English Teaching: Practice and Critique September, 2008, Volume 7, Number 2
http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/2008v7n2art5.pdf pp. 85-98
Digital literacies in two low socioeconomic classrooms:
Snapshots of practice
ROBYN HENDERSON
University of Southern Queensland
EILEEN HONAN
University of Southern Queensland
ABSTRACT: The teaching of digital literacies is regarded as an important
facet of literacy teaching in the 2f‘ century. With many literacy tests
continuing to indicate that students’ levels of achievement tend to be
differentiated along socioeconomic lines, it seems timely to consider the
connections between home and school and how these play out in relation to
digital literacies. This is particularly important in light of the considerable
evidence that has demonstrated how important home-school connections are
in ensuring improved traditional literacy outcomes for students from low
socioeconomic backgrounds. With these points in mind, this article reports on
an investigation into the usage of digital technologies in two middle-years
classrooms in low socioeconomic suburbs in a regional Australian city. Using
a range of ethnographic techniques, the study explored two teachers’
approaches to teaching students how to use digital technologies in one school
term. Through snapshots of digital practices in the two classrooms, three
issues are considered: teachers ’ pedagogical approaches; students ’ access to
digital technologies at home and at school; and the teachers ’ recognition of
students ’ prior knowledge of digital technologies. The article concludes by
reflecting on the need for teachers to draw on the digital literacies that
students are using in their out-of-school lives, to make bridges to school
learning and thus address the challenge of preparing students to be literate in
the 2T‘ Century.
KEYWORDS: Deficit discourses, digital divide, digital literacies, digital
technologies, literacy, socioeconomic status
INTRODUCTION
Current understandings about the learning of literacies highlight the importance of
social and cultural contexts and the way that literacies always involve people
conducting social and cultural activities. This view challenges monolithic accounts of
“literacy” as a set of neutral and transportable skills and instead understands literacies
as active and interactive practices that always occur within social situations and
cultural contexts (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Luke, 1992).
Traditionally, school literacy learning has privileged a narrow range of literacy
practices and this has had the effect of advantaging some learners and disadvantaging
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Digital literacies in two low socioeconomic ...
or marginalising others. As Gee (2004) points out, some students “get an important
head start” to the learning of school literacies before they arrive at school (p. 3).
Indeed, success in school literacy learning - defined by Alloway and Gilbert (1998)
as “demonstrated competence in the context of literacy as it is done and evaluated in
schools” (p. 255) - has been inextricably tied to “the repertoires of practices and
knowledge that they [students] already had from their home and community
experiences” (Comber & Barnett, 2003, p. 5).
In talking about the connections between home and school. Comber (1998) argued
that what has often been understood as “background” - socioeconomic status, family
practices, ethnicity, home languages, and “young people’s life-worlds and
experiences” - is “by no means ‘background’ in their [students’] access and take up
of educational provision and school literacies” (p. 3). From the seminal work of
Shirley Brice Heath in the US (1982, 1983) through to more recent research in the
Australian context (e.g. Comber & Kamler, 2004; Freebody, Ludwig, & Gunn, 1995;
Kamler & Comber, 2005), it has been acknowledged that families engage in diverse
literacy practices and that these are not always recognised as valid in school contexts.
There is plenty of evidence that the non-acceptance of home literacy practices as valid
or useful generally results in deficit stories about students and families (Freebody et
al, 1995; Henderson, 2005; Kamler & Comber, 2005). However, there is also
evidence that home-school connections are important when trying to improve literacy
outcomes for students whose literate strengths and capabilities in contexts outside
schools do not match the valued and normalised literacy practices of schooling
(Freebody et al, 1995; Thomson, 2002). By reconceptualising home literacies as
resources to support school literacy learning, teachers can help to recormect students
to classroom literacy learning (Comber & Kamler, 2004; Kalantzis, Cope & The
Learning by Design Project Group, 2005).
As digital technologies have increasingly permeated daily life and impacted on the
literacy practices that are used (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006b; Carrington,
2006; Healy, 2008; Henderson, 2008), there has been growing recognition that digital
literacies and the use of digital technologies are a necessary part of school learning.
