of the founding members of the New London Group. According to Gee, discourses⁷ are the ways particular groups of people (for example, certain sorts of lawyers, women, families, cultural groups, and so forth) behave interact, value, think, believe, speak, (and often) read and write.

"Discourses are ways of being ‘people like us.’ They are ‘ways of being in the world’; they are ‘forms of life’; they are socially situated identities. They are, thus, always and everywhere social and products of social histories" (Gee, 2008, p3).

According to Gee, students are already proficient in many discourses on arrival at school. These discourses include the primary discourse of their family and community groups, and the secondary discourses such as their understanding of how to be, for example, a gymnast, a church goer, a collector of rugby cards, a bike owner.

At school there are new discourses to learn including those related to being the member of a classroom, school clubs and teams, and those related to different disciplines such as Science, Mathematics, and English. The e-fellowship application form invited applicants to submit proposals for inquiries into literacy teaching and learning in any discipline area. As we discuss, later in the report, the e-fellows projects were situated primarily within English and the Arts, and to a lesser degree, the Social Sciences.

According to Gee (2008), learning a new discourse requires immersion in practice and explicit instruction. In terms of Multiliteracies Pedagogy, these are the ideas of Situated Practice and Overt Instruction. According to the multiliteracies framework, Situated Practice needs to involve experts who can guide learners; provide an environment in which learners are secure, can take risks, and trust the guidance of others; take into account the affective and sociocultural needs of learners; use learners’ experiences, out-of-school communities and discourses as an integral part of the learning experiences; and use assessment for formative purposes.

Overt Instruction recognises the importance of connecting contextualised-learning experiences (from Situated Practice) with a conscious understanding of elements of language meaning and design. In the multiliteracies framework Overt Instruction builds on pedagogies that explicitly teach rules and conventions, but it does not involve transmission, drills, and rote learning. Rather, Overt Instruction needs to: scaffold learning; allow the learner to build conscious awareness and control over what is being learned; make use of meta-languages⁸ that describe the form, content, and function of the discourses of practice; and provide formative assessment related to other aspects of learning, such as the use of meta-language in Situated Practice. Overt Instruction is especially important for students whose out-of-school discourses differ markedly from those of the school because it provides these students with the knowledge to represent themselves and express themselves in the school context.

We use the Four Resources Model (Freebody & Luke, 1990; Luke & Freebody, 1999) as a framework for analysing the literacy teaching and learning that occurred as students and teachers engaged in Situated Practice and Overt Instruction. The Four Resources Model separates the repertoire of literacy practices into four main roles: code breaker, meaning maker, text user, and text analyst, emphasising that each of the roles is necessary but not sufficient in any act of reading. The Four Resources Model was used to develop the framework for literacy acquisition presented in the Effective Literacy Practice books (MOE, 2003; 2006) and so the ideas underpinning this model are familiar to many New Zealand teachers.⁹ It is important to note that, although we use the roles from the Four Resources Model to structure the literacy learning chapter of this report, our interpretation of what it means to break the code, make meaning, use texts, and analyse texts is not based solely on the work of Luke and Freebody. The Four Resources Model focuses on written and spoken languages and visual images. In this report we apply the model to all modes of meaning making, including, for example, audio (the use of sound effects, music, and so forth). We interpret the term “visual images”, broadly, as including print, gestural, and spatial modes of meaning making, as well as static images, such as illustrations and moving images, such as video. Further, the Four Resources Model was originally developed as a tool for thinking about reading and responding to texts and in this report we also apply it to the production of texts, for example, writing or performing.

To help us analyse the conditions in which the learning occurred we use ideas from complexity thinking as applied to education (Davis & Sumara, 2006; Davis, et al, 2008; Sumara, 2000).¹⁰ We do so because we see the education context, including students, groups, classes, schools, and so forth as complex systems. In particular, we make use of the conditions complexity thinkers have identified as being present when complex systems grow, adapt, evolve, and transform.

How the researchers and e-fellows worked together

The e-fellows, NZCER, and CORE formed a community of learners that met virtually and physically over the course of the project. The project ran throughout 2009. It began with an induction day in February, followed by a four-day hui in March, a two-day hui in August, and another in October. A project wiki¹¹ was developed and there were regular teleconferences. During on-line and in-person conversations, teachers and researchers discussed findings from the research literature, what was happening in classrooms, and emerging ideas and theories about literacy teaching and learning in e-Learning contexts.

Each e-fellow was assigned one researcher as a critical friend and mentor responsible for helping frame the e-fellow’s inquiry, sharing relevant research literature, and engaging in conversation about the emerging themes. Researchers visited their e-fellow partners on at least two occasions for one to two days, and maintained contact online and by phone.

