Literacy, Place, and Pedagogies of Possibility (Expanding Literacies in Education)

"I found this book tremendously uplifting for many reasons. One was that it is informed by insights from three decades of Barbara Comber’s pedagogic research and practice. Reading it felt like a conversation with a revered senior colleague, who has maintained her optimism and vision throughout the vicissitudes of education policy and ideologies during that time. Despite its scope, this book is succinct and very current, addressing literacy and learning in an age of climate change and globalisation. But its long view gives it a compelling authority." - Rachel Stubley, Research and Practice in Adult Literacy 

How can teachers ensure a pedagogy of possibility underpinned by social justice, and what has literacy got to do with this? This book explores the positive synergies between critical literacy and place-conscious pedagogy. Through rich classroom research it introduces and demonstrates how a synthesis of insights from theories of space and place and literacy studies can underpin the design and enactment of culturally inclusive curriculum for diverse student communities, and illustrates how making place and space the objects of study provide productive resources for teachers to design enabling pedagogical practices that extend students’ literate repertoires. The argument is that systematic study of and engagement with specific elements of place can enable students’ academic learning and literacy.

Literacy, Place, and Pedagogies of Possibility

• is informed by critical literacy, place-conscious pedagogy and spatial theory
• is richly illustrated with examples from classroom research, including teacher and student artifacts
• provides new directions for classroom practice in critical literacy

This novel combination of multidisciplinary theory and classroom research extends previous work in critical literacy pedagogy, drawing on two decades of ethnographic and collaborative inquiry in classrooms situated in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms.