LEONIE ROWAN ASSIGNMENT 2ETL411 CURRICULUM THROUGH LITERACY Student No*: s239638

1. Powerfully Literate at
Lillydale
Assignment 2 for
ETL411 Teaching the Curriculum 1 / Integrating
Literacy
Leonie Rowan

2. Welcome
• Thanks for taking the time
read these materials
• For those who I haven’t
really met, I am a new
teacher at Lillydale Primary
School in Logan on the Gold
Coast of Queensland. I
teach year four students
and I LOVE everything to do
with reading.

3. Welcome
• That’s a coincidence because….as
we know, 2012 is the National
Year of Reading in Australia.
• Probably because I am always
walking around with my head in a
book (or my ears in a book thanks
to my ipod or my eyes on a book
thanks to my ipad) Ms March has
asked me to put together some
ideas about how we can promote
the National Year of Reading in
our school for the rest of this
year.

4. A plan
• In the pages that follow I will discuss some of the
influential ideas I have been reading about
reading (and, indeed, about the purposes of
schooling). I’ll then go on to talk a bit about how
I plan to use these resources to help my year
four students develop the kind of ‘powerful
literacy’ associated with successful readers and
successful learners. I’ll discuss the contemporary
model of reading that I believe is most relevant
to our school context—specifically the four
resources model put forward by Freebody and
Luke (1999)—and then outline three specific
reading needs that this model helps us address.

5. A plan
• I’ll finish with some examples of the
specific strategies I plan to use with my
students to meet these goals, and with
some ideas for ways we can link this
work across the curriculum, and to some
other important global events such as
the United Nation’s International Year of
Sustainable Energy.

6. A beginning
• I want to start by saying that like many of us
here I am driven by a passionate
commitment to help create the best
possible futures for our learners and to be
part of a profession that is also helping our
students understand their role in a wider
social, global and political context.
• So…let’s start with a video.

7. Think about this
• The Girl Effect

8. Powerful Ideas
• The video makes the powerful point that
access to quality education has life long and
life wide consequences. Ironically, the
powerful nature of this video (and others
like it) can actually help to generate a sense
that it is only those living in the under
developed or developing countries of the
world who really who face this level of risk.

9. Reality Check….
• Yet in Australia we have our own version of this educational
problem. The children most at risk of educational alienation
and failure today are the same children who were at risk
twenty years ago.
• The kids in our school who come to us with English as an
Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D), from non-traditional
family forms, from Indigenous, low socio-economic or rural
and isolated communities remain at consistently higher risk
of educational alienation and failure than their middle class,
non-Indigenous, English-as-first-language peers.
• Here’s another video that helps to make this point.

10. Generation One
• Australia's challenge...

11. • So…the clock is ticking in
Australia too.
• Importantly as this video
helps to suggest, patterns of
educational success and
failure are not carved in
stone. Nor are they
biologically or genetically
determined, and incapable
of change.

12. I believe that…
• Regardless of the subjects we are
best at teaching or the age group
we most commonly work with, all
of us can play a role in creating
powerfully literate, confident,
optimist learners.
• our work in our school can
connect with work in other
schools nationally and
internationally to help achieve
long term educational change: a
commitment that is supported by
a Sustainable Energy agenda.

13. Aims Talk
• This requires a school wide commitment. For this
reason I am a believer in what Nel Noddings
describes as “aims talk”: talk that extends well
beyond discussion of curriculum objectives and
learning outcomes to include reflection upon the
purpose of education: who wins and loses in our
classrooms and the short and long term
consequences of these patterns (Noddings, 2003).
• To get things started…I propose that in regards to the
teaching of English, we should be working towards
the idea that it is possible for us to help ALL our
students become “powerfully literate citizens”
(Sawyer, 2007).

