Barbara Comber

The Supporting Improved Literacy Achievement (SILA) project has attempted to make a difference to literacy achievement in some of the most 'educationally disadvantaged'schools in South Australia, and hence to take on seriously what has been an intractable ...

... PhD thesis, James Cook University. [img], PDF (Thesis front) - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader 2391Kb. [img], PDF (Chapters 1-2) - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader 9Mb. [img], PDF (Chapter 3 ...

Comber, Barbara, Reid, Jo-Anne, & Nixon, Helen (2007) Environmental communications: pedagogies of responsibility and place. In Comber, B, Nixon, H, & Reid, J (Eds.) Literacies in place:Teaching environmental communications. Primary English Teaching Association, Australia, pp. 5-18.

Thus, the US economy was not backed with sufficient cash. After the stock market reached its peak in September of 1929, stocks seesawed erratically, investors panicked, and the US financial system collapsed. Businesses and banks closed, facto-ry production dropped, and ...

© Primary English Teaching Association 2007. This page is available for download from www.peta.edu.au. It may be copied for the purposes of professional development but may not otherwise be reproduced without the publisher's permission. ... Chapter 1: Environmental ...

Since the mid-1990s, government policies in the USA, Canada, England, and Australia have promoted the need to produce an ICT skilled workforce in order to ensure national competitiveness in globalised economic conditions. In this article, we examine the ways in which these policy intentions in 1 state in Australia were translated into a techno-determinist and technocentric plan which focused primarily on getting wired up and connected. We summarise the findings from 2 projects: an investigation of a state-wide principals' professional development programme and an action research study investigating literacy, educational disadvantage, and information technologies. We found significant differences in the distribution of the physical and human capabilities between schools which made the task of engaging with ICT harder for some than others. Nevertheless, we suggest that some school leaders did develop innovative practice. We suggest that policy deficits made it difficult for school leaders to grapple with the dimensions of and debates about the kinds of educational changes that schools and school systems should be making.

Publication View. 48849963. Behind the scenes: Making movies in early years classrooms (2005).Nixon, Helen. Publication details. Download, http://arrow.unisa.edu.au:8081/1959.8/27734. Publisher, RoutledgeFalmer. Repository, ARROW Discovery Service (Australia). ...

Reid, Jo-Anne, Nixon, Helen, & Comber, Barbara (2007) Teaching for environmental sustainability: Combining critique with hope. In Comber, B, Nixon, H, & Reid, J (Eds.) Literacies in place: Teaching environmental communications. Primary English Teaching ...

Comber, Barbara & Reid, Jo-Anne (2006) Literacy education: what's new and what needs to be new? In Doecke, B, Howie, M, & Sawyer, W (Eds.) Only connect: English teaching, schooling and community. Wakefield Press in association with The Australian Association ...

Nixon, Helen & Comber, Barbara (2009) Literacy, landscapes and learning in a primary classroom. In Somerville, M, Power, K, & de Carteret, P (Eds.) Landscapes and learning: Place studies for a global world. Sense Publishers, The Netherlands, pp. 119-138.

Abstract This chapter reports on a project in which university researchers' expertise in architecture, literacy and communications enabled two teachers in one school to expand the forms of literacy that primary school children engaged in. Starting from the school ...

... Research: commonalties and parallels; Carol Munn-Giddings 'A Different Way of Knowing': social care values, practitioner research and action research; Pete Strauss No Easy Answers: the dilemmas and challenges of teacher research; Angie Titchen & Alison Binnie A Unified ...

This chapter considers the complex literate repertoires of 21st century children in multicultural primary classrooms in Adelaide South Australia. It draws on the curricular and pedagogical work of two experienced primary school teachers who explore culture, race and class, by ...

... Like Judy and Cherie, the other teacher-researchers who joined the three-year project were 18 ... reviewed articles for English Teaching: Practice and Critique, jointly written with three late career teachers (Comber et al., 2004) and with one early career-late career pair (Boyer et al ...

... students at risk / Caleb Peterson -- 5. Utilising community funds of knowledge as resources for school literacy learning / Rob Fuller and Di Hood -- 6. Using Shrek and Bart Simpson to build respectful learning communities / Cheris Pickering and Judy Painter -- 7. Re-positioning ...

... Critical literacies and cultural studies. Luke, A., Comber, B. and Grant, H. (2003). Critical literacies and cultural studies. In Geoff Bull and Michele Anstey (Ed.), The Literacy Lexicon 2nd ed. (pp. 15-36) Australia: Prentice Hall. Document type: Book Chapter. ...

Increasingly many education systems are behaving as though a standardized global approach to curriculum design and pedagogical practices will lead to more competitive citizenry and economies. That is, they are placing a high degree of emphasis on comparative statistics and international and state rankings in order to judge the quality of teaching and schooling. Literacy is an area which attracts high stakes testing, political and media commentary, often with a narrowing of approaches and a never-ending hunt for a failproof answer. However, my research suggests that anxiety-driven same-size-fits-all systems programs may be contributing to literacy difficulties for students, teachers, school leaders and parents. I argue that what is needed is a fundamental re-imagining and redesign of school literacies. My collaborative research with teachers suggests that theories of social justice, social geographies, literacies and teachers' work can inform and re-energise education for the planet and its peoples. In this presentation, I explore possibilities for research, theory, policy and practice that emerge in this contemporary literacy landscape. In particular, I will illustrate ways in which teacher-researchers actively work with young people aware to explore the positive potential of the interconnectedness and intersections of different people from different places when the welfare of the planet and the local community become shared goals. WORKSHOP: Learning to write now: A socio-material analysis of text production at school Australia's students perform less well in reading than in writing on standardized measures. The gap between children in low socioeconomic communities and their more affluent peers is significant and increases as they continue through schooling. Contemporary literacy classrooms are spaces of intense curriculum and technological change; yet, even now reading seems to enjoy more space and time than writing, despite the fact that producing texts in various forms, genres, media and modes is a ubiquitous practice in everyday life. The advent of technologies, such as smart boards and iPads, changes the physical dimensions of some classrooms. Yet many classrooms remain in transition, with whiteboards and blackboards side by side, exercise books, pencils, and iPads together on student and teacher desks. Some classrooms have few tools or technologies. In this workshop we will discuss how students are learning to write as they participate in producing both print and digital texts with a range of tools and technologies in different cultural contexts. Learning to write is conceptualised as a situated dynamic social and material cultural process. Teacher and student perspectives on learning to write will be shared. Innovative approaches to teaching writing in early childhood classrooms designed by teacher-researchers in two schools situated in low socioeconomic communities across two states will be illustrated. The affordances of new ways of understanding learning to write in action, in contemporary classrooms are explored along with what gets in the way.