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In England, several developments combine in powerful ways to sustain certain ideas about literacy and research in education. These include the promotion of a specific model of 'evidence-based practice', frameworks for initial teacher education and early career professional development, and a strong accountability framework via inspection. However, as we illustrate through examples of activity on Twitter, to suggest that such ideas are all pervasive is to ignore other, less predictable, ways in which research circulates. Teachers, researchers and others working in literacy education, combined with the work of digital actors, assist the movement of ideas in sometimes unpredictable and even exciting ways. We argue that, if we are to understand how teachers encounter research, we need a better understanding of how research moves. We suggest that such movements are produced through shifting assemblages of human and non-human actors that combine to mobilise literacy research evidence differently and to varying degrees. This, we propose, calls for a new focus on what we call 'research mobilities' in primary literacy research.

In many countries across the world education for deaf people is limited and sign languages are undervalued. In this paper we discuss insights from an initiative to support deaf education for young adults in India, Ghana, and Uganda. Reporting here on the work in India, our project used a bilingual approach, with Indian Sign Language as the main means of communication while developing students' English literacy through a multiliteracies pedagogy (Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis, eds. 2000. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge) and the use of authentic texts in lessons. Our approach was designed to invite learners' agency and input. Responding to students' engagement with the approach, we encountered their demand for formal grammar teaching and we offer an example of how one of the tutors engaged with this. Illustrated with visual data from the lessons, we discuss two insights from the project: the importance of the students' 'semiotic repertoire' (Kusters, Annelies, Massimiliano Spotti, Ruth Swanwick, and Elina Tapio. 2017. "Beyond Languages, Beyond Modalities: Transforming the Study of Semiotic Repertoires." International Journal of Multilingualism 14 (3): 219–232.) ; and the centrality of an inclusive educational approach that is supportive of students' agency and aspirations for learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children's engagements with digital technologies form part of their emergent everyday literacy practices. The study reported here derives from the pan-European study 'A Day in the Digital Lives of Children aged 0-3'. The methodology was centred on the videoing of an entire day's experiences of a child aged under 3, together with a reflective interview with the parents and inventories related to digital access, skills and activities of the child. In this paper, we look at three children in Spain, Sweden and England, respectively. We examine our data through three prisms. (1) Spatio-temporal: We consider the children's engagements in terms of their appropriation of space, in relationships with others in the home and the intimate geographies of young children's digital literacies. (2) Parental discourse: We use the tensions and contradictions for families framework to examine the selection and monitoring of digital literacies. (3) Practice: Drawing on the first two prisms, we zoom into how children engage with tablet devices and television. Our research demonstrates richness, diversity and agency in these young children's practices with technologies. We propose the concept of living-room assemblage as an analytical metaphor to understand the macrohabitats of young children's digital literacies and practices, which emerge as multi-layered, creative and co-occurring with other family activities. Our analysis also explores the challenges presented to parents and the ways in which they navigate tensions and contradictions in their media and digital environments, which are condensed in family practices and discourses around tablets and television.

We approach Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, also known as Occupy Central, encountered in 2 days in November 2014 as an exemplar of literacy as placemaking. As a contemporary city-based resistance movement, the creation and subsequent resemiotisation of literacy artefacts were an important element of spatialised practice in asserting a new and dynamic sense of citizenship. In their collaborative design, shared commitment to certain values and expressions of political resistance, these occupation sites may be read as an instantiation of Goodsell's concept of public space. The initial research site of engagement gave rise to a dataset of photographs that the authors examined together as discourses in place, informed by cultural knowledge of Hong Kong. Selecting two photographs, we broaden out beyond the linguistic features of texts to consider processes of creative semiotic remediation. We suggest that in such placemaking activities, the Umbrella Movement activists embodied Giroux's concept of literacy as emancipatory practice. Finally, we make suggestions as to how this study might be connected to a critical pedagogy of place.

