A Landscape View of Literacy Studies in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over a hundred literacy researchers gathered at the University of Victoria for the 10 th annual Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada (LLRC) preconference, Writing the Past: Reading the Future.The preconference invited scholars to explore the landscape of literacy studies and present papers and engage in discussions and debates about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going as a field.Building on the momentum of this event, we have come together as organizers of the preconference with this special issue that brought together a number of Canadian scholars' work in diverse areas of literacy education from adult literacy to digital literacies, multiliteracies, Canadian Aboriginal children's literature and family literacy programs.The five papers in this issue explore literacy learning across a range of in-school and out-of-school contexts illustrating the complex, multiple, layered and dynamic nature of literacies in our everyday lives.The first three papers come from our conference panelists and review the authors' past and current research as well as their considerations for future research.Suzanne Smythe presents a review of 10 years of adult literacy policy and practice in Canada.Smythe draws on the concepts of 'policy networks' (Hamilton, 2014), 'powerful literacies' (Crowther, Tett, & Hamilton, 2012) and 'workaround' (Campbell 2012;Debono et al. 2013) to analyze policy texts and discourses.She discusses the tensions between the centrally imposed accountability structures and policy priorities, contrasted with the actualities of local educational contexts.She argues that educators and learners "participate in policy networks as powerful actors" and that definitions of literacy are constantly shaped and re-shaped though this interaction of texts, discourses, power, and agency.Lynne Wiltse's paper offers a critical reflective narrative focusing on Aboriginal children's literature in Canada.Drawing on Aldana (2008) and Bothelho and Rudman's (2009) work, Wiltse analyzes her research, teaching and learning experiences using the three metaphors of "books that are mirrors", where students see themselves and their realities reflected; "books that are windows", which offer insights to Others' worlds; and "books that are doors", which invite readers to social action.Wiltse discusses the importance of considering cultural diversity in relation to text selection in K-12 classrooms as well as in teacher education programs, and stresses the value of using these texts that confront the status quo or the mainstream ideology and bring issues of social inequities to the forefront so that students and teachers can engage in critical discussion.Wiltse draws on the notions of 'difficult knowledge' (Pitt & Britzman, 2006) and 'pedagogy of discomfort' (Boler, 1999; Boler & Zembylas, 2003) as she examines the challenges and the role that discomfort plays while teachers and students explore difficult issues such as oppression, marginalization and social inequity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.058 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".