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LRDG meetings held in 2005

11 Jan - Nell Steward, Programme Area Leader, Access to Learning, Adult College in Lancaster

A Virtual Dialogue

18 Jan - Book Discussion

Chapter from Scollon and Scollon 'Discourses in place'

25 Jan - David Barton and Karin Tusting

'Are people really 'hard to reach'? Purpose and participation in community setting'

1 Feb - David Barton and Karin Tusting

Are people REALLY hard to reach?: Discussion

8 Feb - Vicky Duckworth, The Oldham College

Issues Surrounding Progression in Skills for Life

15 Feb - Mary Hamilton, Educational Research, Lancaster University

From On The Move to The Gremlins: Analysing Media Campaigns for Literacy

22 Feb - Jeremy Bateman, Learning Support Tutor, Adult College Lancaster

A Brief Study of Skills for Life Training and Readiness at an Adult College

1 Mar - Sue Parkin, Linguistics, Lancaster University

What can clauses do for me?

8 March 2005 - Carol Tomlin, University of Central England

A Discourse Analysis of Black Preaching style: Interpreting the Biblical Texts

15 Mar - Sue Bloxham and Amanda West, St Martin's College

Helping Sport Studies students understand the rules of the game: a case study in raising achievement in student writing

19 Apr - Sue Walters

Emergent Bilingual Children and Learning to Read – From Deficit and Disadvantaged to Discontinuities and now Syncretism

26 Apr- Alix Jordanova, NRDC

Enlightenment, education and acculturation: a contract for citizenship?

3 May - Uta Papen and Sue Walters

Literacy, learning and health: literacy and ESOL students' health-related reading and writing practices

10 May - Karin Tusting

Written intertextuality and the construction of Catholic identity

17 May - Sue Parkin and Susan Dray, Lancaster University

Applying Ideas from ‘Discourses in Place’ to Our Own Research

24 May - Jeremy Bateman

Introducing the General Election to Students with Learning Difficulties/ Disabilities

31 May - Theresa Lillis, Open University

Exploring the impact of literacy brokers in the production of English medium academic texts by multilingual scholars

7 June - Zoe Fowler

Putting 'Literacy Practices' into Practice

The purpose of this paper is to explore the key concept of ‘literacy practices’ in relation to the Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project’s research into students’ uses of reading and writing in their everyday lives and in their learning across a wide range of Further Education curriculum areas. The concept of ‘literacy practices’ is not unproblematic: this paper highlights some of the problems that we are running, or might run, into through our use of this term.

14 June - Amy Burgess, Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University

Discussant: David Russell, Iowa State University

The Life and Times of the Individual Learning Plan:
How a text mediates across timescales and represents time

I am carrying out an ethnographic study of the writing development of students in three adult literacy classes. My paper will focus on the students' Individual Learning Plans (ILPs) and other related data, showing how these data illustrate an important theoretical theme in my research: namely the relationship between literacy and time. I will start by discussing the significance of time, timing and timescales in the practices in which the ILP plays a part. I will then consider the ILP as a text, focussing on how it represents time, timing and timescales.

21 June - Carmen Lee, Lancaster University

Instant Messaging Practices among University Students in Hong Kong: A Preliminary Analysis

There have been increasing concerns about the negative impact of electronic communication systems, such as mobile phone texting and instant messaging (IM), on students' language standards. My research aims to address this issue by studying the literacy practices of using ICQ and MSN Messenger among university students in Hong Kong. In this talk, I will present sets of practices identified in my data (drawing on chat logs, interviews, observations, and logbook data). Preliminary findings suggest that, in addition to chatting online, the informants are simultaneously engaged in other activities. The concept of 'polyfocality' (Scollon et al. 1999), along with other emerging themes from the initial data analysis, will also be discussed.