Students' development of professionalism is vital within medical education, while social media communications can blur professional and personal boundaries. In the UK advice for medical practitioners and students has been developed, advocating care in the projection of a professional identity online as offline. This study takes an academic literacies approach to a small-scale investigation of attitudes and practices of second-year medical students in a British university through a focus group and paired interview, recognising that issues of identity and power are multi-layered and complex. Use of social media focuses primarily on Facebook, where they had already begun to adapt their self-presentation. Depictions of alcohol use are a particular area of concern. The students' reflections demonstrate professionalism in respect of care for patient confidentiality and privacy. Yet they express an ambivalent sense of a future trajectory in which continuing social media use may appear simultaneously undesirable and yet vital. A finding of considerable concern is a reluctance to challenge inappropriate online behaviour despite policy guidelines. New generations growing up with social media raise challenges and opportunities for medical education that require greater attention and the development of participatory approaches to research, increasing understanding that in turn may be beneficial for policy-makers.

Contemporary research suggests there are many missed opportunities for home and school to work together to define and promote effective practices with digital technologies, especially in early years. This study outlines ways in which one Early Years classroom creatively promoted bidirectional connections between children's learning with technologies at home and in school. Nested in a posthumanist perspective on space and classroomness (Burnett, 2014), the study illuminates the complex spatial entanglement among home, school and technologies in the form of enhanced vignettes. As a space-based interpretive case study that emerged from a larger project, the data collection methods revolved around a set of two visits by each researcher, one year apart, plus analyses of school documentation and online interactions. We integrate diverse data sources to argue that innovative, multimodal practices of teaching, learning and assessment can be designed and implemented imaginatively, deploying a range of digital technologies to connect with children's and parents' home lives. Use of multimedia affordances of technologies, attention to children's physical and material interactions with resources and strategic school policy made it possible for influences to percolate between home and school, to the enhancement of children's learning in the moment.

The right to share the social heritage of a nation is an element of citizenship closely associated with education. Social heritage is understood as the negotiation of understandings within a dialectical understanding of social practice across multiple timescales. In this paper the meaning-making practices of one young child concerned with beavers as symbols of Canada is studied, using the Day in the Life methodology, across two encounters in one day, the first in "mat-time" at a kindergarten and the second at afternoon tea with her family. The teacher's careful orchestration of the event is analysed, and elements of her structuring of heteroglossic discourses identified. The young girl demonstrates close attention to certain complexities in her subsequent family dialogues and expands her narrative with imagined additional elements. The paper contributes to our understanding of bridging between the early development of academic discourse registers and home-based narratives. Methodologically, a contribution is made to consideration of processes of transcription, for analytic and dissemination purposes. In conclusion, deepening linguistic ethnography through the use of multimodal methods, we find complex layers of representations and practices in the negotiation of citizenship through daily life routines.

This article explores telephone interactions between young children and adult family members as contributing insights to the co-construction of identities within both the nuclear and the extended family. The authors deploy methods of linguistic ethnography to enrich the scope of interpreting the data beyond textual analysis. The study's premise was that intimate relatives have knowledgeable appreciation of their child's affective and cognitive worlds that they can call upon to enhance emerging language use and narrative productions, even in distanced communications. Talking over the telephone has the potential to scaffold children's skills in offering clear, cohesive communications, and elaborated narratives. Examination of the corpora of four preschool children in interaction with a family member on the telephone showed them to employ extensive expressive power to negotiate considerable communicative space in having both emotional and cognitive needs met; identities are co-constructed as stories about persons and experiences are shared.

The rapid adoption of new forms of digital communication is now attracting the attention of researchers from a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences. In the landscape of social media, the microblogging application Twitter has rapidly become an accepted feature of everyday life with a broad appeal. This paper, from a dual autoethnography (Davies and Merchant, 2007) over one year, is a reflexive account of the experience of two academic Twitter users. We offer analyses of the functionalities of the semiotic environment and trace how our meaning making practices illuminate Bakhtinian (1986) principles of human communication, while at the same time constituting literacies that are distinctively new in character. We show how communication using Web 2.0 technologies can be described as semiotic and sociolinguistic practice and offer an appropriately dialogic and exploratory methodology to the study of New Literacies. (Contains 6 figures and 1 table.)

