Looking at student teachers' assignments in an educational foundations course, we explore the function of vicarious experience in relation to several candidates' practical knowledge. Finding that students could develop resonance-type responses to a multitude of segments from autobiographical works, we explore what can be recognized about the usefulness of such responses in relation to particular students' practical knowledge and action. Three hypotheses are developed concerning the connections we recognized among vicarious experience, resonance, and practical knowledge.Did you ever cry at the movies? Do you find it hard to turn off the TV in the middle of a suspense thriller? If your answer to such questions is "yes," do you also maintain that such vicarious experiences have nothing to do with the way you live your life? Or, do you suspect that your experience of a work of art (good or bad) is intimately connected to what you have to offer in daily life and academically? We are not debating these issues directly in this article, but they are an important context for our work. We believe that connections between vicarious experiences and practice are likely. We want to explore them here by focusing on student teachers' interactions with experiential autobiographical writing. If the experience of even small slices of such works intimately connects to a student teacher's practical knowledge and action, it is of primary importance in teacher education, not in the sense of literary education, but in the sense of teacher development.

This paper highlights the various roles and influences of a particular text form: the timetable pasted unassumingly on the wall of a residential home for children. It provides examples of literacy events that take place around the ubiquitous timetable and how through these events, the social dynamics of its residents and those around them are constructed and enforced. An important aspect of institutional life, the timetable “regulates the home's residents' daily patterns by structuring their time so that they move from one set of skills to another throughout the day”. In addition, it becomes the ‘invisible monitor’ in the absence of the home's supervisor, as though ‘empowered’ with authority to dictate the children's actions. In other words, the timetable proves to have dominant control over the daily practices of those living in residential care.

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This paper presents an ethnographic study of the out of school literacy practices of children living in residential care in Malaysia. Although residential homes generate much publicity, especially during the festive seasons, not much is known about the children living within the confines of these homes. Even more lacking is research on their literacy practices, despite the embeddedness of literacy in the everyday lives of these children, which includes formal schooling, after-school tuition classes and devotion sessions with volunteers.

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