Data sources and analysis

The meta-analysis data sources included classroom observations, interviews with e-fellows, focus groups with students, and a range of documents. A more detailed description of each of these is provided below.

Classroom observations

The researchers visited the e-fellows’ classrooms on at least two occasions to do a series of classroom observations. These included observations of teacher-led activities and observations of individuals or groups of students working on a task. The researchers recorded these events (audio or video) and kept running notes.

Interviews with e-fellows

The researchers also interviewed the e-fellows during each of the two school visits. In preparation for the interviews we asked e-fellows to keep a record of significant moments in terms of shifts in their own thinking or in students’ learning to share with us on each visit. These came to be known as “ah-ha” moments. Some of the interview questions focused on these moments, and others focused on e-fellows’ observations about shifts in their thinking and practice more generally. The e-fellow interview also included questions about what and how children were learning, and the conditions that seemed to be supporting their learning. A copy of the interview questions can be found in Appendix A.

Focus groups with students

During each classroom visit the researchers also ran focus groups with small groups of students from the e-fellows’ classrooms. The questions focused on student perceptions on what and how they had been learning as part of the e-fellows’ projects. Where necessary we tailored these to the context of each e-fellow’s classroom. In some cases we related the questions to the specific lessons we observed, in others to the whole unit of work students were involved in, and in some we combined these two approaches. These decisions depended on the nature of the project, and the age of the children concerned. A copy of the generic focus group questions can be found in Appendix B.

Other sources of data

In addition to the data sources described above, we drew on a range of other documents. These included:

• Teacher planning and student work samples;
  
• Records of reflective conversations held during project hui or on-line; and
  
• The e-fellow portfolios.

Data analysis

We analysed the data according to themes using a staggered and iterative approach. The data analysis occurred at several levels over the course of the project, with each stage informing the next. Our approach to data analysis was designed to ensure that e-fellows, as well as researchers, had input into the data analysis. There were opportunities for the group as a whole to engage in collective data analysis and discussion of emerging themes during the August hui.

Profile of the e-fellows

The application form for the 2009 e-fellowships required evidence of experience and expertise in literacy and in e-Learning, and many of the e-fellows had been already been exploring literacy in e-Learning contexts for several years before the project began.

Five of the teachers had between six and ten years of teaching experience, and the other four had over ten years’ experience. Five held management positions.

Most of the e-fellows were very experienced working in e-Learning contexts. Six had been either lead teachers or ICT PD cluster facilitators and two had post graduate diplomas with an e-Learning focus.

All of the e-fellows had literacy interests and skills. Two had specialised in English as part of their teacher training at a time when this involved building their own capacity as readers and writers. Two had Bachelor of Arts degrees, and one had a speech and drama qualification. Six had school leadership responsibilities related to literacy. Nearly all had been involved in some form of professional development related to the English learning area.

Nearly all of the e-fellows had been exploring literacy and e-Learning ideas related to their e-fellowship topic and experimenting with these ideas in their classrooms for several years prior to their fellowship.

The 2009 e-fellows included two teachers working at the New Entrants to Year 2 levels; four at the Years 3–4 levels; two at the Years 7–8 levels, and one taught English at Year 11.

Seven of the e-fellows taught in primary and intermediate schools, and two taught in secondary schools. This was representative of the applicants overall. Few teachers from secondary schools applied. The e-fellows’ schools ranged in size, decile, and composition. An overview of their characteristics is shown in Table 1.

The projects

The e-fellows’ projects were all situated in the learning areas of English, the Arts, and to a lesser degree, the Social Sciences. This was representative of the applicants for 2009 e-fellowships overall. Most of the applicants proposed projects in the English learning area.

Outlined below is a brief description of each of the e-fellows’ projects. In this report we refer to each teacher according to the class level of students they worked with during their e-Learning projects.

Connecting to picture books through student video dramatisations (New entrant teacher)

The new entrant teacher explored opportunities to interpret and analyse shared picture books when dramatising stories, podcasting, and making movies. She introduced a new picture book each week and integrated oral language, reading, writing, drama, and art into the learning around the book.

Sharing multi-media student stories via blogging (Year 2 teacher)

The Year 2 teacher explored ways to make the writing process more explicit to her students through the use of multi-modal language activities and visual planners. Students recorded verbal accounts or stories, rehearsed these with a “literacy buddy”, and then wrote and illustrated their stories. They then used the written texts and oral recordings to create a multi-media presentation which they shared with classmates and families via the classroom blog. Readers of the blog were encouraged to give students feedback on their finished product, which in several cases led to further revision of the accounts and stories.

