International Perspectives on Literacies, Diversities, and Opportunities for Learning Critical Conversations

This book explores the conceptual framework, opportunities for learning, as a transaction between literacy learners, mediating agents, and the literacy content to be learned within social, cultural, and historical contexts. With contributions from top scholars from around the world, the chapters in this book provide a window into the varied ways learners, their families, educators, and researchers have co-constructed opportunities for learning in a range of PK-12 classrooms, community settings, and university classrooms across the globe. Building on decades of existing scholarship, contributors conceptualize literacy as social practice and discuss a variety of literacies—including engineering literacies, community literacies, and bilingual and multicultural literacies and more—through real-world and insightful examples. By situating literacy learning in the complex social, cultural, and historical contexts in which students, teachers, and families live and work, chapter authors provide nuanced, qualitative, and deeply profound views of literacy learning. Critical and informative, with a myriad of examples on co-constructed opportunities for learning, this volume is an essential text for graduate courses on literacy education, and for literacy researchers, teacher educators, and teachers.

Contents Support Material Foreword Section 1 - Setting the Context Introduction: Contextualizing Our Collaboration, Our Book, and Opportunities for Learning What Do Opportunities and Diversities Have To Do with Literacies Teaching and Learning?: A Provocation Section 2 - Opportunities-for-Learning: Focusing on Learners Learning Exploring Classroom Implications of Literacies and Diversities Through an Opportunities for Learning (OfL) Lens Teaching through lifeworlds of Aboriginal Children: Australian Opportunities through Culturally Responsive Pedagogies Positioning and Academic Diversity in a First-Grade Literacy Program: Implications for Opportunities for Learning Opportunities for Learning Disciplinary Literacies in Engineering Club (Grades 3-5) Transnational Digital Literacies and Transitory Opportunities: A Perspective from the Global South Opportunities for LGBTQ+ Students’ Learning in English Language Arts Classrooms Section 3 - Literacies, Diversities, and Opportunities for Learning: Teachers and Teacher Education The Significance of Difference: Student Diversity and Literacy Learning The City as Curriculum: Opportunities for Learning about Literacies, Ethnography, and Pedagogy of Place White Teachers' Opportunities for Learning About Whiteness Newly Trained Ghanaian Teachers’ Opportunities for Learning Literacy Content Collaborative Inquiries in Diverse Literacy Classrooms to Understand Learning Opportunities Section 4 - Opportunities for Learning: Community and Family Literacies Unveiling the Hidden Capital of Family Prolepsis for School: Non-Dominant Students’ Opportunities for Positive Futures Co-Constructing Opportunities for Shared, Collective Literacies Learning in Communities in Fiji Co-Constructing Opportunities for Learning with Displaced Children and Families From Deficit Discourses to Learning About Pedagogy: Using Testimonio to Track Opportunities for Learning in a Research Journey Conclusion: New Imagining of School

Cynthia Brock is Professor and Wyoming Excellence Endowed Chair in Literacy in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming, USA. Beryl Exley is Professor and Deputy Head of Learning and Teaching in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Australia. Lester-Irabinna Rigney is Professor and Co-Chair of the Pedagogies for Justice Group of the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion, Education Futures Unit at the University of South Australia, Australia.