Imagining Literacy: Teachers and Children Finding Time and Space in a Crowded Curriculum

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Abstract

Objective: In this paper we present initial imaginings of what might be possible when teachers and children work together to design locally relevant curriculum. In the current context of accountability as testing and increasingly high definition curriculum, we ask what teachers and children might achieve when they explicitly foreground the classroom as a negotiated space, one where a sense of belonging is worked into being as children learn to read and write their worlds.

Perspectives and theoretical framework: According to Massey (2005), classrooms are always negotiated, and as such they will never be spaces of neutrality. By this we mean that classrooms are more than containers for teachers and children. Instead, they are a complex network of negotiation. As such the curriculum and classroom discourse can be designed in ways that overtly encourage a sense of belonging and ownership, and foster substantive participation. The cases presented in this paper demonstrate that this is not only possible, but also necessary if we are to achieve a socially just approach to schooling.

Methods: In order to explicate possibilities for alternatives to the current logics of curriculum, we worked with 4 teacher-researchers in two states to explore ways in which working with place and space as resources for children’s learning might enable all children to participate actively in the curriculum. Our small-scale collaborative inquiry invited teachers to weave possibilities for students to imagine into literacy tasks. The project involved: collaboratively designing and planning a unit of work; negotiating and implementing the curriculum; collecting artifacts; and, debriefing on the enacted curriculum and analyzing student artifacts.

Data sources: Participants included four teachers, three who taught in primary schools and one who worked in the middle years of schooling, and the children in their classes. The data includes records of planning and collaborative discussions, photos and field notes of learning activities, artifacts of the children’s engagement in the units planned which include sprint, visual and moving texts.

Results: Each teacher designed and negotiated curriculum and pedagogy that fostered significant participation for students to accomplish something new together. We believe that there is enough evidence in these case studies to suggest that locally crafted curriculum, that foregrounds explicitly the process of negotiation and of creating spaces of belonging for children in current classrooms is possible. To keep our collective educational imaginations alive we must continue to enliven the teaching profession with discussions of learning, belonging, questioning and resisting.

Scholarly significance of the study: We assert that imagining, negotiating and documenting pedagogies of belonging is politically significant in the contemporary policy landscape of standardized testing and regulated curriculum. We argued that this is particularly important in literacy education given the increasingly multilingual diversity of students and the affordances of changing digital communications.

Authors

• Barbara M. Comber, University of South Australia

• Annette Woods, Queensland University of Technology