The ‘four contextual
domains’:
Everyday Starting points:
diverse & open ended; Working with the contexts prior knowledge &
understandings; roles & relationships; interactivng with others primarily
through spoken language; ‘personal
growth literacy’
Applied Gaining control of specific kinds of
expertise; using specific skills, based on acquired expertise;
apprenticeship role; using spoken and written language to enable experience or
activity; ‘skills literacy’
Theoretical Accessing
dominant forms of knowledge & semiosis; assimilating & reproducing
the contents of specialised knowledge based on educational learning; becoming
part of member of a discipline; producing & interpreting epistemic texts; ‘specialised literacy’
Reflexive Negotiating social
diversity and competing discourses; questioning the taken-for-granted
understandings of specialised knowledge, based on alternative perspectives;
challenging and reconstituting roles in a world of social diversity; recons
truing meanings through different media, ‘critical
literacy’
Implications for my teaching means that while critical
literacy is important it cannot be achieved without engaging students in
mainstream/specialised literacy practices. Students need to be explicitly
taught those literacy skills that will help them to be able to create their own texts, process their own and other
texts meaning and analyse text before they can critique texts (54).
Outline of author’s
model of students’ path towards critical literacy:
1.
access to a range of contextualisation practices in their reading and writing. Students
need to make informed decisions about which occasions warrant a critical or
more mainstream reading. They need to know the parameters of a text - the terms that make ‘it’ obvious - before
they can recontextualise it.
2.
Develop meta-level
awareness of texts & the
practices that provide the concrete evidence – students need to be able to
recognise a text’s topic, identify its implied author and readership and
comment on its rhetorical features. Students need to have multiple experiences (and taught the skills) ‘which enable them to distance themselves from
texts’ (57).
3.
Acquire both of the above within visible
pedagogies marked by explicitness. Using
focused reading of model texts (structures and features), joint construction of
class texts, immersion in texts that are intertextually relevant to different learning
contexts.
Issues of interest in
the students’ study and writing in the IVF unit:
·
Teacher used students prior knowledge and
personal experience as initial
provocation
·
Review earlier work so all students have a
common knowledge base
·
Visual literacy – diagrams, labelling, technical
terms = which brought a new intertextuality
into play...students personal experience with technical recontextualisation (an
applied intertextuality)
·
Explanations, tables, videos , note taking (all
of these are activities are building upon the prior knowledge of previous
lessons)
·
Students are also scaffolded in their
independence – beginning with small group work, before moving to independent
work
·
Refocusing on text type – e.g. the explanation –
from the content, the language now becomes the field of study; looking at differences
between genres (eventually narrowing to two text types)
o
Explicit focus on matching examples of genre with its social
purpose
·
Outlining: Continued modelling by teacher of
text (breaking it down into its component stages/technical language)
·
Student draft explanations in groups
·
Students write final drafts independently
(following editing by teacher).
·
THROUGHOUT WHOLE PROCESS STUDENT LEARNING &
UNDERSTANDINGS IS SCAFFOLDED TO BUILD UPON THEIR EXPERIENCES AND KNOWLEDGE AS
THE UNIT PROGRESSES.
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