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Mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers' work: An institutional ethnography : LRDG seminar

Date: 16 February 2010 Time: 1-2pm

Venue: Institute for Advanced Studies Meeting Room 1

Barbara Comber, University of South Australia

Mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers' work: An institutional ethnography

My broad project as a researcher has been to document the complex work teachers do in schools situated in low socio-economic areas. In particular I have described how they work with children to make meaning through innovative critical literacy curriculum incorporating the arts and multi-media to represent themselves and their places. My passion has been to capture school-situated literacies which are enabling and to this end I have studied teachers who conjure 'spaces of freedom' in pursuing a social justice agenda. In the context of a seemingly global preoccupation with standard measures of literacy performance, my colleagues and I are currently investigating mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers' work in South Australia, Victoria and Ontario, Canada through an institutional ethnography approach (Griffith & Smith, 2005; Smith, 1987, 2005). In this presentation I will briefly review key insights from my work with teachers in high poverty schools about enabling literacy pedagogies before turning to the current study.

Barbara Comber is a key researcher in the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures in the Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia. She has recently co-edited 2 books Literacies in place: Teaching environmental communication (Comber, Nixon & Reid, 2007) and Turn-around pedagogies: Literacy interventions for at-risk students (Comber & Kamler, 2005).

Event website: http://www.literacy.lancs.ac.uk

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Who can attend: Anyone