While considerable research has focused on a so-called “digital divide”, which
highlights the “gap” between those who have technological access and those who do
not (e.g. National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 1999;
Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development, 2001), there is a growing
sense that the divide is actually between the rich literate practices used by young
people in their homes and the narrow and restricted practices engaged in by schools
and teachers. Recent data from the USA and the UK indicate that the so-called digital
divide between socioeconomic groups is not as clear-cut as it was 20 years ago
(InterActive Education Project, 2002; Horrigan, 2006). As the costs of computer
technologies and internet access decrease, and the infiltration of mobile phone
technologies increases, families from low socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely
to perceive access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) as an
educational imperative (Honan, 2006a).
Despite parental investment in digital technologies as a “techno-educational panacea”
(Schofield-Clark & Demont-Heinrich, 2004), there is some evidence that teachers in
low socioeconomic schools often underestimate the access of students to computers
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and the internet (Honan, 2006a; Snyder, Angus, & Sutherland- Smith, 2004;
Warsehauer, Knobel, & Stone, 2004). Previous studies have also indieated that
teaehers generally do not take aeeount of students’ home use of digital technologies,
especially when that use involves mobile phones and game consoles rather than
computers (Honan, 2008).
With these issues in mind, the current research set out to investigate the use of digital
technologies in two classrooms in schools in low socioeconomic areas. Through
snapshots of digital practices in the two classrooms, three issues are considered:
teachers’ pedagogical approaches; students’ access to digital technologies at home
and at school; and the teachers’ recognition of students’ prior knowledge of digital
technologies. The article concludes by reflecting on authentic purposes and contexts
for learning digital literacies.
THE RESEARCH
To begin an investigation of the usage of digital technologies, particularly computers,
in schools and to explore students’ perceptions of this usage in relation to their home
practices, data were collected in two middle-years (young adolescent) classrooms in
low socioeconomic suburbs in a regional Australian city. In particular, the research
set out to investigate teachers’ assumptions about the digital literacy practices and the
digital texts used at home by students from low socioeconomic backgrounds; what the
students described as their home digital literacy practices and the types of digital texts
that they accessed, and how the home practices described by the students compared
with what they were expected to do at school.
The small study was conducted in two, state primary schools located in low
socioeconomic suburbs in a regional city area of south-east Queensland, Australia. A
two-step process was used to identify the two schools. Unemployment data from the
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2006a) were mapped against information from the
state education authority about the locations of schools (Department of Education
Training and the Arts, Queensland, 1999). Once schools were identified as located in
the section of the city with the highest level of unemployment, schools’ Annual
Reports, which are available to the public from the internet, were used to select two
schools.
In their A nn ual Reports, both schools noted the high level of unemployment in their
local communities, along with other factors that are often linked with low
socioeconomic status (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000; 2007). One school’s
Annual Report stated that the majority of their students came “from families with long
term unemployment and 50 per cent of the students live in families with only one
natural parent,” and the other reported that the school population had “a moderately
high rate of student transience, a significant unemployment rate and a high percentage
of single parent families.” In both schools, a small number of students came from
indigenous families. (References are not provided so that the anonymity of the
schools is preserved.)
The research was conducted in one middle-school classroom in each school
(Classroom 1 and Classroom 2). The classes, each with approximately 25 students.
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were ehosen through negotiation with the sehool prineipals, who identified a teaeher
who had an “interest” and was au fait with using digital technologies in the
classroom. Both teachers had many years of teaching experience. During one school
term of 2007, data were collected during a weekly visit by one of the researchers. As
a participant observer in the classrooms, the researcher used a range of ethnographic
techniques, including classroom observations, field notes, informal discussions with
students and interviews with the teachers and the students.
During classroom observations, data were collected about activities within the
classrooms as a whole, but there was a specific focus on a small group of students -
eight in Classroom 1 and six in Classroom 2. We had asked the teachers to consider
students who they knew would fit our interest in low socioeconomic status and home
usage of computers. However, we also explained that we wanted to cause the least
disruption to classrooms as possible and were happy for the teachers to consider what
was convenient to them. In the case of Classroom 1, convenience played a major role.
