In public debate, language and literacy education is increasingly nominated as the answer to a number of urgent global policy problems including global economic growth, the challenges of technological innovation, national and regional economic competitiveness, stable democratic governance and individual human rights and participatory citizenship. Although Language and Literacy education is recruited to these causes, it is not always clear what is meant by language and literacy education, what contribution it can reasonably make to addressing these challenges, what success would look like or what trade-offs there might be between sometimes competing goals.
In this seminar series, presenters will reflect on three overarching questions:
- What is language and literacy education for?
- How do we know if it is achieving its aims?
- What constitutes evidence in the assessment of language and literacy achievement?
The question for our second seminar is: Is academic literacy failing to keep pace? Addressing multilingualism, interculturality and multimodality in a changing education landscape.Our presenters will reflect on their own work and engage with four broad questions in relation to the needs of all students:
- What is the most urgent issue?
- Why does it matter?
- Why hasn’t it been dealt with yet?
- What should we do next?
Presenters:
Prof. Liz McKinley, MGSE, (Focus: Indigenous engagement and academic literacy)
A/Prof. Paul Gruba, School of Languages and Linguistics, (Focus: Literacy and translingual listening)
Dr Mahtab Janfada, MGSE, (Focus: Pedagogy and academic literacy)
Trent Newman, MGSE, (Focus: Academic literacy in multilingual spaces)
Discussant:
A/Prof. Larissa Mclean Davies, MGSE
Details
Thursday 20 April, 5.30 - 6:45pm
Room 219
Level 2, 234 Queensberry Street
Melbourne Graduate School of Education
University of Melbourne