Highlighted Session: Teaching amidst a changing landscape of literacy ideologies, expectations, curricula, and pedagogies

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

Drawing on empirical work in three country settings, this panel will consider the diverse experiences of teachers across changing landscapes of literacy ideologies, expectations, curricula, and pedagogies. Literacy continues to grow in prominence as a priority of education donors, program designers, and policymakers worldwide. Particularly in multilingual contexts, teachers’ efforts to navigate varied, and sometimes competing, language ideologies and local practices in communities alongside the official language policies of government are underappreciated and underexplored. On one hand, teachers are positioned as the “final brokers” (Spillane 2010) of new literacy policies and “exercise substantial discretion” in how they get interpreted and enacted through classroom curricula, the language of instruction, and pedagogy (Lipsky 2010). On the other hand, teachers’ labor is shaped and structured by the social, political, and economic environments within which they live and work. Research too often limits teachers’ to the role of individual implementers, acting alone, and disregards the relationships and communities that shape their labor. We need deeper explorations of teachers’ labor’s social and material conditions, how they make sense of and respond to new demands, their expectations and approaches, and how new curricular materials, textbooks, and training mesh with their lived experiences. Only this type of inquiry can fully capture teachers’ agency in education policy reform generally and policies related to language and literacy specifically. The research encompassed in this panel hopes to move us toward a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of teachers’ perspectives and experiences.

Papers 1 and 2 of the panel explore these issues in the context of Uganda. First, Lindsey Allene Hall analyzes significant shifts in literacy curricula that have taken place in Uganda over the past ten years. Her paper, “Examining Discourses of Writing and Writing Instruction in Ugandan Primary Education Curriculum,” focuses on new curricular materials created at primary level and asks how writing and writing instruction are positioned in these materials designed for teacher and pupil everyday instructional use. Utilizing a content analysis approach (Neuendorf, 2002), Hall uncovers evidence of what Graham and colleagues refer to as “the homogenization of writing instruction” (2021, p. 920), in which writing instructional practices with specific evidence derived from one learning context, are presumed to be relevant and applied in another very different learning context. Her research also highlights the potential emergence of new discourses surrounding writing and the purposes of writing in the lower primary curriculum.

Jonathan Marino’s paper, “Working conditions as policy mediators: Exploring teachers’ enactment of early grade reading reforms in Uganda”, focuses on the same set of reforms in Uganda, but shifts attention to the ways social and material conditions of teaching influence how teachers take-up these new literacy curricula and pedagogies. Drawing on classroom observations, a teacher survey, and teacher interviews in government primary schools across three districts, Marino’s research shows how working conditions mediate teachers’ policy enactment in myriad ways: A shortage of textbooks forces teachers to spend time and resources copying reading passages; low salaries push teachers to take on additional jobs outside of school; frequency teacher transfers across schools and grade levels limited their ability to implement trainings they received; Long commutes to and from school gave teachers little time or energy to prepare themselves for new lesson plans or provide formative feedback to students, as new reading curricula asked them to do. These findings contribute to the limited literature on teachers’ working conditions, and the even smaller research base that links working conditions to teacher implementation of new policy reforms.

In Paper 3, “Exploring teachers’ enactment of micro language policies in two different learning contexts in Nairobi, Kenya,” Saida Mohamed presents a multi-sited ethnographic study that highlights ways in which teachers disrupt language policies that alienate students. Mohamed traces how teachers positioned themselves “at the heart of language policy” as they made their classrooms semi-autonomous spaces where they had the power to make room for marginalized languages through translanguaging (Vogel & García, 2017), code-switching (Arthur, 2001), and curricular revisions (Brown, 2008) all in an effort to make literacy content accessible to students who spoke a language that was not part of the school language and whose languages were considered marginal to be captured in government demographics for purposes of macro policies. In this way, Mohamed’s study provides an example of the ways teachers of children in diverse learning contexts can contest hegemonic language and literacy policies and enact policies that provide access to the curriculum for all learners.

Finally, in Paper 4, “​​Gateway Crossing: Writing Education for the New Mainstream in the Pipeline to a Four-Year College,” Antonella Pappolla extends the discussion to a different age demographic and regional context: a two-year college in the United States. While much attention has been paid in recent years to early literacy, many countries have centered reading and writing education as a critical policy lever at the higher education level. As the opportunities to access higher education have improved for socially and linguistically minoritized students, concerns about students’ readiness for college-level writing have fueled English language and writing courses for those perceived as “underprepared.” At the same time, evidence that students placed in so-called “remedial” classes tend to give up on higher education has prompted a series of policies to remove remediation altogether or accelerate students’ transition into college-level courses. Drawing on a case study of writing instruction in a two-year college in the midwestern United States, Pappolla’s paper, “Language Education for the ‘New Mainstream’ amidst Anti-Remedial Reforms: Evidence from a Two-Year College”, discusses preliminary ethnographic data from English teachers and students enrolled in courses pre-required for English 1, the gatekeeper course that fulfills the college writing requirement across U.S. colleges and universities. Pappolla’s study seeks to analyze how two-year college English teachers interpret and enact language and literacy standards, which represent a racial and socioeconomic majority, as they adapt (or do not adapt) to a “new mainstream” of higher education seekers.

Sub Unit

• Global Literacy SIG

Chair

• Jonathan Marino, UW-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Examining Discourses of Writing and Writing Instruction in Ugandan Primary Education Curriculum - Lindsey A. Hall, Michigan State University

• Working conditions as policy mediators: Exploring teachers’ enactment of early grade reading reforms in Uganda - Jonathan Marino, UW-Madison

• Exploring teachers’ enactment of micro language policies in two different learning contexts in Nairobi, Kenya - Saida Mohamed

• Gateway Crossing: Writing Education for the New Mainstream in the Pipeline to a Four-Year College - Antonella Pappolla, University of Wisconsin Madison

Discussant

• Bethany Wilinski, Michigan State University