The class was already operating in three small groups for focused lessons on the use
of computers and the teacher chose one of those groups for the focused observations
of particular students.
CLASSROOM SNAPSHOT 1
The class that was observed in one school was a Years 5, 6 and 7 multi-age class
located in a large, double teaching space. The children were between 10 and 12 years
old. Four computers were available at one of the back comers of the room. These
were used at times during class and the teacher allowed students to use them in the
mornings before school commenced. However, twelve computers were located in a
small room next to the classroom. These were not for the exclusive use of the class,
but were accessed by classes from across the school. The room thus served a
“computer laboratory” purpose within the school.
For the class in question, a teacher-aide provided focused half-hour lessons on
computer use for small groups of approximately eight students at a time. The
computers in the withdrawal room were located on desks that were arranged in a U-
shape against three of the walls. This set-up meant that students faced a wall when
they were using a computer and keyboard and that they had to turn their bodies when
they were required to look at the whiteboard located on the fourth wall. The centre of
the room was an empty space. It was apparent during the observations of the focussed
lessons that once students sat at a computer, they remained in that position until the
half-hour lesson was finished.
During the research period, the class was working on a Mathematics investigation
about the number of “letter slots” on a vinyl pencil case. Students were collecting data
about the number of letters in the names of students in their own class as well as
across the school. This information was to be stored in Microsoft Excel and the
students were learning how to use that program during the teacher-aide’s focused
lessons.
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CLASSROOM SNAPSHOT 2
The class in the second school was a Year 6 class (approximately 11 years of age),
located in a single teaching space with four computers on desks at the back of the
classroom. These were used by the students before school, during school time, and
during lunch breaks on rainy days. A withdrawal room containing 22 computers was
located between this classroom and another and was used on a regular basis by the
class. Most of the computers were situated on desks against the wall in a U-shape and
students had to face the wall to use the computers. However, the rest of the room was
full of hexagonally-shaped desks with chairs for students to use if not working at a
computer. In most of the lessons observed, students were able to move within the
withdrawal room as well as between this room and their classroom and they engaged
in considerable discussion about the tasks they were doing.
During the period of data collection, all students in the class were preparing a
PowerPoint presentation about “Me” as part of an integrated studies unit that involved
the key learning areas of Technology, English and the Study of Society and the
Environment. The students were expected to create PowerPoint presentations that
contained hyperlinks, different sized fonts, word art and photographs. The audience
for the presentation was to be the class and the teacher. The students were encouraged
to include information about the younger students (from either Year 1 or Year 2) they
were mentoring as part of a whole school reading program and this provided an
opportunity for later use of the PowerPoint presentations in other classrooms.
TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL APPROAC H ES
During the observation period, it was apparent in both classrooms that there was a
focus on teaching specific aspects of “how to use” a particular computer program.
Despite the similar focus, however, there were considerable differences in the
approaches that were taken.
In Classroom 1, where a teacher-aide provided focused and explicit instruction about
Microsoft Excel, the approach was teacher-aide-directed and incorporated the
teaching of a set of skills - including entering data, the addition of rows, producing
graphs, and copying graphs in Excel and pasting them into a Word document - using
“dummy data”. In each lesson, the students spent considerable time listening to an
initial set of oral instructions, which were sometimes recorded on the whiteboard. The
students were then expected to follow the steps at their computer keyboards ,while the
teacher-aide provided further instructions as a “voice over” (see Comber, 1997). The
voice overs included instructions such as: “Go to edit and copy;” “Now go back to
your spreadsheet. This time we are going to graph the money,” and “This time click
on Row 4 and edit and paste.”
Even though the teacher-aide used an extensive metalanguage - which included the
terms “chart wizard”, “button”, “icon”, “number keypad”, “data values”, “minimise”
and many more - there was little discussion around these terms. When there were
opportunities for interactions between the students and their instructor, an IRE
(initiate-respond-evaluate) format was evident, whereby the teacher-aide initiated a
discussion by asking a question and the students provided responses which were
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evaluated by the teaeher-aide (Cazden, 2001). There were few opportunities for the
students to engage in diseussion with each other, as they spent most of their time
listening and following step-by-step instructions.