11 Oct - Susan Dray, Roz Ivanic, Candice Satchwell, Lancaster University

Discourses in (other) places

We will apply the analytical concepts offered by the Scollons' book 'Discourses in Place' to two very different types of data. Susan will reanalyse public signs which she photographed in Jamaica, and compare the insights offered with those she gained from her previous analysis. Roz and Candice will explore the usefulness of the approach for analysing literacy texts and practices observed in a real work environment for Catering and Hospitality courses.  In this way we will open up discussion both of our own data and of the strengths and weaknesses of the theoretical framework.

18 Oct - Rebecca O’Rourke, University of Leeds

"Anything but teach" : Situating Creative Writing in Education

The refusal, of students and tutors alike, to see creative writing courses as sites of teaching was just one of the contradictions highlighted by the ethnographic study of contemporary creative writing policy and practices in the UK undertaken by Rebecca O'Rourke throughout the 1990s. This seminar will outline the scope of her research into local cultures of writing and her argument that the recent legitimation of creative writing as both popular arts activity and emergent discipline in education, especially in higher education, rests on an uncritical recourse to education as gateway to and guarantor of both a more democratic cultural policy in which culture is foregrounded as a means of social regeneration. The hostility towards an educational explanation of creative writing activities raises interesting questions about the relationship between education and creative writing and the sense that practitioners and participants make for themselves about their practices.

Rebecca O'Rourke is the author of Creative Writing: Education, culture and community, published in July 2005 by NIACE. She has organised and taught creative writing courses in adult education since the late 1970s, worked in community publishing and writing development prior to joining the University of Leeds in 1992 and writes and publishes fiction.

25 Oct - Jonathan Tummons, Lancaster University

Exploring literacy practices amongst trainee teachers in the post-compulsory sector

For many teachers and trainers in PCET, teacher-training programmes provide a first encounter with higher education. Trainees’ experiences are becoming established as an area of research drawing on socially situated learning theory, which posits learning as being in some ways characterised by participation in particular Discourses. Put simply, how do trainee FE lecturers, learn to talk the talk of higher education? How do they learn to talk as and with students whilst still talking as and with teachers? Do these Discourses have any common ground?

Drawing on an ongoing exploratory investigation of teacher training students, this seminar sets out a working framework for analysing these, and other, questions by exploring some of the literacy events encountered by the trainee teacher.  The trainees are all part-time students, who are working towards Fento-accredited awards, whilst teaching part- or full-time within further education. The paper will focus on literacy events and practices within the genre of teacher training and within the institutions that shape their community.

26 Oct - SPECIAL MEETING - Mary Hamilton, Lancaster University

Campus Discourses Workshop

Please bring your photos of signs around the campus to this special meeting. This will be a participative workshop where we will discuss the pictures people have taken, why and where, and see if we can apply the Scollon and Scollon Discourses in Place frameworks to them. We will also think about how we can write this up as a project to go onto the LLRC website.

1 Nov - Ian Cheffy, Lancaster University

Exploring the Meaning of Literacy in a Neo-Literate Community in Cameroon

In this presentation, Ian will discuss his work in progress researching the meaning of literacy in Cameroon. His research site, which he will be visiting for the first time later in November, is the Mofu-Gudur language group, a community whose awareness of literacy as a means of communication dates back no more than a century. Literacy in Mofu became possible only 20 years ago when an orthography was developed for the language for the first time. Even today, few children complete their primary education and only some 15% of adults are able to read and write in Mofu or any other language used in the area.
 
After outlining his theoretical basis which lies in the view of literacy as a social and communicative practice, Ian will refer to related studies from Namibia, Mexico and elsewhere, before describing his methodological approach which will draw on ethnography, grounded theory and discourse analysis. He will survey the range of possibilities of what literacy may mean to the Mofu people and suggest ways in which his research may be of practical application to adult literacy programmes in this and similar areas.

8 Nov - Tim Shortis, AQA A Level English Language Chief Examiner, Institute of Education, University of London

‘Unlicensed variation’ in Unregimented Writing: the case of orthography in adolescents’ use of txt.

