Another day

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Another day, another research event. This time the launch of the Critical Literacies project which will connect teachers and researchers in England and Scotland with Australia, and we hope the US. They’ll all try out and document approaches to critical literacy in their own settings….fascinating. So today we were fortunate to have a great workshop led by Hilary Janks of the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) - the venue for next year's Learning Conference. There were so many useful insights, but it was the simplicity (and depth) of the initial activity that made the most impact on me. On the back of that familiar activity of going round introducing ourselves, she got us to pair up and describe the whole group – captured in 4 sentences on paper. The juxtaposition of those two texts provided the critical purchase for deconstruction of the two genres, their conventions, disruptions and omissions and the power dynamics that underpin them…and of course, as you might expect, this little blogger was fascinated by the identity performance, identity editing and social network compliance that was revealed!