14. What is powerful literacy?
• According to Sawyer, powerfully literate
citizens are those who are able to “realize
their goals and aspirations”, and “
participate effectively as citizens and in the
twenty-first century” (Sawyer, 2007, p. 44).
These are learners who possess not only the
operational literacies necessary to decode
texts but also the critical and cultural
literacies that allow them to interact with a
changed and changing world in the most
effective, powerful and politically informed
way possible.

15. • A powerfully literate citizen is able to
participate actively in their society. A
powerfully literate student, by extension,
is able to participate fully in the activities
of their society: their school, their
community, their home.

16. • I believe that powerfully literate learners
will:
– possess the skills to succeed socially and
academically;
– feel included and valued;
– see links between their home and school lives
• This will help them in both short and long
term with both educational and social well
being outcomes

17. • So….from a political or ideological
perspective which seeks to develop the
opportunities of all students—local and
global—to develop powerful literacies I
believe there are some immediate moves
we can make in our school to help
achieve these goals.

18. Some reminders
• We are all very familiar with the
demographics of our school but for the
benefits of the pre-service teachers who
are with us let’s recap on a few things.
• First. Our school is awesome 

19. • We have a strong commitment to our
school matter—everyone is learning—
and an equally strong commitment to
fostering positive home/school
partnerships.

20. What the stats say

23. Ummm
• This raises the key question: can we
make a difference?

24. Ummm
• Our own ongoing analysis of
student progress suggests
that students in all year
levels are below national
averages in key literacy
areas of:
– Reading
– Persuasive writing
– Spelling
– And, to some extent,
grammar and punctuation

25. Can we???
Despite some of the dominant discourses about diverse
learners that circulate in Australian society (discourses
that tend to represent disadvantage as biologically and
socially determined and linke to a lack of ability or will
rather than circumstances and opportunities) decades of
research tells us that students like ours are:
– Capable of learning
– Learn best when they feel safe, included and valued
– Learn best when there are positive links between
home and school

26. Can we???
• An international review of best practice in teaching diverse
learners (Alton-Lee, 2003) identified ten key features of quality
teaching in this area. Three of these principles—and their
pedagogical implications—are particularly relevant to the
proposal that follows.
– 1. Quality teaching is focused on student achievement
(including social outcomes) and facilities
– 2. Pedgogical practices enable classes and other learning
groupings to work as caring, inclusive, and cohesive learning
communities.
– 3. Effective links are created between school and other
cultural contexts in which students are socialised, to facilitate
learning (Alton-Lee, 2003 n.p.)

27. Can we???
• So the question isn’t “can we make a
difference” the question is “how will we
make a difference”.

28. My year 4 world
• I have a classroom of year 4 students, who
reflect the school’s level of diversity. Of our
24 students 30% have English as an
Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D). 12
of the students are boys (again a group
routinely recognized as at risk of
disengaging in the middle years of school)
and 3 other girls who are from middle class
families have been performing below
national averages on all key literacy
indicators.

29. • My goal is to help all of my students feel
(and be) powerfully literate.

30. • Like all other year levels the English
curriculum for year 4 has three strands:
– Language: knowing about the English
language
– Literature understanding, appreciating,
responding to, analyzing and creating
literature
– Literacy: expanding the repertoire of English
usage.

31. A necessary focus
• Having analysed the results of NAPLAN tests
and my own running records I propose to
focus on the following sub-strands and
reading needs
– Understanding the influences of social context
on social interactions
– Understand the differences between reports
and opinions
– Understand how texts vary in complexity
depending on context, purpose and audience

32. • A related by secondary focus is:
– Further developing an understanding of
Standard Australian English

33. Where does this fit?

37. And as a bonus

38. • The way I will approach these reading
needs is influenced by the Model of
Reading I will adopt: the four resources
model.

39. A model of reading?

40. A different model…
• The way I will
approach these
reading needs is
influenced by the
Model of Reading I
will adopt: the four
resources model.

41. Four resources
• I believe that we can
meet our powerfully
literate goals by
continuing our existing
commitment to a socio-
cultural approach to
literacy generally and to
the four resources
model more specifically.

