Today the research group will be presenting work from the project Literacy Teacher Educators: Their Backgrounds, Visions and Practices, at the Ministry of Education/Faculties of Education Forum – Research Practice: Nurturing relationships for teaching, learning and well-being. It will be an interesting and exciting day.
I (Clare) am pleased to share some good news. We submitted a proposal to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to fund the project Rethinking Literacy Teacher Education for the Digital Era: Teacher Educators, Literacy Educators, and Digital Technology Experts Working Together. One of the main activities of the project will be bringing together 16 experts from three fields and 4 countries (Canada, US, UK, and Australia) to address the following questions.
As a team we are going to work together to:
Click here to read the summary of the proposal. Final Summary of Proposal
As academics we tend to work in our “silo” which although allows us to specialize it has 
limitations. The symposium will provide an opportunity to work in an inter-disciplinary manner which may help us move forward the field of literacy teacher education. My co-applicants for the proposal are Lin Goodwin (Teachers College), Simone White (Monash University), Bethan Marshall (King’s College UK), Jean Murray (University of East London), and Clive Beck (University of Toronto). I will continue to provide updates on our work.
For those of you have been following this blog, you know we are conducting a study of literacy/English teacher educators in four countries (Canada, U.S., Australia, and UK). Our first paper from the study has recently been published in Journal of Education for Teaching 39(5), 534-540. The paper A Foot in Many Camps: Literacy Teacher Educators Acquiring Knowledge Across Many Realms and Juggling Multiple Identities is available through this link: Foot In Many Camps
In the paper we describe how the teacher educators had a range of classroom teaching experience which they drew on in many ways. Most went far beyond simply telling stories about their previous work. All were heavily influenced by their own childhood experiences, which continue to affect their current work. Many felt that they needed to hold dual identities, teacher and academic, because they were still heavily involved in schools through their research and in-service activities. Several felt that there was a hierarchy in their department with those most removed from schooling at the highest tier. Most saw themselves in the field of literacy not teacher education and gravitate towards literacy-focused conferences and journals rather than those in teacher education. I (Clare) hope you find the paper interesting. We certainly have found this entire study fascinating.
On Saturday a number of us from our research teams presented at the Ontario Teachers’ Federation/Ontario Association of Deans of Education conference. We did two papers:
· Teaching Student teachers How to Teach for Relevance, Integrating Curriculum around Big Ideas and Key Values
Clive Beck, Clare Kosnik, Shelley Murphy, and Elizabeth Rosales
· On-going Learning for Literacy/English Teacher Educators: Examining Four Spheres of Knowledge
Clare Kosnik, Pooja Dharamshi, Cathy Miyata, Lydia Menna, and Yiola Cleovoulou
Click on the link Publications and Presentations to see our powerpoint presentations. (Clare’s ppt can be found under Clare’s presentations; Clive’s ppt can be found under Clive’s presentations.)
When I saw this comic it made me chuckle. I enjoyed the comic’s gentle reminder that children/youth routinely engage with and expertly navigate a variety of communication tools. Clare and I (Lydia) conducted a two-year collaborative self-study of our efforts to incorporate various technological resources (e.g. a wiki) into our pre-service literacy methods courses. This research helped us identify both the challenges and successes we encountered along the way. Our research efforts also made us more mindful of why we chose to incorporate certain technological resources into our pedagogical practice — questioning for what purpose and to what end. Through the analysis of our efforts we realized that we had initially seen technology as an end in itself, not as a tool to support learning. In the second year of the study, we focused much more on student learning and became more systematic in our efforts. Over the two years of the study, our identities as teacher educators shifted as our pedagogies became richer, our use of technology more fully integrated into our literacy courses, and we received validation from others and from each other.
Literacy in the 21st century. What does it mean? Or perhaps the better question to ask is, what does it mean TO YOU?
Literacy Teaching and Teacher Education 