LPLC Past Events
From July 2009 the LPLC Past Events page has now been combined with the Centre for Research in Education
- CREd Past Events -
Links to various audio and video files, papers and powerpoints are all available
LPLC Past Events (Jan-Jul 2009)
Research@Work Seminar Series
The Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures Research-at-work Seminar Series provides opportunities for: (a) academics to share what they are up to in their research projects: such as work in progress, problematisations, issues with analysis and theory building, methodological and ethical quandries; (b) post graduate students to present their latest writing to a supportive audience; and (c) visiting researchers to talk about their research work.
Research-at-work 2008 seminars
(With various files available for downloading)
Research-at-work 2007 seminars
(With various PowerPoints, papers and audio files available for downloading)
Research-at-work 2006 seminars
(With various files available for downloading)
Jerri Willett Seminar
Mutual Learning through a university/school partnership: Synergistic and sustainable model
Audio file of Jerri's talk |
 |
July 8th 2009
Over the last decade, teachers, teacher educators and educational researchers in the U.S. have been the target of harsh criticism by conservative reformers, who, in the name of greater accountability and higher achievement in schools, marginalized educators and educational researchers. These attacks and subsequent mandated reforms, such as scripted curriculum materials, devastated the morale of educators. Seeking to reclaim their voices, a group of school and university educators formed the ACCELA Alliance, a University-Schools Professional Development Partnership between Springfield, a low-performing, high poverty school district, and the Language, Literacy and Culture Concentration at the University of Massachusetts. In this partnership, teachers and faculty with the assistance of doctoral students worked together to document teaching and learning across the year with both mandated curriculum scripts and teacher-developed curriculum units. This presentation will describe the synergistic model of mutual learning that emerged, how it transformed relationships and identities among its members, and how their efforts improved learning and teaching. But it was the documentation of the children’s learning that enabled these educators to reclaim their voices in the conversations about educational reform. Drawing on the ACCELA model, the School of Education and the Springfield School District are currently expanding the partnership to incorporate additional programs and faculty from the School of Education and teachers and administrators from the Springfield School District. The goals of this expanded partnership will be to 1) recruiting, supporting and retaining teachers in high need subject areas, 2) provide seamless and articulated professional development across all stages of teacher development (pre-service, residency, induction and leadership), and 3) building coherence through negotiated core commitments and strategies.
Professor Jerri Willett has earned an international reputation for her groundbreaking work in the fields of language and literacy. For more than two decades, she has been a compelling advocate for the professional development of teachers of second language learners. Jerri spends countless hours in the schools, working with teachers in Holyoke and Springfield and mentoring students in the doctoral concentration. Her consistent presence in the lives of these public school teachers along with her dedication to improving the education of second language learners have been instrumental to the ACCELA Alliance's success. Professor Willet and her colleagues in the language and literacy concentration at UMass Amherst are currently working to expand the ACCELA program across the Commonwealth.
Ulf Lundström seminar
Dr Ulf Lundström
Umeå University, Sweden
Competition and its effects on upper-secondary schools: Perceptions of marketisation
LPLC audio and video recordings 2009 - including Ulf Lundström
Powerpoint presentation
18th February 2009
The Swedish education system has, since the end of 1980,
undergone major reforms and restructuring. Many of the recent
changes are in line with international policy trends, while others
are more specifically national. The development and expansion of
market solutions is one of the most important changes in Swedish
education in the last 30 years. It is a politically controversial
change in the light of the long tradition of social-democratic
education policy in Sweden.
This seminar will draw on findings from the project, Upper-secondary education as a market, into how the school market competition is perceived by three groups of actors in two Swedish regions: headmasters, counsellors and heads of municipality upper-secondary education administration. The projects aim was to analyse the occurrence of market solutions and market steering, the strategies towards them from involved actors, and their impact on upper-secondary education. The research is based on a broad range of data: statistical data, policy documents and information/marketing texts, questionnaires, interviews and observations. The aim of this study concerned two themes:
1. How the respondents perceive the strength of competition in their
municipality and
2. What they believe are the effects of increased school
competition, on students, staff and schools.