42. • Sociocultural approaches to literacy recognize the
fundamentally social nature of all literacy practices
(Alexander & Fox, 2004; Bull & Anstey, 2005; Hirst,
2002). By extension, reading is seen as always
located within a broader social context within which
reading is an active process with purpose: and that
purpose can vary from one context to another. In
other words, reading withinthis framework isn’t just
about making meaning out of text, or decoding
particular combinations of letters and symbols.
Reading is about making sense of the way meanings
exist within particular cultural and historical
environments.

43. • From this perspective a teachers’ focus
moves from “drill and skill” and rote
learning, towards the creation of
opportunities for students to engage in
reading that they find to be meaningful and
motivating.. As well as that, emphasis is
placed upon the benefits of allowing
students to make connections between
their ‘school’ worlds and their other worlds:
worlds that are too often kept apart in
traditional schooling structures.

44. • This kind of framework also allows us to
recognize and value the diverse forms of textual
and social practice associated with the 21st
century. Rather than perpetuating a hierarchy
between ‘authentic’ or ‘high culture’ texts or a
canon, critical literacy, socio cultural approaches
and the New Literacy Studies all embrace the
value, legitimacy and educational importance of
diverse literacy practices. No text is to big, too
small, too casual, too trivial to warrant analysis
(Honan, 2004; House, 2012; Sommer, 2007).

45. The Point?
• Within this broad socio-cultural
framework, I believe there is much to be
gained from continuing our school’s
commitment to the Four Resources
approach to literacy developed by Luke
and Freebody (1999). In this framework
an effective literacy education is one that
allows learners to develop skills to:

46. I can…
– break the code of texts – (be a code
breaker):
– participate in the meanings of text - (be a
meaning maker)
– use texts functionally - (be a text user)
– critically analyse and transform texts – (be a
text analyst)
• (Luke & Freebody, 1999).

47. • It is important to note that within the
four resources model powerfully literate
students are those who are able to enact
ALL of these different roles. They
understand what a text is
communicating; what it means to them;
how they can use or create texts for
various purposes and the consequences
of the texts for various individuals.

48. Let’s recap
Okay so far I’ve spoken about
• Our school (and our rich diversity)
• My beliefs that all our students can be powerfully literature
• The importance of global and local perspectives
• The specific reading needs I’d like to focus on with my year 4
students
• The links between these needs and the year 4 national
curriculum
• The ways in which the four resources approach to reading
emphasizes literacy work that goes beyond decontextualized
skill acquisition into activities that recognize the situated
nature of literacy.
• I will now go on to look at the specific strategies I intend to use
into the future.

49. What we have already done
• Last year we introduced the idea that our classes
are learning communities where everyone can be
an expert learner, and an expert teacher. As
Alton-Lee notes: The term “describes the kind of
classroom where the peer culture has been
developed by the teacher to support the learning
of each member of the community” (2003)
• I propose that we increase this work with a
classroom focus on “The Expert In Me”

50. ME ME ME ME
• The goal of this focu sis to explore
with students:
– diverse textual forms which ‘experts’ use
to communicate;
– the multiple contexts within which
experts are valued;
– the different text types used by ‘experts’
– the different language patterns that
experts use to connect to different
audiences

51. US US US US
• There are two pedagogical strategies that
I will prioritise: each one of which is
justified both by research into best
practice for teaching diverse learners
(Alton-Lee, 2003); and research into the
implementation of the four resources
model in ways that meet the needs of
culturally and linguistically diverse
students (Groundwater-Smith, 2006)

52. Strategy 1:
Connecting Students To Learning
Through Explicit Teaching
• According to Edwards-
Groves:“Opportunities for learning are
enhanced when classroom talk is clearly
focused on learning about aspects of
literacy and directly responds to the
learning needs of the students”
(Edwards-Groves, 2002, n.p.).