The approach in Classroom 2 was quite different from the one observed in Classroom
1. To equip the students with the skills required to produce a series of PowerPoint
slides, the teacher had modelled some of the tasks that needed to be completed -
including inserting photographs, changing the slide background design, adding sound.
The modelling was conducted in the classroom using a computer connected to a data
projector, and the teacher was logged in as one of the students. The students plaimed
the content (information about themselves) and the wording of their series of
PowerPoint slides on paper before using the computers. The paper task was
completed individually. Information on the whiteboard provided an organisational
structure for the four slides that students had to design, as well as a guide to inserting
specific features into PowerPoint, as per the requirements of the task.
A major difference with the approach taken in Classroom 1 was that the students in
Classroom 2 were working on the task (the design of PowerPoint slides) right from
the beginning and their learning of aspects of the program PowerPoint occurred as
they were doing the task. It was apparent that the teacher had identified “experts”
within the class and called upon them to assist students who had missed some of the
modelling episodes. Even though each student worked at a computer, there was much
discussion about the tasks they were doing and it was evident that considerable
problem-solving was occurring. The teacher moved amongst the students, answering
questions and offering advice. The students experimented with colour, layout and
fonts as they prepared their slides and this experimentation was a major point of
discussion and comparison as the students worked at the computers.
Collaboration amongst students was a feature of the class’s use of computers and even
students who were not necessarily regarded as experts took on the role of teaching
other students when they were able to do something that other students could not. For
example, in one instance, one of the female students shared her knowledge about
changing the design and colour of the slide backgrounds with students working at
nearby computers. The students also discussed the information that they displaying on
slides and ways of organising and expressing that information.
TEACHERS’ RECOGNITION OF STUDENTS’ PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
In using quite different approaches to the teaching of digital technologies, the teachers
also seemed to have different understandings about their students’ prior knowledge of
digital technologies and the computer program that was being taught. In Classroom 1 ,
the students were given direct instruction of sequences to follow when using
Microsoft Excel and this instruction was the same for all students in the one group
that was observed, regardless of their previous experiences with computers. As will
be further explained in the next section, the students in that group had varied
experiences of computers and one student knew quite a lot about Excel, because she
had watched her father use the program at home.
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In Classroom 2, all students were also doing the same task. However, the students
were working at their own paee and were individualising the task as they proeeeded.
The teaeher reeognised some of the students as experts and, on oecasions, matehed up
experts and novices. There were opportunities, however, for all students with
expertise on the use of PowerPoint to share their knowledge with other students.
Even though the teacher in Classroom 2 may have seemed more attuned to students’
prior knowledge, it was evident that both teachers had talked with their students about
digital technologies, including computers. The teachers had certainly heard about
many of the digital technologies that students used at home and there was recognition
that students had better skills than teachers in some areas. For example, the teacher in
Classroom 1 explained that “Their text messaging skills are quicker. While I’m still
looking for the button to press they can tell me where it is.”
In response to the question, “What do you know about students’ access to digital
technologies out of school, the teacher from Classroom 1 answered: “Probably not a
lot. I do know that a few of them have X-Boxes and PlayStations and a lot of them
spend time on those.” The teacher from Classroom 2 responded in a similar way: “Not
a lot. There’s an unusually large number of kids in this class that don’t have
computers, about 20 per cent I think, in this day and age, that’s about four kids. I
thought it’s like a microwave that would be standard practice.”
When interviewed, the teacher in Classroom 1 indicated that she based her
assumptions about students’ home use of computers on a whole-school survey that
had been conducted in the previous year: “A lot of them said they had computers but
the majority of them said they use computers just to play games and not for any other
use.” The assumption that a program like Microsoft Excel was not used at home
seemed to be one reason for the directed approach. Additionally, the teacher pointed
out that the focused lessons taught by a teacher-aide were a school practice that she
had not yet questioned:
It’s been a sort of a school thing that [the teacher-aide] does a little bit of skill work
before with the kids.... I feel confident enough to do a lot myself where some of the
other teachers just don’t and I think that’s probably where it originated from. And
[the teacher-aide] ’s done it in the past and because I’m sort of new in the school we
haven’t sort of talked about changing that or doing something different.