Over a 13-month period, the Schome Park Programme operated the first "closed" (i.e. protected) Teen Second Life project in Europe. The project organised diverse educational events that centred on use of a virtual world and an associated asynchronous forum and wiki. Students and staff together exploited the affordances of the environment to develop skills and enhance community spirit. One popular activity, initiated by students, involved sailing boats around the project's virtual island, a technically challenging task for beginners. This paper studies the records of one of these sailing regattas. Organising and implementing this event involved considerable technical and interactional challenges. We analyse the following: How do people work together, including through the use of (virtual) artefacts, to solve problems? What particular qualities of the literacy practices surrounding the regatta appear to us to involve learning? Simultaneously, we contribute to the development of methodologies for studying learning in virtual worlds by employing a virtual literacy ethnography. Findings include a diversity of creative approaches that are used when solving problems, the significance of adult behaviour in authentically modelling learning and the value of humour in fostering a learning community. The notion of distributed cognition has implications for characterising learning and analytical approaches to analysis. (Contains 5 figures and 4 notes.)

The TV broadcast of "Jamie's school dinners" in 2005 prompted action throughout the UK to improve the standards of school meals. A public debate continues across the media around changes, resistance to them and consequences. This article draws upon the findings of a one-year ESRC-funded project on the English school dinners debate, which analysed interviews with stakeholders, focus groups of primary and secondary pupils and their parents, and corpora of newspaper articles and relevant websites. We focus here on our finding of a neglected area of the debate: provision for religious diets, dealing in particular with halal. Despite many intentions by providers to meet complex requirements, these are imperfectly understood, and pupils requiring religious diets may not be benefiting from general reforms. Our analysis suggests that improved communications could lead to better understanding of need and take up of school meals provision. (Contains 2 notes.)

In this paper I deploy a synthesis of methods I term virtual literacy ethnography to investigate the diverse literacy practices of the project Schome Park. Participants have been engaging over a 15-month period in an innovative out-of-school project centred on use of the "(Teen) Second Life" three-dimensional virtual world. Some ethical aspects of working with children in virtual worlds are briefly discussed. I analyse evidence from the three main communicative domains of the project: chat logs, wiki and forum, demonstrating the complexity and creativity of student literacy practices. I include in my data selection exemplars that draw on persistently valued literacy texts and demonstrate that attentive examination to literacy practices may be more fruitful than maintaining overly dichotomised boundaries between new literacies and those more established.

Interactive whiteboards have been rapidly introduced into all primary schools under UK Government initiatives. These large, touch-sensitive screens, which control a computer connected to a digital projector, seem to be the first type of educational technology particularly suited for whole-class interaction. Strong claims are made for their value by manufacturers and policy-makers, but there has been little research on how, if at all, they influence established pedagogic practices, communicative processes and educational goals. This study has been designed to examine this issue, using observations in primary (elementary) school classrooms, and builds on the authors' previous research on Information and Communication Technology in educational dialogues and collaborative activities. (Contains 1 figure, 6 extracts and 3 notes.)

Children's early word learning is not usually considered creative in the same sense as artistic productions of later life. Yet early word learning is a creative response to the intrinsic instability of word meaning. As the child acts to participate in her community, she strives for intersubjectivity, manifest in neologisms and under- and overextensions, commonly characterized as errors. Young children's innovative productions, as those of second-language learners, may raise new possibilities for rich understandings of linguistic creativity, if from dialogical approaches to linguistics the local quality of interpretations is properly incorporated into theory. Language use into adulthood, including for literary functions, continues to interplay routines and innovations; semiotic transformation is a central process of human creativity.

