Changes in the teaching of reading during the past decade include a shift away from a previous emphasis on "one-to-one" learning experiences to a focus upon more communal forms of learning which place the teacher center stage. With the teacher's role thus highlighted, teacher-pupil interaction in practice has come under the spotlight, with a…

This article reports on a UKLA-funded project in which a group of 10 teachers in South Wales were involved. The televised science fiction drama "Doctor Who" was chosen as the theme as it was based on popular culture as well as being of local and national interest. The main character in this television drama is an alien who can fly through time and…

In contributing to debates about how student-teachers might draw from personal experience in addressing digital literacy in the classroom, this paper explores the stories that one primary student-teacher told of her digital practices during a larger study of the role of digital literacy in student-teachers' lives. The paper investigates the…

This article explores the term "learning lives" by reporting on three research projects conducted by members of the Oslo-based research group TransActions. By stressing the term "learning lives" within a range of social "educational" contexts, the article aims to look at learning within and across different learning sites exploring the positioning…

Social networking can currently be described as a mainstream youth activity, with almost half of 8-17-year-old children, who have access to the Internet, claiming to participate. As an activity it is of particular interest to literacy educators because it is enacted through the production and consumption of text. However, a growing body of…

This article discusses the identities that may be constructed by upper primary aged pupils during silent reading sessions. The findings presented are taken from a 2-year ethnographic case study, which investigated how four dyslexic pupils, aged 10-11 (Y5-6), coped with the classroom reading they encountered at a large primary school in northern…

In this article I explore one day in the life of a primary classroom in which teacher and children are "playful social" insiders in digital worlds. I argue that this snapshot offers glimmers of unimagined ways forward in teaching in digital worlds. The classroom culture is one of challenge, collective intelligence and reflection. The teacher's own…

In this paper we consider the place of early childhood literacy in the discursive construction of the identity(ies) of "proper" parents. Our analysis crosses between representations of parenting in texts produced by commercial and government/public institutional interests and the self-representations of individual parents in interviews with the…

The notion of "multiliteracies" and the development and creation of multimodal texts within classrooms is of pedagogic interest in this age of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). The case study reported herein provides an analysis of how one teacher engaged her class of primary school students as they responded to the challenge of…

From a learning perspective, social semiotics researchers tend to focus on the liberation latent in the multimedia options available through the new media. It is true that digital media democratise the possibilities open to the general public of a more varied and comprehensive text production than ever before, both in and outside school.…

This article focuses on a bookmaking project that was conducted with pre-adolescent Serbian and Bosnian girls at a summer camp outside Sarajevo, Bosnia in 2005. During this camp, children from Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia were brought together by the Global Children's Organisation to engage in a variety of activities, including conflict resolution,…

Given the narrow scope of primary teachers' knowledge and use of children's literature identified in Phase I of "Teachers as Readers" (2006-2007), the core goal of the Phase II project was to improve teachers' knowledge and experience of such literature in order to help them increase children's motivation and enthusiasm for reading, especially…

This paper describes the development and use of the Creative Learning Assessment (CLA) as a means of evidencing, supporting and promoting children's creative learning in arts-based contexts. The research team at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) worked with a group of teachers in inner-city Lambeth primary schools to develop an…

Previous experimental studies have indicated that young people's text comprehension and summarisation skills can be improved by techniques based on text concept mapping (TCM). However, these studies have done little to elucidate a practical pedagogy that can make the techniques adoptable within the context of typical secondary school classrooms.…

The main objective of this study was to explore how teachers and classroom factors contribute to students' successful literacy learning. Eight Grade three classes, achieving at higher levels than expected with regard to socio-economic background and language factors, were identified in a multicultural Stockholm district and statistically…