53. Which is handy because…
• This is consistent with the advice contained
in Alton-Lee’s Best Evidence synthesis which
emphasised the fact that “Tasks and
classroom interactions provide scaffolds to
facilitate student learning (the teacher
provides whatever assistance diverse
students need to enable them to engage in
learning activities productively, for example,
teacher use of prompts, questions, and
appropriate resources” (Alton-Lee, 2003)

54. Strategy 1: Explicit Teaching
• To this end: I will therefore ensure that
students are clear about the gaols we are
working towards and the steps we will go
through purpose of our lessons. The
published and shared aims are:

55. A big picture

56. Another one…
Our class will
• Work to To Show Off Our Expertise
– First steps: What is an expert? What makes an expert?
How do you become an expert?
– How do experts communicate? Where do experts
communicate? How many different expert text types can
we find? )eg youttube, encyclopedias; cookbook,
manuals)
– What would you like to be an expert about? What do
you already know?
– What do you need to know to get your ‘expert’ banner?
– How can experts communicate
– What is a blog?

57. In this process
• Students will be encouraged to research blogs,
(including those linked to from the National
Year of Reading website:
http://yablogosphere.blogspot.com.au/ to
identify the key features of blogs and to help
recognize features in structure, language,
tenor, tone, layout, vocabulary,
formality/informality

58. Collaboratively we will identify
• Features of a blog
• So we can move on to:
– Designing a blog
– Writing a blog
– Writing our own blog AS EXPERTS

59. Strategy 2:
Students as Expert Bloggers
• Dowdall makes the point that young people are
increasingly involved in the production of digital
texts that are “highly purposeful, powerful and of
consequence to the creator”(Dowdall, 2009, p.
65). Within the four resources reading model
introduced above, online, digital or multi-model
texts are examples of the way literacy can be
understood as social practice. This point is well
explored in Davies and Merchant’s discussions of
the educational possibilities of blogging (Davies
& Merchant, 2009).

60. Strategy 2: Students a sExpert
Bloggers
• Davies and Merchant explore the ways in
which teachers ae able to work with blogs
(which are, as they note, easy to create
within existing templates) and the ways in
which “blogs can be used to engage learners
in textmaking, both as a way of beginning to
understand what it means to participate in
social network, and as a way of involving
young people in publishing for wider
audiences and for a range of purposes.

61. Specifically
• We will work with the popular software
“Blogger”. As was the case in the vignette
based upon Miss Gupta’s class explored
by Davies and Merchant (2009, p. 89)
students will be encouraged to use their
blogs as a “repository of hyperlinked
information” and to allow them to be
viewed by parents and friends.

62. Teachers as learners
• I will work on two blogs:
– One will be a whole of class blog called
“awesome things for year 4s to read) which
everyone can make submissions
– This will directly connect to the Australian
year for Reading

63. Teacher as expert blogger
• My second blog will be on Sustainability. This
will link to the United Nations identification of
2012 as the Year of Sustainable Energy for All.
• I will focus on publishing facts about energy
consumption and sustainable energy; opinions
about how we can make a difference; links to
experts in the area and a list of practical
strategies that we can do in our own school.

64. Full circle
• This linking of sustainability with reading
allows us to return to the Girl Effect and
recognise that the support we give to
other countries to develop sustainable
energy impacts upon their ability to
access health care and education and
thus to pursue positive futures….