The teacher in Classroom 2 appeared to have an in-depth understanding of the role of
games in her students’ lives, although some value judgements seemed to be apparent
in her views. For example, in talking about a possible relationship between family
income and technology, she said:
I think it’s probably the reverse because one of the families that’s particularly poor
has every electronic thing known to man, even down to the new 360 X-Box which
was a thousand dollars... where you can actually do the physical boxing and attach
the things to yourself.
In talking generally about students’ access to digital technologies, there were
indications of deficit views about the parents of children in her class and perhaps of
society in general. She explained that:
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I think it would be typical of what’s happening - go and occupy yourself, yeah 1
don’t want to kick a football with you or sit down and watch TV with you. Go into
your room and watch TV. Unfortunately 1 think that’s indicative of what’s happening
these days.
Nevertheless, despite the teaehers’ understandings of the place of technologies in the
students’ homes, it was as if they were unable to see any relationship between the use
of games and other technologies for leisure activities and the use of technologies
required at school.
STUDENTS’ ACCESS TO DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
Interviews with students in both classrooms and straw polls of the two classes
indicated that students “lived” with technology of various types in their out-of-school
lives. Every student in both classes had access to a games console of some type,
whether that was a Nintendo DS, GameBoy, X-Box or Sony PlayStation, and 58 per
cent had a television in their bedroom. Many of the students also had a DVD or video
player attached to their television. 84 percent reported having at least one computer in
their home, and almost all of the students said that they had access to a computer
elsewhere - whether they used one at a friend’s or relative’s house or at the local
library.
What was apparent in the students’ discussions of their home usage of technologies
was that computers were one option among many activities that they could engage in
when not at school. By far the most popular form of home entertainment was
electronic games, but games were played in many forms - on games consoles,
computers and occasionally mobile telephones. For many of the students, it seemed
that games provided opportunities to engage in “fun” play. As the students explained,
there were many types of games, ranging from those where “you shoot bad guys and
everything. You escape from jail”, to ones where, for example, “you have to try and
knock out the blue tiles before the time runs out and then you go up to the next level”.
Computers, however, were not only used for games and many of the students reported
their regular use of the internet, the downloading of television programs and the use
of Microsoft Word and Excel for some of their leisure activities. For example, one
student used Microsoft Excel for adding up the money he had saved - to “see how
much I can spend”. Another said that, “Dad uses it [Excel] to do his darts things....
Because he plays darts and he has got to tally up all the dart things to give to the darts
team... and I watch how he does that.” Others talked about the use of the internet to
“get some cheats for games on the PlayStation” or for parents to “buy off eBay”.
Some students, though, talked about the reluctance of some family members to use
computers or about their role in teaching relatives to become users of technology. For
example, one student described her mum as “not really computer smart.. . .She doesn’t
really go on the computer”, while another explained, “Eve actually taught my
[grandfather] half the stuff he knows about computers.”
In the classroom, the students’ use of technologies was focused on computers, but
these were not used on a daily basis. The teacher in Classroom 1 expressed concern
that she had not used computers as often as she would have liked, although the
students were able to use them before school and during some lunch breaks. In
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Classroom 2, it was evident that computers were used fairly regularly as part of the
curriculum, but that the usage was not necessarily daily. In other words, technologies
seemed to play a much greater role in the students’ home lives than in their classroom
lives.
