We describe a collaborative project in which university researchers, teachers and Grade 4–5 English language learners (ELLs) investigated the sociohistorical contexts and practices in which the ELLs participate, through a ‘community scan’. Many observers have argued that schools and teachers have such minimal knowledge of the outside- school lives of their multilingual and multicultural students that they are unable to build upon the ‘funds of knowledge’ that students and other members of their communities have. In particular, a large body of recent literature argues that school literacy education should be linked to literacies that children develop in their homes and communities. We present here a study centred on a public school located in a Canadian Punjabi-Sikh community. For our scan we collected census and other demographic representations of the community, as well as media reports and academic literature concerned with Punjabi-Sikh immigration. In addition, our scan included interviews with teachers, principals, parents and community leaders. Students’ investigations and representations of the community and of out-of-school multiliteracies were also collected. The authors argue that such information is crucial in the development of pedagogy that values and promotes the reworking of the practices, images, texts and symbols that children already use.
This paper reports on the second phase of a joint teacher/researcher project that explored teachers’ understandings of the potential of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) as a tool for primary school children’s collaborative group work. By examining teachers’ written analyses and discussions of work carried out in their own classrooms, the paper seeks to contribute to the debate about the ways in which the use of IWBs can contribute to changes in pedagogy. It highlights the interrelationships between collaborative learning and factors identified as important in the research carried out by teachers, amongst them the children’s technical skills and confidence, the mediating role of the teacher, the IWB affordances for knowledge‐building and the teachers’ own knowledge, attitudes and professional development. The paper also provides an account of how participation by the teachers in a course with Faculty staff, focused on the collaborative co‐construction of knowledge related to learning and to classroom research grounded in the values and principles of socio‐cultural theory, supported changes in pedagogic practice.