Book Review-- Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers

Prison Pedagogies, Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers Edited by Joe Lockard and Sherry Rankins-Roberson Syracuse University Press, New York, 2018 ISBN 9780815654285 Reviewed by JUNE EDWARDS Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, Irelan

Book review: Unlocking Minds in Lockup

Education is a powerful tool that not only opens doors within prisons, but international research would indicate education also, and more crucially, prevents men and women from re-entering those same doors back to prison. Therefore Jan Walker’s recently published Unlocking Minds in Lockup: Prison Education Opens Doors is a welcome addition to the already rich literature on this subject

LITERACY FOR LEARNING IN FURTHER EDUCATION IN THE UK: A SYMPOSIUM

The Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project, a collaboration between two universities – Stirling and Lancaster – and four further education colleges – Anniesland, Perth, Lancaster and Morecambe, and Preston, funded for three years from January 2004 as part of Phase 3 of the TLRP. The project draws on work already done on literacy practices engaged in by people in schools, higher education and the community and seeks to extend the insights gained from these studies into further education. It aims to explore the literacy practices of students and those practices developed in different parts of the curriculum and develop pedagogic interventions to support students’ learning more effectively. This project involves examining literacy across the many domains of people’s experiences, the ways in which these practices are mobilised and realised within different domains and their capacity to be mobilised and recontextualised elsewhere to support learning. A project such as this raises many theoretical, methodological and practical challenges, not least in ensuring validity across four curriculum areas in four sites drawing upon the collaboration of sixteen practitioner researchers. This symposium of four papers examines some of the challenges and findings from the first eighteen months of the project. The first paper explores some of the findings regarding students’ literacy practices in their everyday lives and those required of them in their college studies. The second focuses on one approach adopted by the project as a method through which to elicit student literacy practices. The other two papers focus on different aspects of partnership within the project, in particular the attempts to enable students and lecturers to be active researchers rather than simply respondent

A Species Tree for the Australo-Papuan Fairy-Wrens and Allies (Aves: Maluridae)

We explored the efficacy of species tree methods at the family level in birds, using the Australo-Papuan Fairy-wrens (Passeriformes: Maluridae) as a model system. Fairy-wrens of the genus Malurus are known for high intensities of sexual selection, resulting in some cases in rapid speciation. This history suggests that incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) of neutrally evolving loci could be substantial, a situation that could compromise traditional methods of combining loci in phylogenetic analysis. Using 18 molecular markers (5 anonymous loci, 7 exons, 5 introns, and 1 mitochondrial DNA locus), we show that gene tree monophyly across species could be rejected for 16 of 18 loci, suggesting substantial ILS at the family level in these birds. Using the software Concaterpillar, we also detect three statistically distinct clusters of gene trees among the 18 loci. Despite substantial variation in gene trees, species trees constructed using four different species tree estimation methods (BEST, BUCKy, and STAR) were generally well supported and similar to each other and to the concatenation tree, with a few mild discordances at nodes that could be explained by rapid and recent speciation events. By contrast, minimizing deep coalescences produced a species tree that was topologically more divergent from those of the other methods as measured by multidimensional scaling of trees. Additionally, gene and species trees were topologically more similar in the BEST analysis, presumably because of the species tree prior employed in BEST which appropriately assumes that gene trees are correlated with each other and with the species tree. Among the 18 loci, we also discovered 102 independent indel markers, which also proved phylogenetically informative, primarily among genera, and displayed a $\sim4$-fold bias towards deletions. As suggested in earlier work, the grasswrens (Amytornis) are sister to the rest of the family and the emu-wrens (Stipiturus) are sister to fairy-wrens (Malurus, Clytomyias). Our study shows that ILS is common at the family level in birds yet, despite this, species tree methods converge on broadly similar results for this family.Organismic and Evolutionary Biolog

Literacy practices in the learning careers of childcare students

This paper draws from the Literacies for Learning in Further Education research project, funded through the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. Drawing on the empirical study of literacy practices in eight Childcare courses in Scotland and England, we seek to demonstrate that, integral to the learning careers of students are literacy careers through which their learning is mediated. In the process, by drawing upon the lens of literacy, we also challenge some of the common sense understandings of learning in childcare. In particular we suggest that the literacy practices of lower level courses can be more diverse than those of higher level courses, producing confusing literacy careers for the students involved. We also point to the complexity of the literacy careers in childcare, given that students are required to mediate different aspects of their experience through literacy. In particular there are the mediations made possible by the use of information technology and those entailed in relating work placements to classroom practice. We argue that students on vocational courses have complex literacy careers and that a literacies approach to learning helps to reveal this complexity

Possibilities for pedagogy in Further Education: Harnessing the abundance of literacy

In this report, it is argued that the most salient factor in the contemporary communicative landscape is the sheer abundance and diversity of possibilities for literacy, and that the extent and nature of students' communicative resources is a central issue in education. The text outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education project in a social view of literacy, and the associated research design, methodology and analytical framework. It elaborates on the notion of the abundance of literacies in students' everyday lives, and on the potential for harnessing these as resources for the enhancement of learning. It provides case studies of changes in practice that have been undertaken by further education staff in order to draw upon students' everyday literacy practices on Travel and Tourism and Multimedia courses. It ends with some of the broad implications for conceptualising learning that arise from researching through the lens of literacy practices

Men in Childcare: Does it matter to children, what do they say? (Stage 2)

This is a joint research project between London Early Years Foundation and the University of Wolverhampton. We asked How do children perceive male practitioners? How do children characterise their relationship with the male practitioners ? Do children consistently choose staff they like for the activities they do well rather than the associate gender connection. ( For example choosing a woman to play football because she is really good rather than a man)? This research is mainly qualitative and based in a sociocultural perspective. The methods are participatory and are based on praxeological values by involving teachers as research partners. Key findings are: Children need high quality teachers, male and female, who are ‘good at’ activities. Children associate fun activities with the person not the gender (balance) Where males are visible in the setting, seen to be engaging in all activities and, not just as ‘a novelty event’ children did not associate the activity with the gender There can be a tendency in some areas to fall back on gender stereotypes when staff or children faced with activities that are not a favourite or are unpleasant