Investigating student teachers’ presentations of literacy and literacy pedagogy in a complex context

Abstract

The field of literacy and primary literacy education is patterned by multiple discourses and this raises challenges for those educating the next generation of primary literacy teachers. In England, the last 15 years have seen considerable levels of prescription in the primary literacy curriculum and compliance by the school and teacher education sectors has been enforced through demanding accountability regimes. In this paper, we draw on findings of a small-scale interview study to consider how understandings of literacies associated with different contexts may or may not inflect student-teachers' orientations towards literacy provision in school. We explore how five student-teachers presented their experiences of literacy within and beyond the classroom and how they seemed to position themselves in relation to literacy pedagogy. We focus particularly on continuities and discontinuities between literacies in their personal and professional lives, and on tensions they identified between the teachers they felt they wanted to, and were expected to, become. Reflecting on this work, we consider how we can best equip pre-service primary and early years teachers to develop as critical reflective literacy practitioners in the current context.

Closing the gap? Overcoming limitations in sociomaterial accounts of early literacy

“…Importantly, deficit perspectives do not provide the only ways in which educators understand what children do. Teachers’ perspectives are often framed by multiple and seemingly conflicting discourses of childhood, literacy and education and these intersect in complex ways (Alsup, 2006; Burnett et al., 2015). For instance, teachers may be just as likely to celebrate children’s creativity and wellbeing as they are to foreground specific skills (or the lack of them), and certainly focusing on what children can do (rather than what they cannot) has led to empowering approaches to literacy provision (e.g.…”