Ulf Lundström finished his doctoral thesis in educational
fieldwork in 2007 and since then has been working as a senior
lecturer in teacher education, Umeå University. Prior to this he
worked as a teacher and headmaster in upper-secondary schools for
more than 20 years. His research interests include teachers’ work
and professional development, school development and education
policy. Also organisation theory, leadership and reflective
practice. An overall driving force is to contribute to bridging the
gap between theory and practice.
Mike Corbett seminar
Associate Professor Mike Corbett
Acadia University
A Lens on Community: Video Ensemble Process in a Rural School
LPLC audio and video recordings 2009 - including Mike Corbett
Powerpoint presentation - to come!
23rd February 2009
In this seminar Mike will present some aspects of the
conceptualization and preliminary results from the first year of a
two-year action research project introducing digital video production in
a rural middle school classroom. This project brought a professional
film maker and performance artist into school to develop, with teachers,
a literacy project that seeks to teach video production as a complex
literacy rather than as a set of technical skills. The theoretical
foundation of the project is phenomenological and its methods are
qualitative focusing on reciprocity and direct knowledge transfer both
at the level of policy and particularly at the level of the practice of
research subjects/participants.
Understanding the impact of information and communication technology in
contemporary educational settings is an important focus for contemporary
educational research. At present, we know relatively little about how
children and youth use ICTs in their everyday lives. We know even less
about how ICT related literacies articulate with the kinds of literacy
expectations that students encounter in school. Even less again is known
about how rural children and youth use ICTs and how these technologies
shape their understanding and experience of place and schooling. It is
undeniable that information technologies have transformed rural
communities in the past decade, but there is little focused analysis of
how this transformation has changed the lives of young people living in
rural places.
This is an interesting and dynamic time in the history of schooling as
well as in the history of literacy. Globalization, radical mobility,
cultural hybridity, loosening of traditional habits and patterns (liquid
modernity), access to mobile communications devices, and ubiquitous
microcomputers are just a few of the key change forces that are
reshaping culture, society, politics, and the economy. Ironically, at
the same time that the scale and scope of contemporary literacies are
expanding outside schools, most educational jurisdictions have begun
(under the rubric of accountability) to assess literacy more narrowly in
terms of generic skills. This project analyses the tension between
traditional conception of literacy (pencil and paper reading and
writing) and emerging conceptions of multiple literacies analysing how
children, youth, teachers and parents manage this tension between the
expanding literacies they encounter in life and the narrowing
skills-based literacy expected in school, particularly in those schools
serving marginal populations.
Michael Corbett is Associate Professor at Acadia University in
Nova Scotia, Canada, where he teaches in the School of Education. His
research focuses on the dynamic and ambivalent relationship between life
in Atlantic Canadian rural/coastal communities and the structures and
processes of schooling.
Brown Bag Lunches
Friday 26 June
Dr Ian Goodwin-Smith
Lecturer, School of Psychology, Social Work & Social Policy
Reflections on Foucault
Twenty-five years after his death, Foucault’s influence permeates disparate and
innumerable fields and informs so much of our thinking. Foucault’s influence is
far reaching, interdisciplinary and complex, but he draws us together too,
providing a common theoretical baseline for diverse disciplinary endeavours.
Just as his life and his work connect theoretical pursuits as diverse as queer
theory and postcolonial studies, so his influence builds bridges between
theorists. Growing from the murky ferment of French colonial history, the father
of post-structuralism’s story is as complex as that encounter, and his legacy is
as unsettling and transformative.
Ian will present a version of a paper delivered the day prior to this session at
a conference that he is coordinating. He will discuss some of the merits and
pitfalls of the concepts he advocates in the paper in terms of getting some
traction as an ECR. He will also shed some light on why anyone would want to run
a conference or do any of the things that might be seen as outside a
researcher’s job description.
Post-PhD Wisdom
Anyone who has finished a PhD will have a pretty clear sense of what they would
have done differently and how they could have made the whole ordeal easier. But
there’s also the business of how they could have harnessed the process more to
make their futures easier as well. This presentation makes some painfully
obvious points about keeping an eye on an academic future while you’re in the
academic present, but they’re points worth a moment’s thought.
Dr. Ian Goodwin-Smith is a lecturer in social theory and social policy at the University of South Australia. His research interests orbit around postcolonial theory and social policy; and he has a particular interest in new theoretical directions for progressive politics with a focus on culture, social identity, subjectivity and social democratic citizenship, as well as an interest in critiques of expertise and professionalism.