This paper explores the methodology of an ecological investigation of aspects of culture in the interactional construction of early childhood in diverse global communities: Peru, Italy, Canada, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. Regarding culture as a dynamic dimension of the child's socialisation, the approach taken was to film a "day in the life" of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl in each location. The principal investigators viewed these five "days" and selected clips were made into a compilation tape, to be interrogated and interpreted by the local investigators and the child's family. These latter reflections were also taped and then applied to a growing appreciation of the child in cultural context. Other inter-researcher techniques were used to elucidate and explore events and values further. Reflexive concerns as to the interplay between aims and methods in interpretive research are critical components of this endeavour to develop new cultural understandings of the girls in context. (Contains 1 note.)

This article reports on a specific aspect of a larger study of "a day in the life" of five two-and-a-half-year-old girls in families in Canada, Italy, Peru, Thailand and the UK. The larger study involved filming each of the five children in their family contexts for one whole day and studying a number of emerging themes related to the child's development. The focus is on mealtimes and eating. Culture is regarded as a dynamic dimension of the child's socialisation through which family practices around eating (often neglected as a research focus) are explored. Using the concept of an "eating event", by analogy with a "literacy event", close examination of video sequences reveal the extent to which children and carers, with differing desires and intentions, negotiate and collaborate to achieve mutually satisfactory ends. (Contains 6 figures.)

This paper approaches the theme of this special issue, the distinctive contribution of new technologies to collaborative thinking and learning, through an analysis of postings to an EdD bulletin board. Bourdieu's concept of habitus as socialised subjectivity is manifestly appropriate to the focus on professionality, the key theme of the course. A crucial element of the educationalists' professional development is constituted by deliberation and dialogue, shaped in forms of a discourse associated with this community of practice. Analyses of data draw on Bourdieu's conception of the intrinsically double nature of the "reality" accessible here; that in order to apprehend the ongoing construction of meanings within the bulletin board postings, we should also endeavour to attend to the "objective structures (spaces of positions)" among the participants. The evidence suggests that greater success is demonstrated among learners and tutors in appropriating/demonstrating/developing their professional habitus in exchanges where symmetries in discourses are achieved, or, perhaps more accurately, asymmetries in either or both aspects of Bourdieu's "double nature" of reality, are managed or avoided.

Considers aspects of talk into telephones by young children in play. Examines expression of the incorporation of recognition of another's perspective, a movement towards recontextualization of language from the primary conversational contexts of joint environment, and experiences reflected in face-to-face talk on here-and-now topics with familiar interactants. (Author/VWL)

Introduction: Versions of Musical Childhoods The tradition of developmental psychology has been of fundamental importance in providing versions of musical childhoods, particularly for the earliest years of childhood. However, in [...]

