Course overview
This course will focus on developing expertise in the area of teaching literacy and numeracy across the curriculum for middle years schooling. Students will investigate historical and contemporary understandings of literacy and numeracy and their applications in the Australian Curriculum as distinct but interconnected knowledges, understandings, skills and dispositions. The course will help preservice teachers to identify the literacy and numeracy demands placed on students by school curricula and explore strategies for enabling student literacy and numeracy capabilities as informed, analytical, critical and creative citizens. Approaches to literacy will emphasise pedagogical strategies to be used across the curriculum for integrating listening, reading, viewing, speaking, writing and creating oral, print, visual and digital texts, and using and modifying language for different purposes in a range of contexts. Approaches to numeracy will emphasise pedagogical strategies to be used across the curriculum for purposefully and critically integrating numeracy knowledge and skills such as interpreting statistical information, using spatial reasoning, recognising and using patterns and relationships. The course will draw on literacy and numeracy knowledge and processes when planning, differentiating and developing student literacy and numeracy through integrated and subject specific tasks for middle years school students.
Course learning outcomes
- Understand and apply models of reading when developing teaching strategies for the comprehension element of the Australian Curriculum: Literacy Capability. Develop knowledge and strategies to support middle years students in applying transferrable and subject specific comprehension demands when comprehending texts through the literacy processes of listening, reading and viewing when applying text, visual, word and grammar knowledge.
- Develop a historical understanding of numeracy development and the implications these developments have had on society and curriculum development.
- Understand and apply approaches to the composition of multiple forms of texts when working with the composing element of the Australian Curriculum: Literacy Capability. Develop knowledge and strategies to support middle years students in composing texts through the literacy processes of speaking, writing and creating when applying text, visual, word and grammar knowledge.
- Understand and apply the Australian Curriculum: General Capabilities and National Numeracy Learning Progression to observable classroom practices while on placement.
- Develop teaching strategies to assist middle years students to recognise (a) subject specific literacy and numeracy demands, processes and knowledges, and (b) literacy and numeracy demands, processes and knowledges that transfer across subjects and contexts.
- Develop teaching strategies to assist middle years students approaches to critical numeracy when using and applying the six interrelated elements of numeracy identified by the Australian Curriculum of using measurement, estimating and calculating, recognising patters and numerical relationships, using spatial relationships, interpreting statistics, using decimals, percentages, ratios and rates.
- Develop understanding and disposition for the interconnectedness between literacy and numeracy. Preservice teachers explore the planning of tasks that integrate literacy and numeracy processes and knowledge in transdisciplinary or in subject specific contexts.
- Develop middle years students ethical use of their literacy and numeracy capabilities when comprehending and composing texts for academic and social purposes; for example, when using the internet and various forms of social media.
- Draw from a range of cultural resources, including those of First Nations Australians, to celebrate the diversity that exists in Australian Classrooms. Students explore the specificity of place and culture as a resource for generating tasks that are purposeful and meaningful for students.