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Digital technology has long been ubiquitous in many communities within Australia and internationally, thereby requiring suitable digital proficiencies. While a majority of Australian children experience digital literacies as part of their everyday lives, limitations in access disadvantage others. In educational settings, there is a clear need for teachers to incorporate the digital literacies of learners while also working towards addressing inequities by providing rich literacy experiences that bring together print and digital forms of texts. Well-established understandings about the importance of literacy development early in a child's life support teachers of the first years of school to teach essential digital literacies. In Australian schools, teachers are mandated by a range of documents, including the Australian Curriculum, that provide content for teachers to teach. Situated within a frame of New Literacies theories, this paper reports findings from analyses of the ways these mandated documents may support teachers in the first years of school to design learning experiences that respond to learners' needs in producing digital texts. We then determine implications for teachers' responsiveness to these documents. With the recent release of the Australian Curriculum version 9.0, we argue for the pedagogical knowledge that teachers require to implement digital text production experiences within the mandates of the curriculum and, consequently, the professional learning they need for realising the potential of all children's digital capabilities in their classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established in Australian research and policy literature that children attending schools in regional, rural, and remote locations will benefit from access not only to experiences and interactions offered in their own communities but also to the sorts of experiences available to those in more populated areas of Australia as well. Virtual interactions afforded by technology are an obvious solution to achieving this access by enabling Australian classrooms to be increasingly connected. However, with the plethora on offer and little oversight of their quality, literacy educators are left to sift and sort through volumes of virtual interactions and to make decisions regarding their capacity to promote the development of oral language through play. Using a design-based research approach, this study aimed to identify in research literature key principles for the design of virtual interactions for children that can support the development of oral language through play and test them against those currently on offer. The study confirmed the value of virtual interactions as rich sources for learning that offered shared experiences built on language interactions between creators and users and giving access to new information where learning is scaffolded and understandings can be transferred from virtual to real contexts. The study also identified personal advantages that access to new physical geographies within virtual interactions can offer to those in regional, rural, and remote communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian early childhood education positions literacy learning as a set of social practices contextualised by one's unique experiences and knowledges. Despite widespread agreement about the need to teach phonics and other code-breaking practices, the ways early childhood educators integrate "constrained" skills are not well understood outside the education profession. Current public discourse is generating ever-increasing pressure for the adoption of explicit teaching of phonics, however, teaching skills in isolation from reading and writing can be problematic, especially for marginalised learners. Challenges lie not only in learning to apply skills later but also in the impingement on time for more sophisticated concepts such as comprehension or vocabulary. This paper's focus on pedagogies in early childhood educational settings prior to compulsory formal school sits within a larger project examining literacy demands for learners across school. In this paper, we argue for greater recognition of early childhood educators' expertise in planning for and facilitating a diversity of practices that can address all learners' needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian literacy classrooms are shaped by an unprecedented time of national curriculum reform. Australian teachers follow a national English curriculum with the pressures of national standardised assessment, state interpretation (state-based syllabus and support documents) and localised system requirements influencing their pedagogical practices. It is timely to consider how teachers recontextualise these external pressures in their teaching of writing. This paper uses reflexivity theory to investigate the interplay between social, cultural and individual influences on the materiality of writing classrooms. Through our conceptual framing of reflexive materiality, we analyse video tours created by elementary teachers (Grades 3–6) to highlight classroom components pertinent to their writing pedagogy and practices. Our analysis focused on theoretically-based instruction practices, teacher professional knowledge, opportunities for students to write, and the impact of the external context on the materiality of the classroom environment. Findings demonstrate a reflexive relationship between teachers’ system-based contexts and the substance of classroom objects, spaces, and teachers’ ideas and philosophies regarding writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers’ enactments of literacy pedagogies are recontextualisations not only of curriculum documents, but of system and school-based policies, approaches, frameworks and the demands of assessments. These external inputs combine with teacher professional experience, beliefs about teaching and the roles of teachers and learners to generate pedagogies unique to each context. While these pedagogies can generate rich teaching environments and offer genuine opportunities for learning that connect strongly with students’ out of school experiences, they also require the learner to understand what is expected and how things are done in this classroom. Teacher expectations are expressed through the learning experiences they design and the