EDUC9133 Literacies for the Middle and Secondary Years

This topic supports pre-service teachers to think about their role as a teacher of literacy in their teaching areas. The topic begins with a focus on how socio-cultural background shapes students' textual practices. Definitions of literacy are considered, together with their implications for classroom teaching. Against this background pre-service teachers will examine their responsibility to teach literacy in their specialist teaching areas. Classroom strategies which support students' literacy learning will be explored.

This topic aims to:

• Understand that education policies, educational contexts and student needs are some of the factors that impinge on teachers' work
• Understand their responsibility to teaching literacy in the middle and secondary years in their teaching areas/disciplines
• Develop understandings, knowledge and skills for supporting literacy learning appropriate for beginning middle and secondary schooling teachers
• Introduce students to the field of literacy education research

1. Identify a range of written, oral and visual texts and to be able to select appropriate texts, and ways of dealing with texts, for middle school students
2. Acknowledge the contextual factors that shape text production: that a text is influenced by who wrote it; when, where and under what circumstances it was written; and, its intended audience and purpose
3. Know the language structures and features of different text types, why they are significant, and ways of teaching them in classrooms, using appropriate meta language that is clear and precise
4. Identify and select from a range of teaching strategies that support students’ literacy development and be able to use these strategies effectively
5. Identify how literacy is conceptualised in their teaching area/discipline and be able to able to embed literacy teaching in their classroom pedagogy
6. Identify a range of views found in the literature about literacy learning and pedagogy and how they influence classroom decision making
7. Articulate an informed and defensible personal view of literacy that can be used to interrogate classroom practice for consistency with this view