ASFLA Armidale

Here is the abstract I've just submitted to the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association Conference 2006. This year it's in Armidale, NSW. Cross the fingers and hope for the best. It's not great, but it's something. Plenty of interesting people, including the young Angela Thomas (aka anya), who I've been wanting to meet for ages.


Using digital technologies for literacy across school, home and community: five case studies

Recent educational policy and curriculum debates have focused on a range of issues at the intersection of new technologies, young people and learning (eg Sefton-Green 1998; Marsh & Millard 2005). These debates raise questions about young people’s changing practices, the future of formal schooling and the changing social, cultural and economic conditions young people might meet in their varied futures. Within this broader context, this paper reports on the preliminary findings of a study investigating the connections between young people’s practices around digital technologies across school, home and community settings. The study is particularly interested in the implications of young people’s social and cultural practices for language and literacy learning and teaching in secondary schools. Ethnographically oriented case studies of five young people from five contrasting schools in Melbourne are examined from a New Literacy Studies perspective (Street 1984; Gee 1996; Pahl & Rowsell 2005) to understand: a) what technologies these young people are using and the spaces where use takes place, and b) how these different uses might be understood productively as social and cultural practices. The case studies promise insights into the everyday lives of young people in terms of their language learning, shifting identities and changing group memberships. The case studies also illustrate the kinds of pressures operating on teachers and schools through policy and in discourses about ‘changing times’.

As I'm sure you can see, I'm a beginner at his game ...