The Salty Chip Blog

A social space to learn more about the Canadian Multiliteracies Collaborative

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Rethinking Rural Literacies: Transnational Perspectives

Our new book has just been released: Rethinking Rural Literacies: Transnational Perspectives edited by Bill Green (NSW,Au) and Michael Corbett (Acadia, CAN).

From McMillan:

rural lit

Linking the terms “rural” and “literacy” often conjures images of deficit and improvement. This book takes a different approach, unpacking both of these laden concepts in diverse national contexts. It explores how people in many rural places understand and experience what it means to be rural and the multiple ways that exist of being literate, including ways that are linked to and situated in a particular place and conception of that place. The chapters in this international collection investigate a wide range of theorizations of rurality and literacy; literate practices and pedagogies; questions of place, space, and sustainability; and complex representations of rurality that challenge simplistic conceptions of standardized literacy and the real-and-imagined world beyond the metropolis.

Table of Contents:

PART I: CONCEPTUALIZING RURAL LITERACIES1. Literacy, Rurality, Education: A Partial Mapping; Bill Green
2. Why not at school? Rural Literacies and the Continual Choice to Stay; Kim Donehower
3. Find Yourself in Newfoundland and Labrador: Reading Rurality as Reparation; Ursula Kelly
4. My Roots Dip Deep: Literacy Practices as Mirrors of Traditional, Modern and Postmodern Ruralities; Karen Eppley
5. Another Way to Read ‘The Rural’: A Bricolage of Maths Education; Craig Howley
PART II: LITERACY/PEDAGOGIES
6. Exploring Rurality, Teaching Literacy: How Teachers Manage a Curricular Relation to Place; Phillip Cormack
7. Rural Boys, Literacy Practice, and the Possibilities of Difference: Tales Out of School; Jo-Anne Reid
8. Reconfiguring the Communicational Landscape: Implications for Rural Literacy; Kathryn Hibbert
PART III: PLACE AND SUSTAINABILITY
9. Thinking through Country: New Literacy Practices for a Sustainable World; Margaret Somerville
10. Literacy, Place-based Pedagogies and Social Justice; Lyn Kerkham and Barbara Comber
11. The Making of ‘Good-Enough’ Everyday Lives: Literacy Lessons from the Rural North of Finland; Pauliina Rautio and Maija Lanas
PART IV: MOBILITIES AND FUTURES
12. Reading Futures: Exploring Rural Students’ Literacy Practices in Neo-liberal Times; Kate Cairns
13. Mediating Plastic Literacies and Placeless Governmentalities: Returning to Corporeal Rurality; Michael Corbett and Ann Vibert

Reviews:

“I found a great deal to think about as a result of reading the thought-provoking essays in Rethinking Rural Literacies. The editors and contributors offer what I regard as a new space to consider where and how education occurs. I recommend this book to researchers and practitioners working in rural studies, but also those who appreciate the idea that we all teach, research and live somewhere. The essays in it are likely to inspire many new studies and new questions related to place-conscious education: in other rural contexts, ‘downtown’, by the side of the road, in high-density housing, and in relation to the place of physical location and online communities. The essays are provocative, reflexive, and truly offer a rethinking of rural literacies.” – Claudia Mitchell, James McGill Professor, McGill University, Canada, and Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Rethinking Rural Literacies makes multiple important conceptual and scholarly contributions in exploring a variety of issues that lie at the nexus of literacy, rurality and education. Green and Corbett’s volume represents an excellent and essential complement to existing work in the field.” – Kai A. Schafft, Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University, USA, and Editor, Journal of Research in Rural Education

“This collection is much needed. It will be immensely useful, bridging conceptual and actual sites and spaces with global reach but offering a respectful attention to the sometimes-forgotten literacies of the rural, locating and describing that field more clearly, and drawing on contemporary theory and practice in literacy studies.” – Kate Pahl, Reader in Literacies in Education, The University of Sheffield, UK

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Rethinking professional learning as sociomaterial: making visible what ‘matters’

Visiting Scholar

Tara Fenwick, Professor and Director of ProPEL (Professional Practice, Education and Learning), The Stirling School of Education: University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

tara

 will be presenting a CERI Colloquium

Rethinking professional learning as sociomaterial: making visible what ‘matters’

Date: Monday, September 9th, 2013

Time: 3:30 – 5:30 pm

Location: H101, Health Sciences Addition

RVSP:    Holly.Ellinor@schulich.uwo.ca

LINK To talk: Please note, the camera was running for about 25 minutes before the talk started, so fast forward until you reach the 25:00 mark. My introduction was not audible as I didn’t have a michrophone, but you can hear Tara when she begins to speak:

http://www.livestream.com/westernu/video?clipId=pla_bfe1076d-6e01-478c-ae20-2cb2aa05999f&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb

This presentation focuses on ‘practice-based learning’, what some call workplace or informal learning. A key dynamic to consider are the material as well as the social interactions in which different practices and learning emerge in these environments. Professional practice is intimately enmeshed with instruments, technologies, texts and forms, bodies and blood – all of which embed a history of politics and ethics. The material is often disregarded or dismissed as mere tools of human intention and action. However recent research in professional learning is now focusing on the materiality of practice – and not just the materials, but the entanglement of the material with the social, including language, cultural discourses, power relations, hierarchies and so forth.

 

In this colloquium, Dr. Fenwick will introduce these recent conceptions of practice-based learning that work from a fundamental re-thinking of what actually constitutes practice. Here, knowing and doing are understood to be inter-related, the social and material are enmeshed, human dynamics are not granted priority, and practice is situated between what the established and the emergent. The focus is upon ‘knowing-in-practice’ as enactments performed through assemblages or networks that are more-than-human. These concepts help us to trace how myriad networks and dynamics of translation are at work in students’ learning encounters with the objects and texts of practices. They highlight the material mediators and intermediaries holding together particular practices, and the politics through which they work. These concepts also illuminate the ways that standards of practice are actually performed (along with the inevitable work-arounds), and they raise questions about how humans become assembled with technologies and with what effects.

 

Overall, these approaches reveal workplace learning as a series of continuing learning struggles and as enactments – performed not by individual human actors but by sociomaterial collectives. One implication is a radical revisioning of issues of agency, politics and ontology in professional practice and education. Another is examining pedagogical implications for teaching that can support productive practice-based learning. Our aim in this colloquium is to open dialogue on these issues across the professions.

 

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