Writing narratives and sharing stories as movies (Year 3 teacher)

The Year 3 teacher explored opportunities for meaning making provided by the task of producing a multi-modal story. Her students wrote narratives about a mischievous character—Pesky the Possum—introduced to them by the teacher, and then converted their stories into movies. The teacher chose a target group of five students to work with intensively and these students became class mentors who could help others with their work.

Retelling and sharing stories using web 2.0 tools (Year 3/4 teacher)

The Year 3/4 teacher focused on the use of face-to-face and on-line formative feedback to enhance the engagement and achievement of her students in narrative writing. Students created New Zealand-based adaptations of traditional fairy stories, which they posted on the class wiki for formative feedback through all stages of the drafting, writing, and publishing process. They added oral recordings of the stories and illustrations to create multi-media presentations.

Collaborative storytelling using blogs (Year 4 teacher)

The Year 4 teacher explored the opportunities literature circles provided her students to interpret and analyse text. Students read a series of texts, posted responses from the perspective of their literature circle roles on the class wiki and engaged in extended dialogue about their different interpretations.

Producing content for a regional TV station (Year 4–6 teacher)

The Year 4–6 teacher investigated the impact of authentic audience and authentic learning activity on student engagement and literacy achievement. She taught a group of students who were withdrawn from normal classes for one day each week to produce and create their own movies, and to work as producers, directors, presenters and crew producing items for the regional TV station that had its studio in one of the school buildings. Students worked collaboratively in production teams to script and shoot animated movies using school equipment. They also worked as part of a real production team, developing items for broadcast by the regional TV station.

Reading logs as reading blogs (Year 7/8 teacher)

The Year 7/8 teacher investigated how opportunities to blog about books, with the support of a mentor, might enhance the engagement of reluctant readers. Her blogging group consisted of students selected from across the school and included 10 confident readers working as mentors in a one-to-one relationship with 10 “reluctant” readers (the buddies). The buddies, with the help of their mentors, posted reviews of books they enjoyed on a blog, together with supplementary material such as photographs of the book cover, and podcasts of passages read from the book.

Dispositions of literacy learners engaged in e-Learning (Year 7/8 teacher)

The Year 7/8 teacher explored the learning dispositions demonstrated by her students as they engaged in an integrated study of Shackleton’s leadership in Antarctica supported by e-Learning activities. Students worked in groups to create a class film depicting Shackleton’s journey with each group responsible for one part using the genre and mode of their choice.

Use of blogs and online communities in English (Year 11 teacher)

The Year 11 teacher explored her students’ out-of-school use of blogs and class wikis to prepare and practice for an NZQA Achievement Standard in formal writing. The class wiki provided students with the topics and live links to resources for a range of formal writing topics. Students had the option of completing formal writing practice on individual student blogs or with pen and paper. The teacher explored the impact this approach had over time on student participation, engagement and literacy learning as illustrated in their production of formal writing.

Overview of the report structure

This report is organised by theme. In Chapter 2 we describe the literacy learning occurring in the e-fellows’ classrooms, and in Chapter 3 we focus on student engagement. In Chapter 4 we describe the conditions in which student learning occurred, and in Chapter 5, the conditions of teaching. In the final chapter of the report we summarise the key research findings and consider their implications.

Footnotes

4. Due to a car accident one of the e-fellowship winners was unable to participate in the research.
5. For more information on the e-fellowship programme, see the Ministry of Education website.
6. For recent work on multiliteracies and its application to the classroom, see Anstey & Bull (2006).
7. In this report we do not adhere to Gee’s (2008, p.154) convention of capitalising the “d” in discourse.
8. Meta-language is the language used to talk about language itself.
9. In the framework for literacy acquisition presented in Effective Literacy Practice books (MOE, 2003; 2006) the role ‘text user’ was subsumed into the role of ‘meaning maker’.
10. Complexity thinking is an interdisciplinary movement which draws a distinction between complicated and complex systems. In brief, complicated systems are those which can be reduced to the sum of their parts, such as machines, while complex systems are those made up of other dynamic and interrelated systems. Commonly cited examples of complex systems include cities, ecosystems, economies, and ant colonies. In the context of education complex systems are defined as systems that learn and produce new knowledge. Examples include brains, individuals, classroom collectives, and systems of knowledge such as English or science. Complexity thinking as it is applied to education, assumes that effective teachers work to occasion learning at the individual and collective levels simultaneously. For further information about complexity thinking as it applies to education, see Davis et al. (2008) and Davis & Sumara (2006).
11. A wiki is a website for creating and editing linked web pages.