Boys, literacy and schooling: expanding the repertoires of practice

Abstract

Recommendation 8That future research address the effectiveness of the three repertoires model -repertoires for (re)presenting the self; repertoires for relating; repertoires for engaging with and negotiating cultural knowledges and meanings -for improving literacy outcomes for boys. BACKGROUND TO THE STUDYOn the matter of boys and literacy, two observations arise from recent Australian research.The first is that there is a relatively small but systematic disadvantage shown by boys on some tests of literacy in early schooling.The second is that gender interacts with other demographic and individual indicators in the prediction of performance on literacy tests.In the recent national survey of students' literacy performance at years 3 and 5 conducted by the Australian Council for Educational Research (Masters & Forster 1997), it is reported that 'the majority of students are achieving well, with many students working well ahead of expectations' (p.x), but This study neither pursues nor makes any empirical claims about these accounts.Nor does it set them aside.As these issues form part of significant discourses that shape current educational and community practice, they need to be treated as relevant to educational practice, and their various inflections need to be documented if we are to understand and critique that practice.Our reports of surveys and interviews conducted with parents, teachers and school administrators (see Chapters 4 and 5) provide ample evidence of the prevalence of various kinds of explanations of the literacy achievements of boys versus girls, and of the direct implications those explanations are taken to have for actual and recommended educational practice.As we report in Chapter 3, a scan of the extensive research and theoretical literature on this topic shows a number of distinct hypotheses aimed at accounting for the literacy performance difference between boys and girls.Each locates the problem in a Interviews Face-to-face interviews were conducted during 2001 with two teachers (year 2 and year 6 teachers in New South Wales and Tasmania; year 3 and year 7 in Queensland, but henceforth in this chapter referenced as year 2 and year 6), in each of the 24 schools of Phase 1 of the study.In most cases, a senior member of the school's administration was also interviewed.The 24 primary schools in Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania included single-sex (boys) schools and schools in which Data analysis to inform Phase 2 of the study was conducted continuously during Phase 1 of the study, with a view to identifying sets of practices that were seen as helping to improve boys' literacy outcomes. Phase 2Phase 2 focused on developing and trialling classroom interventions, and evaluating and documenting their effectiveness. ParticipantsFrom the 24 schools and 48 teachers of Phase 1 of the study, 12 schools and 24 teachers (one each at years 2 and 6) were selected to continue participating in Phase 2. The schools were selected to represent a range of educational settings across the three participating States, especially in regard to:• a range of socio-economic settings; • schools and communities with varying levels of students whose first language background is not English; • a mix of inner-suburban, fringe-suburban and rural-provincial schools; and • mixed-gender classrooms, single-gender schools and classrooms in which boys and girls were separated for some literacy-related activities. Training for participants in Phase 2The training for Phase 2 was aimed at enabling the participating teachers to:• extend their understandings of links between gender and literacy;

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