Abstract Book of the 2nd International Academic Conference on Teaching and Education
Year: 2025
[PDF]
Reading and Writing Pathways through Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Exploring Literacy, Identity and Story with Authors and Readers
Dr. Alicia Curtin, Senior Lecturer
ABSTRACT:
This paper focuses on innovative Arts Education pedagogy through the development of future oriented, creative and impactful inquiry based experiential teaching methods for and authentic assessment of literacy learning in early childhood, primary and secondary education settings. The study, which has been published as a manuscript by Routledge, London, 2023 (https://www.routledge.com/Reading-and-Writing-Pathways-through-Childrens-and-Young-Adult-Literature-Exploring-literacy-identity-and-story-with-authors-and-readers/Curtin/p/book/9780367821012), is interdisciplinary and collaborative in its culturally responsive, environmental and activist focused approaches to curriculum development closely related to UN sustainable development goals. Connecting author, reader, writer and teacher identities and worlds this study explores how teachers can use children’s literature as a pedagogical approach for teaching literacy (including life long literacy practices) in the classroom. 17 international and award-winning children’s literature authors were interviewed about their own understanding and experiences of reading, writing and literacy. Each author also collaborated on literacy focused activities and pedagogical approaches for use with their own written texts in the classroom. This paper gives a brief overview of the study and its methodological approach. Exploring sample interview extracts and related literacy pedagogical approaches using fairy-tales, comic books, graphic novels, children living in literature, popular culture, young adult fiction, and non-fiction and digital texts, this paper develops a sociocultural understanding of literacy as a lived and contextually dependent practice where meaning is derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Different contexts for literacy are explored, including reading and writing strategically (to learn about literacy and literature), widely (for personal purposes) and deeply (to transform understanding) (Short, 2011).
Keywords: Agency, English pedagogy, power, value and positionality, professional learning partnerships, sociocultural theory