ways they talk about them, and it is in these interactions that learners develop understandings about what counts as literacy. Within the frame of Green’s (1988; 2012) 3D model of literacy, we draw on semi-structured interview data from teachers and students in the middle years of primary school to examine teacher intent and learners’ interpretations of classroom expectations for literacy learning. We extrapolate these findings in connection with the operational, cultural and critical dimensions of literacy, and consider the implications for learners as they engage with the demands of what it means to be literate today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to write is central to students’ success at school and beyond, and key to this success is the design and implementation of classroom learning experiences. Teachers’ writing lessons are informed by their beliefs about learning, their writing content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. This knowledge supports their interpretation of curriculum documents and their ability to navigate resources for planning and implementing writing lessons. And for teachers who require further development of that content and pedagogical content knowledge, writing teaching becomes problematic. Media and government reports about the decline in writing performance in national and international assessments such as NAPLAN necessitates writing pedagogies research. Findings shared in this paper emerge from a larger project examining literacy demands in New South Wales classrooms across transition points of school. This paper examines two instances of classroom-based practice where students in two consecutive academic school years (Year 2 and 3) with two different teachers participated in a persuasive writing lesson about the same topic–Are cats better than dogs? Analysis of the pedagogical interactions and use of resources provide insights into teacher content knowledge, pedagogical approaches and the subsequent impact on student learning. These findings point to the need for better understanding about the demands on teachers to support students’ development of genuine and empowering writing skills. Consequently, the paper argues for professional development that deepens teacher content and pedagogical content knowledge for pedagogies that can better support student writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That an educator should read texts aloud to children is a cornerstone of literacy pedagogy. And although it is well established that reading aloud to children occurs frequently across educational contexts, less clear is the ways those unique contexts shape the text choices, teaching strategies and expectations for children’s engagement with these literacy learning experiences. The findings shared in this paper sit within a larger study examining the changing literacy demands for learners across their schooling years. The paper examines the literacy learning demands during acts of reading aloud as they were offered in two pre-school settings (prior-to-school) and two Kindergarten classrooms (the first year of formal primary schooling). Analyses of classroom observations and teacher semi-structured interview transcripts through the interactions, the time structures, the use of space and of resources illustrate Bernstein’s theory of visible and invisible literacy learning pedagogies evident in these representations of reading aloud. Considered in the paper are implications for children when pedagogical decisions constrain and enable early literacy learning. The paper contributes to existing understandings about early literacy learning by arguing for greater clarity in the ways the teaching of reading is positioned and articulated for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shares findings from part of a larger project exploring students’ interpretations of children’s literature during independent reading time. Examined in this paper are interpretations by students in Grade 4 (aged 9–10 years) about the messages conveyed in the almost wordless picture book Mirror by author and artist Jeannie Baker. Mirror shares a multicultural perspective on life through its portrayal through collage of the lives of two families living in different countries. Data were collected as semi-structured interviews and observations recorded as field notes. Chambers’ (1994) ‘Tell Me’ framework informed the question schedule of the semistructured interviews, which were designed to promote opportunities for students to share their interpretations following independent reading time. Emerging themes from data analysis are considered through critical literacy lens (Janks, 2010). Further, implications for the use of almost wordless picture books in classroom reading experiences are identified in connection with the development of children’s cultural awareness and sensitivity (Short, 2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of children experiencing a successful transition to school is well established in research literature. Central to this is including the children themselves in the conversation about their learning and ensuring they develop a sense of fit and belonging to their new school environment. The findings shared in this paper sit within a larger study of examining children’s perspectives of their literacy experiences at the time of transition to school. This paper reports the perspectives of two children, firstly in their pre-school (prior-to-school) setting and then again in their Kindergarten setting (the first year of formal primary schooling in New South Wales). The study draws on the theories of literacy as a social practice and describes literacy as events and practices. Digital storytelling was used as the main data collection method to capture the children’s voices as they annotate images, describing their chosen literacy events in each educational setting. Findings revealed that whilst some children have a confident and successful initiation into the literacy events and practices of school, others may not. Herein are substantial messages, firstly, that we need to listen to children so we can support their transition to formal school and secondly that teachers need to better understand the literacy practices of children in pre-school to more effectively support them as they transition to Kindergarten. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]