Churchill Helen: Episode 12 - Week Six

I have just wrapped up my London visit and meetings. What a fantastic time!

I started the week with a visit to Uxbridge to meet the amazing Wayne Tennant and his colleague, Doctoral student, Bal Kaur at Brunel University. Wayne’s work in the teaching and assessment of reading comprehension is world renowned.

His current work in Literacy and Culture is truly inspiring. He talked me through some of his course content and showed me some of the outputs by his preservice teachers when using diverse books with young children. It was so affirming to find he has based some of his teaching on my own work and his students are making use of some of the approaches developed in my doctoral studies. I left with some great ideas to further enhance my own teaching in this area – which shows some of the power of opportunities such as this Fellowship – a wonderful reciprocity of expertise and action!?

Another highlight of the week was my time at the Centre for Literacy in Primary education (CLPE) whose work I have been following for some time.

Here I met with librarian, Phoebe Demeger , and the research and Development Director, Farrah Serroukh.?Like the CCBC in Wisconsin, they are researching and reporting on diversity in children’s books. Farrah leads this project through which they produce the annual Reflecting Realities report and each year this expands in the depth and areas investigated.

Farrah and her team are currently conducting a longitudinal study with several schools investigating the impact culturally responsive use of children’s literature has on teacher understandings and practice and, ultimately, children’s learning and engagement. ?I can’t wait to see the outputs from this! I hope to undertake this type of work on a similar scale in Australia and with what I am learning, and the expert networks being developed I really can see this becoming a reality!

A huge thank you to Louise Johns-Shepherd , CLPE Chief Executive, for arranging this inspiring visit!

On Thursday, I wrapped up my week by visiting the wonderful Professor Nicole Mockler , currently on sabbatical at Oxford University. Nicole does wonderful work in many fields with some of her most recent work on teacher quality looking at how teachers are so maligned in the media and how this links to teacher stress and teacher shortages.

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Nicole and I talked about how the threads of our research tie together in many ways. This included considering the constant scrutiny and shallow level of judgment often applied to teachers which overlooks the complex nature of their work.

We also discussed how important it is to bring voices and goals together. While Initial Teacher Education Australia is going through yet another review, and while I have reservations regarding a constant focus on teacher preparation over addressing systemic inequities, I do at least see it as a positive move that cultural responsiveness has been highlighted as of great importance and is included in Recommendation 7 alongside that of evidence-based teaching of reading and teaching children with diverse learning needs.

As I often say and write – quality teaching of reading (and all other parts of education) and culturally responsive teaching are not, and must not be seen as, mutually exclusive. All children need to, and deserve to, learn to read and to love to read. For this to happen, they need culturally responsive practices that include reading about people like themselves and those who are different to themselves and high quality teaching of reading skills. They need to see themselves in their curriculum and resources – they need to see that school is a place where they belong! Teachers and pre-service teachers need support and training to understand and implement culturally responsive practices.

Nicole and I talked and walked for several hours – what a wonderful way to conduct a meeting! This gave me a wonderful look at key parts of Oxford, and I topped and tailed the visit with a Bodleain Library tour and a guided walking tour of Oxford. So many famous authors passed through the walls of Oxford (many world leaders too) C.S Lewis, JRR Tolkein, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Ludwidge Dodson (better known as Lewis Carroll). And, of course many places at Oxford have been key filming locations for books such as the Harry Potter movies, Mary Queen of Scots and Inspector Morse.

As always, I could not help but notice key links to my studies, with the mentions of the destruction of most of the library’s books during the Reformation with only a handful of books surviving with the rest taken away and burnt. That, and the removal of St Peter’s head and the cross in the carvings above the wall in the School of Divinity.

It would be nice to think this type of censorship doesn’t happen anymore but then I only have to check my twitter feed to see the situation in the US (see some of my earlier blogs) with book challenges this year now in the thousands. Disturbing as this is, it does highlight the power of books and we must use this as impetus to get diverse books into the hands of all children. The more we know about ourselves and about others the more empathetic, understanding and accepting we become! Not only that, but we learn to be more critical and think more carefully about what we do read and believe– hiding diverse viewpoints only breeds ignorance and prejudice.?

Yesterday, I arrived in Liverpool and I am looking forward to meeting with the amazing Ian Cushing on Monday to continue this fabulous learning experience!