DISCUSSION
As we noted earlier, there has been considerable research in Australia and elsewhere
that has attempted to disrupt the deficit views of literacy practices in homes that
operate differently from those valued in schools. There have been significant moves
towards “tum-around pedagogies” (Comber & Kamler, 2004) that base work in
classrooms on the “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzales, 1992) that
children bring in their virtual school bags (Thomson, 2002). Our work on research
investigating the uses of digital literacies in homes and schools is based on an
uncomfortable hunch that deficit views of the digital practices engaged in by students
at home were becoming as deeply entrenched in schooling as those that were once so
taken- for-granted about print literacy practices. Our studies into this area began with a
literature review (Honan, 2006a) that seemed to indicate that these deficit discourses
were operating in: accounts of the uses of technologies in low and middle
socioeconomic schools (Warschauer, 2003); descriptions of teachers’ assumptions
about access to technologies by students from low socioeconomic homes (Snyder et
al, 2004; Warschauer et al, 2004); and assumptions about girls’ work in the
“gendered digital divide” (Honan, 2006b).
While the study reported on in this article is only small, it does (unfortunately) begin
to affirm some of our hunches. In relation to teachers’ misconceptions about their
students’ access to technologies at home, the study confirms reports in the literature
review as well as the findings of another smaller study reported elsewhere (Honan,
2008). That is, teachers generally underestimate students’ access to computers and the
internet outside of school, tend to ignore the place of other kinds of digital
technologies apart from computers in students’ daily lives, and more disturbingly,
disparage and denigrate the uses of technologies by students at home. The teachers’
comments about using computers “just to play games”, parental use of television so
that children can “occupy” themselves, and parents spending money on “every
electronic thing known to man” unfortunately resonate with echoes of the deficit
assumptions about parental attitudes to print material in terms of bedtime reading
(Heath, 1982); the absence of “real” books and “quality” literature; and parents’
attitudes to reading in low socioeconomic homes (Mraz & Rasinski, 2007).
The failure of teachers such as the ones in this study to tap effectively into students’
funds of knowledge about digital technologies has serious and probably unexpected
influences on the pedagogical practices engaged in during literacy classes where new
technologies are used. Elsewhere (Honan, 2008), one of us has reported on teachers’
tendencies to repeat, year after year, lessons and activities that focus on the basic
operational skills needed to navigate a desktop, save a file, and open programs. In that
study, students in Year 2 and again in Year 4 were being taught the same basic
operational skills.
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In this study, the teacher-aide in Classroom 1 practised a “defensive” and safe
pedagogy where students must wait for step-by-step instructions, even when it was
clear that they were capable of proceeding without constant oversight (Garrison &
Bromley, 2004, p. 596). It could be argued that these pedagogical practices are used
because of the aide’s lack of professional authority (compared to a qualified teacher)
in relation to the students, or because of her lack of professional knowledge of
alternative practices. However, the classroom teacher’s willingness to hand over the
teaching using computers to the aide is in itself an illustration of the defensive
teaching practices that Garrison and Bromley (2004) describe. Generally both
classroom teachers and the teacher-aide engaged in pedagogical practices that assume
that the completion of routine classroom tasks are more important or valuable than the
engagement in creative problem-solving or higher cognitive tasks that are inherent in
constructivist teaching approaches (Niederhauser & Lindstrom, 2006), essential in a
“productive pedagogy” framework (Lingard, Hayes & Mills, 2003), and according to
Gee (2003), developed when playing video games.
These safe and routine pedagogical practices involving the use of digital texts
resonate with the practices observed in literacy classes in low socioeconomic areas by
Freebody and his colleagues in the early 1990s (Freebody et al, 1995). In that study,
analysis of classroom conversations revealed that teachers spent an extraordinary
amount of time in talk devoted to routine classroom tasks and management of student
behaviour, working towards the production of “docile bodies” (Foucault, 1995).
Similarly, Warschauer (2003) found that teachers in low socioeconomic schools in his
study used digital technologies for routine and technical tasks that prepared their
students for the workforce, while their colleagues in ‘elite’ schools “used technology
to prepare scholars” (p. 132).
The isolation of computer related tasks and teaching practices from the other literacy
work completed in classrooms is also an area of concern and seems to disregard
young people’s complex integration of digital technologies in their out-of-school
lives. The students interviewed in this study reported using a variety of digital
technologies for a variety of purposes in interconnected ways that were integrated
with other forms of daily activities (Henderson, 2007). This usage seems to more
accurately reflect the daily use of technologies in many adult lives than the isolated
tasks that were completed in the observed classrooms. The unfortunate rapid
deployment of computer laboratories and hubs in primary classrooms across Australia
and elsewhere (Zandvliet, 2006) supports this isolationist approach to the use of
computers.
