Language, Literacy & Learning in Education
Here, I post writings on the role of language and literacy for learning in education.
I will include writings around the pedagogical significance of SFL (systemic functional linguistics) deriving M.A.K. Halliday, especially the so-called Sydney School Genre Theory assembled around the work of Jim Martin.
I also place here writings arising from my interest in ancient rhetoric.
This is an unpublished criticism of the use of genre theory to construct curriculum for Indigenous students. It still stands, I believe, as fair comment on a curriculum framework that is still being used at Batchelor Institute. It is especially relevant in the context of Indigenous students coping with pervasive settler-colonialist ideology embodied in much curricula.
This was my very first venture into public writing: it took a heart attack at age 45 to make me stop ‘thinking about’ writing, and actually do it.
This is short checklist about how to encourage and support the academic reading of students by establishing some new (or old) teaching and learning practices.
Approachs to Academic Literacy
This table sets out three contrasting approaches for framing the encounter between students and the academy. It was designed for an Indigenous context, but is relevant to any context where there are ‘non-traditional’ students entering mainstream higher education academic institutions.
Academic Literacy – a select bibliography
This select bibliography assembles a short annotated list of authors, books, and articles that have been important to me in thinking about preparing students for study at higher education.
Making Text talk: reading as listening
This article is an attempt to enact and make real Gadamer’ s view that literacy is always a matter of coming into meanings that are alien and other. The eminent texts of all cultures, especially our own, suffer from that fate and so they need to be re-interpreted and re-appropriated anew by each generation; otherwise, they fall into dogma, meaninglessness or irrelevance. This encounter with the alien that becomes us is the work of reading, a labour in which we find ourselves both renewed and transformed.
This article was written for the “Emerging Genres” unit in Stage 4 of the Advanced Diploma of Teacher Education, Batchelor College. The article itself is written as an emergent re-working of academic writing in the hope that it can thereby disclose a different, less dogmatic and less colonizing understanding of western academic discourse, one that is more attuned to the both-ways mission of Batchelor College.
Ethical reading-an overlooked aspect
This short article is an attempt to persuade lecturers at Batchelor Institute to consider the significance of values as a serious goal of education, alongside the mandated goals of knowledge and skill.
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