In the media and communications field, research investigating the digital media engagements of very young children at home has largely been restricted to survey methods relying on parental self-reports. Recognizing that qualitative approaches can provide insights in families' practices, values, and attitudes, we argue for the fruitfulness of an ethnographic perspective, drawing on three cases from the project "A Day in the Digital Lives of children 0–3;" two in Sweden and one in England. Using the concept of methodological responsibility, we argue that methodology and ethics are intrinsically entwined. We offer reflections on dilemmas and challenges involved in our participatory work with children under three and their families, bringing attention to such issues as ensuring initial and ongoing consent, using a video camera in the home and data sharing and dissemination. Building trust in such sensitive work is a complex process but the rewards are considerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Picture Postcard was an extraordinarily popular innovation at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe, enabling writers to send brief, multimodal messages through a cheap communications channel, in a 'culture of speed'. With several deliveries a day, this could be experienced as closer to the synchronicity of the digital communications than vernacular written communications in the intervening period. I examine the writing of ten British Edwardian picture postcards from a collection of three thousand. Analysis of the writing, writtenness and multimodality of the postcards is combined with historical investigations of public records. Through this innovative approach to the construction of text histories, I demonstrate the value of applying the ethnographic sensibility of Literacy Studies to these communications that accomplished diverse and rich purposes and explore connections with claims made about contemporary digital practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interactive whiteboard (IWB), the first ICT tool primarily designed for whole-class interaction, is now in regular use in most British primary schools. In this paper, we explore its distinctive potential for enabling the teacher to plan and orchestrate activities and lessons using a wide range of multimodal resources, to engage students' cognitive and imaginative capacities. We show how teachers use combinations of 'matched resources' to support the bridging of pupils' understanding from the known to the new, and from everyday to academic understandings. We demonstrate how teachers can use the IWB to resource the development of ideas and themes over time while maintaining spontaneous responsiveness to situations as they arise, effectively enacting Sawyer's notion of teaching as 'disciplined improvisational performance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the growing research literature on children's 'intimate geographies' by focusing on two-year-old children's explorations and play within the domestic spaces of their homes. It draws on video data showing three young girls playing in selected home spaces i.e. a family grocery shop in Peru, the upstairs rooms of a house in America, and the balcony of an apartment in Italy. Through analysis of short video sequences the paper describes the way children use and invest meaning in these spaces. It is argued that the three domestic locations can be seen as 'safe places', in both material and personal senses; and that they enable children's sense of belonging, foster their 'emplaced knowledge' and build on their confidence to explore spaces further afield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's knowledge of telephone discourse has been little researched, despite the inherent challenge of this mode of communication. Previous research has studied children's performance in artificial environments with children talking to adults, and has focussed upon children's deficiencies in telephone dialogues. In this paper we argue for the importance of pretence play in the development of discourse skills and present data gathered from spontaneous toy telephone talk in a themed pretence play setting. Evidence demonstrates sociolinguistic competencies displayed appropriately and supports Vygotsky's suggestion that pretence play is an important arena for learning within aspirational role realizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how the notion of partnership permeated the methodology of a project concerned with investigating high quality educare for children under three. Partnership, in this specific sense of involving participants in the construction of knowledge, meant full participation in data collection leading to a high degree of involvement in later stages of research. The roots of this approach lie in an interpretive perspective, owing much to Vygotsky ‘s holistic theory of child development, from which stemmed the study focus upon interactions with children. We present particular qualities of the fruits of bringing educarers and parents into a perhaps uncommonly broad span of the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Anne Haas Dyson on construction of a hegemonic vision of children, one by Kathleen A. Roskos, James F. Christie, and SarahWidman on the relationship between literacy and play, and one by Elaine Reese, Alison Sparks and Diana Levya on children's language and literacy.

Abstract: The following recommendations are derived from a systematic analysis of 34 Serratia marcescens outbreaks described in 27 publications from neonatal and pediatric intensive care units (NICU, PICU), in which genotyping methods were used to confirm or exclude clonality. The clinical observation of two or more temporally related cases of nosocomial S. marcescens infection should raise the suspicion of an outbreak, particularly in the NICU or PICU setting. Since colonized or infected patients represent the most important reservoir for cross transmission, hygienic barrier precautions (contact isolation/cohortation, the use of gloves and gowns in addition to strictly performed hand disinfection, enhanced environmental disinfection) should immediately be implemented and staff education given. Well-planned sampling of potential environmental sources should only be performed when these supervised barrier precautions do not result in containment of the outbreak. The current strategy of empiric antibiotic treatment should be reevaluated by a medical microbiologist or an infectious disease specialist. Empiric treatment of colonized children should use combination therapy informed by in vitro susceptibility data; in this context the high propensity of S. marcescens to cause meningitis and intracerebral abscess formation should be considered. In vitro susceptibility patterns do not reliably prove or exclude the clonality of the outbreak isolate. Genotyping of the isolates by pulse-field gel electrophoresis or PCR-based methods should be performed, but any interventions to interrupt further nosocomial spread should be carried out without waiting for the results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]