Interestingly, both of the observed classes had a set of computers in the classroom
space; yet both teachers used these only sporadically. This availability of computers
within the classroom could have contributed to an integration of digital activities
within literacy lessons. The reasons for the lack of integration were not explored
within this study. However, it does remind us of the introduction of “real” books into
classrooms in the 1970s as the use of basal readers and textbook activities came into
question. In many classrooms the “real” books became part of a reward system:
finished work early, read a book; completed that activity, read a book; wet lunchtime,
read a book. In many classrooms observed, including the two in this study, this
reward system now includes “playing” on the computer.
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CONCLUSION
Although limited in scope, this small research project has highlighted the challenging
task for teachers to be cognisant of the diversity in understandings about digital
technologies that students bring to school. Such understandings are important if
teachers want to ensure that school engagement with digital literacies is indeed
preparing students to cope with the literacy demands of a rapidly changing and
increasingly technological and globalised world.
Not only were there apparent differences in the prior knowledges that students
brought to school, there also appeared to be a divide between the everyday digital
practices that students used in their out-of-school lives and the practices that teachers
thought students needed to engage in. Our findings from studying these two
classrooms suggest that in some cases there are huge generational differences between
teachers and students. Even though the two teachers in this study said that they were
confident with using and teaching about technologies, they were quite aware that their
students were faster and more confident than they were with some aspects of
technologies. While the students saw technologies, including computers, as one
option in their out-of-school leisure activities, the teachers emphasised a much
narrower approach - the teaching of specific computer skills for specific purposes.
What appears to be missing in this approach is an understanding of how knowledges
about a wide range of practices with digital technologies might be useful to the
learning of literacies at school. It was evident that the students’ knowledges were not
always used within the classroom context. Computer games, for example, were not
regarded by the teachers as relevant to school learning. However, as Gee’s (2003)
work has highlighted, computer games can provide opportunities for developing
creative problem-solving and higher cognitive skills and for learning new literacies.
Within classrooms, students’ knowledges about technologies and multimedia can
provide “powerful tools of engagement” that bridge home and school practices and
open up the possibilities for building “an expanded range of performative,
entertaining, collaborative literacy practices” (Kerkham & Hutchison, 2005, p. 117).
A recent report (see Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, & Macgill, 2008) indicates that young
people also find it difficult to see relationships between their home and school digital
literacy practices. It found that even though young people were “embedded in a tech-
rich world” (p. ii), they did not regard their expertise in email, instant and text
messaging - “the material they create electronically” (p. i) - as “real” writing. Such
findings suggest that there is much work to be done in understanding the relationships
between the digital literacy practices used inside and outside school.
Understanding how the digital literacies in students’ virtual school bags (Thomson,
2002) might be used to assist school learning would seem to be a critical place to
start. According to Kerkham and Hutchison (2005), collaborative projects that
provide opportunities for teachers and students to participate in “a dynamic exchange
of skills and information” and for students to learn “with and from each other” can
help to reshape the teaching and learning of digital literacies in classrooms (p. 119).
While the digital literacies of home remain invisible to teachers, or as a worse case
scenario are viewed as evidence of deficient home practices, then it seems that the
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Digital literacies in two low socioeconomic ...
difficult task of catering for difference and diversity amongst students will be
compounded. Making home-sehool conneetions explicit for teachers and students,
eombined with a mapping of how school learning might build on what students
already know about digital literacies, will help teachers to move past taken-for-
granted assumptions and to address the ehallenge of preparing students to be literate
in the 21®* Century. Such a move is important if we are serious about wanting to
ensure equitable outeomes for schooling and to prepare all students for active and
sueeessful partieipation in society.
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Manuscript received: June 1, 2008
Revision received: September 1, 2008
Accepted: September 22, 2008
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