Recapturing a "Praxis" Orientation in Educational Practice: Expanding the Local Through Technologies in Kindergarten Literacy

• In Event: 70.065 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 70.065-6 - Rewriting and Retheorizing Literacies in Early Childhood

Abstract

This paper brings together three dynamic representations of educational practice: i) the ever expanding presence of technology in everyday literacy practices, ii) the resurgence of practice theories as resources for understanding contemporary pedagogical work, and iii) historical understandings of ‘praxis’. To do this, the paper draws on five in-depth case studies of the changing practice landscape in Kindergarten classrooms in a rural region in Australia. It specifically examines how participants (teachers, students and leaders) adjust ‘everyday’ literacy practices and orient to a praxis stance to account for their teaching and learning decisions as technologies expand the ‘local’ in their everyday literacy work. It will show how different cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements are made visible in Kindergarten literacy practices.

Author

• Christine Edwards-Groves, Charles Sturt University