65. Cross curriculum
• Learning about literacy takes place
across the entire curriculum. There
will be many opportunities for the
activities that form our reading
priorities to inform and be informed by
the work we do in other curriculum
areas.
• For example: through my own blog on
sustainability I will be able to refer to
science curriculum

66. Cross curriculum
• Science Understanding
• Biological Sciences
–Living things have life cycles
(ACSSU072)
–Living things, including plants and
animals, depend oneach other and
the environment to survive
(ACSSU073

67. Cross curriculum
• Chemical Sciences
– Natural and processed materials have a range of
physical
– properties; These properties can influence their use
– (ACSSU074)
–
• Sciences as a Human Endeavour:
– Use and influence of sicence
– Science knowledge helps people to understand the
effect
– of their actions (ACSHE062
•

68. Back to reading
• Students will be linked into the National Year of Reading
webpages as they research what expert texts look like via
book reviews and blogs written by young people.
• The class as a whole will also keep a book reading record of
all of the books that we read as we develop our blogs
• We will also introduce the Read This! Competition and
encourage students to produce a text that can be
incorporated into their blog to promote their favourite book
on their expert subject. It can be a fiction or non-ficiton
book. Details are available here:
http://www.love2read.org.au/nyr-programs.cfm

69. To sum up
• The four resources approach to reading
allows us to emphasise:
– The contextual nature of reading
– The importance of real world and
‘legitimate’ reading tasks
– The potential for literacy activities to
contibute to social, civic and political
understanding
– The possibility of change

70. A final thought
• William Gibson wrote:
– The future is here. It’s just unevenly
distributed….
• Our school’s emphasis on learning
communities, powerful literacy and digital
literacies gives us a chance to ensure that
our future is no longer uneven…

71. Read more here
• ACARA. (2012). The Australian curriculum: English. Sydney: ACARA.
• Alexander, P. A., & Fox, E. (2004). A historical perspective on reading research and
practice. In R. B. Ruddell & N. J. Unrau (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of
reading (5th ed., pp. 33-68). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
• Alton-Lee, A. (2003). Quality teaching for diverse students in schooling: best evidence
synthesis. Wellington: New Zealand Ministry of Education.
• Bull, G., & Anstey, M. (2005). The literacy landscape. French's Forest, NSW: Pearson
Education.
• Davies, J., & Merchant, G. (2009). Negotiating the blogosphere: educational possibilities.
In V. Carrington & M. Robinson (Eds.), Digital literacies: social learning and classroom
practices (pp. 81-93). London: Sage & UKLA.
• Dowdall, C. (2009). Masters and critics: children as produers of online digital texts. In V.
Carrington & M. Robinson (Eds.), Digital literacies: social learning and classroom
practices (pp. 43-62). London: Sage & UKLA.
• Edwards-Groves, C. (2002). Connecting students to learning through explicit teaching.
MyRead: strategies for teaching reading in the middle years Retrieved 12 May 2012,
2012, from http://www.myread.org/explicit.htm
• Groundwater-Smith, S. (2006). Understanding learner diversity. In S. Groundwater-
Smith, R. Ewing & R. LeCornu (Eds.), Teaching: challenges and dilemmas (pp. 51-74).
South Melbourne: Thomson.

72. And here
• Hirst, E. W. (2002). Engaging heterogeneity: Tertiary literacy in new times.
Paper presented at the Australian Association of Research in Education:
Problematic futures: Educational research in an era of ... uncertainty",
AARE Conference, Brisbane 2-5th December 2002.
http://aare.edu.au/02pap/hir02208.htm
• Honan, E. (2004). Using the four resources as a map of possible practices.
In A. H. Healy, Eileen (Ed.), Text Next: New resources for literacy learning.
Newtown, NSW: Primary English Teachers Association.
• House, U. Y. C. (2012). New literacies and classroom practice
• Killen, R. (2003). Effective teaching strategies: lessons from research and
practic (3rd ed.). Tuggerah, NSW: Social Science Press.
• Luke, A., & Freebody, P. (1999). Further notes on the four resources
model. Reading Online Retrieved 20 March, 2012, from
http://www.readingonline.org/research/lukefreebody.html -
freebodyluke
• Noddings, N. (2003). Happiness and education. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
• Sawyer, W. (2007). The powerfully literate citizen. English in Australia,
42(2), 44-48.
• Sommer, P. (2007). What do we mean by critical? Implications and
opportunities. Curriculum Leadership, 5(21), np.

73. Thanks for reading