This session reports on continuing research on adolescents’ orthographic choices in txt, both sms texting and msn (MSN Messenger). Using a small corpus along with interviews and analysis, txt is examined in relation to its features, patterns and to possible theoretical perspectives.

15 Nov - Erik Borg, Northumbria University

Academic Writing in Fine Arts Practice

A cluster of ideas inform our current understanding of writing: that writing has purpose; that texts and purposes belong to the discourse community and only secondarily to the writer, and that advanced literacy involves the enculturation into a writing community. Doctoral study in Fine Arts Practice suggests that the general applicability of some of these concepts might be questioned. This talk, based on an on-going study of writing in the arts, will describe academic writing in Fine Arts Practice, and the writing requirements for the relatively new qualification of Ph.D. In this discourse community, students and supervisor are still negotiating the form and purpose of a text in a discourse community that primarily creates in other semiotic modes than writing. Some of the difficulties of writing in this context will be discussed, as well as possible implications for writing in other contexts

22 Nov - Julia Davies, University of Sheffield

Academic Blogging: Playing with affordances online

This presentation will report from an ongoing auto-ethnographic study of blogging. It centres on the first hand experience of an academic blogger, her digital writing and online publishing and will describe the ways in which an emerging affinity group (Gee, 2005) or online community seems to be defined
through language, hyperlinks, images and other textual devices. The
production and consumption of blogs is seen as a new form of social practice, depending upon new kinds of writing and meaning making which reconfigure relationships and even engender new ways of looking at the world. In relation to this, the presentation will also look at a website (www.Flickr.com) which has strongly impacted on the researcher and developed her sense of visual Literacies in a world where technology is becoming embedded in the ways people live their lives and helping them to develop new ways of seeing.

Gee, J.P. (2005) A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

6 Dec - Graham Mort, Lancaster University

Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders is a British Council-funded Creative Writing distance learning scheme for emergent African writers. The scheme is the biggest and most sustained literature development project ever mounted by the British Council. It involves over 200 writers from 8 African countries and
25 writers from the UK. It led directly to the Beyond Borders literature festival in Kampala in October 2005, involving writers from
17 Anglophone African countries.
Other spin-offs relating to the project include an international writing residency at Lancaster University, new writing commissions by BBC world service radio, and a new Faber & Faber book of African short stories.
This seminar will present an overview of the project including:
pedagogical, linguistic, cultural and IT infrastructure challenges
distance learning in Creative Writing pedagogy
the postcolonial climate in Africa for creative writers
the relationship between postgraduate provision in Creative Writing at Lancaster to the methodology of the project
the Crossing Borders website and its resources
the Beyond Borders festival and its colloquia
the relationship of action research to academic research
the challenges of sustaining project partnerships and an international profile in pedagogy and research in Creative Writing at Lancaster

Colleagues wishing to attend this seminar might find it useful
to look at the project website first:

www.crossingborders-africanwriting.org

13 Dec - Panagiota (Jo) Angouri, Department of Language and Linguistics,
University of Essex

Educational exclusion Or The case of Greek Roma in Thessaloniki

The number of Roma in Greece is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate accurately. Some official sources report 150,000-200,000 Greek Roma while others, mainly NGO’s, consider the population to be approximately in the range of 250,000-300,000. In Thessaloniki there are approximately 7,000 Greek Roma. A small part of the population is integrated into mainstream Greek society but a considerable percentage lives segregated, under the poverty line and in appalling conditions.
This paper reports on some of the findings of a 5 year ethnographic study of Greek Roma communities in Thessaloniki, focusing on the problems the Greek Roma face with respect to education. Specifically, it outlines the factors which contribute to the communities’ continuing exclusion from the education system and result in up to 70% of the Greek Roma being illiterate to this day. The interrelated issue of the attitudes of Greek Roma towards the Greek and Romani language will also be briefly discussed.
This paper will close by emphasising the urgent need to update the country’s education provision in order to meet the needs of Greek Roma students.