Boys, Early Literacy and Children’s Rights in a Postcolonial Context


Book Description

This book explores boys’ underachievement in literacy in early years education in Malta, using the dual lens of children’s rights and postcolonial theory. The author confronts issues in literacy attainment, early literacy learning and transitions to formal schooling with a case study from Malta. The book includes the voices of young boys who experience formal education from the age of five and adds a fresh perspective to existing literature in this area. Drawing on empirical research, the book traces the impact of foundational ideas of gender and early childhood, and makes practical recommendations to help young children experience socially just literacy education. This timely text will be highly relevant for researchers, educators and policymakers in the fields of literacy education, early childhood education, postcolonial education and children’s rights.




Early Literacy For Under-Fives


Book Description

Embracing a multi-modal approach to early literacy, this textbook supports students as aspiring early years professionals with their understanding of early reading for under-fives and the critical links to language, literacy, and learning. This book looks at early literacy in all its forms including mark-making, sharing stories, making music and covers the breadth of literacy learning opportunities that take place outdoors and in museums, art galleries and more. With chapters on phonics, the deficit model, digital literacies and storytelling, this book is packed with everything you need to support you on your degree and help you to develop into a literacy advocate for under-fives. This key text features individual chapter overviews that enable you to review and rethink, activities that bring theory into practice, and engaging case studies to provoke deeper thought. With reflection points, and ′review and rethinking pedagogy′ sections, this interactive book emphasises the importance of engaging young children with early literacy activities.




Boys, Early Literacy and Children's Rights in a Postcolonial Context


Book Description

This book explores boys' underachievement in literacy in early years education in Malta, using the dual lens of children's rights and postcolonial theory. The author confronts issues in literacy attainment, early literacy learning and transitions to formal schooling with a case study from Malta. The book includes the voices of young boys who experience formal education from the age of five and adds a fresh perspective to existing literature in this area. Drawing on empirical research, the book traces the impact of foundational ideas of gender and early childhood, and makes practical recommendations to help young children experience socially just literacy education. This timely text will be highly relevant for researchers, educators and policymakers in the fields of literacy education, early childhood education, postcolonial education and children's rights.




Literacy Practices in Sports and Coaching


Book Description

This book addresses the ways in which literacy skills, including both reading and writing instruction, are introduced, reinforced, reviewed, and refined in a sports or physical education setting. While there has been significant research that highlights the academic benefits of sports participation and the use of sports programming and units for literacy instruction in the classroom, there is limited research regarding the literacy practices that occur as a direct part of sports participation. This book addresses this crucial gap in the scholarship. The argument presented in this manuscript contends that a number of literacy skills and competencies are taught in and through a number of sports programs and explores how they are effectively and naturally integrated into structured athletics/sports programming. Addressing engagement with literacy skills and competencies in a unique setting, it provides a new lens from which readers can view reading and writing. This book will be of critical interest to scholars and researchers with interests in literacy education and sports education, as well as instructional coaches, sports coaches, literacy educators, health and physical education teachers, middle and secondary educators, and administrators.




Teaching with Dystopian Text


Book Description

Teaching with Dystopian Text propounds an exchange of spatial to pedagogical practices centered around “Orwellian Spaces,” signaling a new utility for teaching with dystopian texts in secondary education. The volume details the urgency of dystopian texts for secondary students, providing theoretical frameworks, classroom examples and practical research. The function of dystopian texts, such as George Orwell’s 1984, as social and political critique is demonstrated as central to their power. Teaching with Dystopian Text: Exploring Orwellian Spaces for Student Empowerment and Resilience makes a case that dystopian texts can be instrumental in the transfer of spatial practices to pedagogical practices. Pedagogical application creates links between the text and the student through defamiliarization, connecting the student to practices of resistance in the space of the classroom. The volume also addresses the challenges of teaching dystopian text in a dystopian educational climate including the COVID-19 lockdown. In addition to appealing to scholars and researchers of literacy education, language education and dystopian text, this book will also be a powerful yet accessible resource for secondary teachers as they address dystopian concerns with students in the complicated twenty-first century.




Critical Perspectives on Global Literacies


Book Description

This book offers critical perspectives on global literacies, connecting research, theory, and practice. An emerging concept in the literacy field, many scholars agree on the need for students to develop global literacies, yet few agree on a widely accepted definition. Based on a synthesis of the literature, the editors formulate a definition of global literacies with four dimensions, including: literacy as a human right in all nations around the world; critical reading and creation of multimodal texts about global issues; intercultural communication and reciprocal collaboration with globally diverse others; and transformative action for social and environmental justice that traverses borders. Taking this shared, proposed definition as a starting point, the chapters then offer contextualized examples of global literacies from K-12 and teacher education classrooms to make explicit links between research and practice. The contributors interact with and interrogate the book’s definition of global literacies using a common framework of critical theory. As such, this book provides both emerging and established scholars with critical frameworks for positioning global literacies in ways that are relevant, dynamic, and forward thinking.




Digital Literacies and Interactive Media


Book Description

This text responds to changing literacy practices in the digital age by developing an interdisciplinary framework for analysis of digital content created by students. Drawing on scholarship that expands traditional understandings of literacy to account for new ways in which students engage with interactive text and media, Aguilera develops a methodological toolkit for formal analysis of multimodal representations. This book frames the central challenges faced by researchers entering the field of digital literacy studies, presents a nuanced discussion of digital mediation, and brings these topics to life in the case study of a Code Club, a library-based computer programming club for elementary, middle, and high school students. The three-dimensional framework, which offers a schema for analysis of multimodal content, computational procedures, and contextual factors involved in the creation and interpretation of digital content, serves as a much-needed framework for the critical analysis of digital multimodal composition. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in the areas of language and literacy, multimodality, and technology and digital innovation in education.




A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty


Book Description

The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.




Voices of the Other


Book Description

This book offers a variety of approaches to children's literature from a postcolonial perspective that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism. The eighteen essays divide into three sections: Theory, Colonialism, Postcolonialism. The first section sets the theoretical framework for postcolonial studies; essays here deal with issues of "otherness" and cultural difference, as well as the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice. These essays confront our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of our authority and control. Section 2 presents discussions of the colonialist mind-set in children's and young adult texts from the turn of the century. Here works by writers of animal stories in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, works of early Australian colonialist literature, and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess come under the scrutiny of our postmodern reading practices. Section 3 deals directly with contemporary texts for children that manifest both a postcolonial and a neo-colonial content. In this section, the longest in the book, we have studies of children's literature from Canada, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.




Children


Book Description

Offering a serious and sustained philosophical examination of children's rights, David Archard provides a clear and accessible introduction to the topic. The second edition is fully revised and updated and include a new preface and two new chapters.