Background and theoretical approach
The aim of this paper is to analyze and discuss how some compulsory schoolteachers, working in various literacy practices, describe their design and staging of learning environments to cater to the needs of their students, and how supportive and inclusive literacy practices can be manifested.
Accessibility and participation are prerequisites for students to be able to develop in school, regardless of functional ability (Aspelin, 2013). The point of accessibility and participation is that everyone should be able to feel included and have access to learning. From a relational perspective, this means that the learning environment is to be adapted, not the individual. It also means, according to Aspelin (2013), that aspects of the social, pedagogical, and physical environment interact, based on the needs and abilities of students.
From an inclusive education perspective, we analyze and discuss how teachers reflect on their work with diverse literacy practices. Inclusive education stands for activities designed to create conditions for all students to be able to participate and learn (Florian, 2014: Howes et al. 2005). Inclusive teaching involves support for teachers’ capacity to respond to the individual variations of students. Not least does this relate to the fundamental issue of the right to develop literacy to be an equal citizen in a text-centered society (Forsling, 2017: Tjernberg, 2013).
The participating teachers in the present study work at four schools with different literacy profiles: one school specializing in dyslexia and neurological disability, one school dedicated to working with reading and writing pedagogy, one school where most students do not have Swedish as their mother tongue, and one school for students with learning disabilities.
The following research questions were formulated:
–How do teachers describe that supportive literacy practices can be designed and staged for diverse learners?
– How do teachers describe their design and staging of inclusive literacy practices?
In order to study and analyze teachers’ statements on how they design and stage supportive conditions for inclusive teaching, we use Critical Literacy (CL) as the theoretical framework. Janks (2010) describes how Critical Literacy research is based on the assumption that visual, oral, written, and digital texts constitute different ways to describe the world, and offer possibilities to interpret, question, and reshape it. Janks (2000, 2010) mentions four dimensions of written language: domination (power), access (accessibility), diversity, and design. The four dimensions are interconnected, overlapping, and necessary for understanding the full extent of what a literacy practice entails. We will use Janks’ four CL concepts to analyze the material in this study.
Method
The project this article is based on is a close-to-practice research project in which teachers from four schools participate. The schools, located in four different municipalities across Sweden, have different literacy profiles, that is, different ways of designing literacy practices. We were interested in investigating how teachers working in very different literacy practices express their knowledge of how supporting and inclusive literacy practices can be designed and staged.
To collect data from group interaction around the specified subject of teachers’ ideas regarding literacy practices, focus group discussions were conducted (cf. Wibeck, 2010). In the focus group discussions, there was a focus on the process, that is, what happened in the conversation and what emerged from interaction between participants, not on the opinions of individual participants in relation to the subject in question (cf. Krueger & Casey, 2014; Wibeck, 2010). A focus group discussion can be described as a flexible, collective activity in which participants have agency to discuss and reflect upon their design for learning (Krueger & Casey, 2014). The aim of the focus group discussions in this study was to arrive at a collective point of view, that is, the overall opinions and statements of the group.
The professional learning was made visible in the focus group discussions, in terms of how the teachers learn from each other when they share thoughts and ideas, which deepens and broadens the discussion.
Findings
The general impression that emerges from our study is that teachers design literacy activities based on both supportive and inclusive aspects and with a focus on variation and diversity. Most of what the teachers participating in the study discuss and reflect upon is comparable across all four groups, for instance a focus on multimodal methods, and the importance of didactic flexibility. The design of literacy activities is a process, which can be deconstructed and reconstructed, just like the texts that the students work with (see Janks, 2014). There also seems to be a consensus among the teachers that writing work should not just be about consuming and processing existing texts. It is through one's own text production that individuals can position themselves in relation to their identities and to the world around them, a process which Janks (2010) refers to as dimensions of domination, access, diversity and design.
An interesting finding is that no respondent used the concept of special education in the focus group discussion. Teachers from all schools instead highlighted the importance of considering the students’ interest and motivation in order to build trusting relationships – a prerequisite for inclusive teaching. Three out of the four schools seem to rely on an approach which Aspelin (2013) describes as a relational perspective on special needs education. As all supportive interventions are related to the school as a whole – special needs efforts are incorporated and integrated in the everyday activities of the school. We claim that this indicates that the teachers have a fundamentally relational perspective on teaching, perhaps even the view that supportive and inclusive pedagogy forecloses the need for special needs education.