Exploring issues of quality and equity through literacy learning in the time of Covid

ABSTRACT

It is well established that literacy as a social practice is fundamental to supporting and facilitating student learning across the years of schooling, and research has shown the importance of all teachers understanding the literacies of their learning areas and being able to mobilise effective literacy practices to support student learning outcomes. During the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic teachers across the globe were forced to (re)negotiate the reading, writing and speaking demands of learning and teaching in uncharted, digitally mediated environments. In this paper, we report on findings from a research project undertaken at a large secondary school in Victoria, Australia which investigated the ways in which teachers’ priorities during online learning impacted on their approaches to and enactment of disciplinary literacy. We identify two priorities that emerge from interviews with teachers during and after the COVID lockdown: (1) to support the development of student disciplinary and content knowledge and (2) to engage in pedagogies that consider cyber-safety and student-wellbeing. We explore these priorities in the context of teachers’ literacy knowledge and practices and students’ literacy engagement and learning, and consider the implications of this analysis for issues of equity and quality in fully online digital contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Literacy
• disciplinary learning
• Covid-19
• digital learning
• quality
• equity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).