Reading to Learn Reading the World: How Genre-based Literacy Pedagogy is Democratizing Education

Reading to Learn, Reading the World showcases a range of Reading to Learn (R2L) projects from around the world in a variety of educational settings in many different languages. This pedagogy emerged over two decades from a coalescence of idealism, academic research and teachers’ experience. One ideal shared by everyone involved in R2L has been to become a more effective teacher, and to help others do so. Underlying this drive to excel is the democratic ideal that education should be equally available, inclusive and effective for every student.

In the first chapter David Rose recounts the origins of R2L in work with Indigenous Australian children, informed by genre writing and scaffolded reading pedagogies. Three following chapters celebrate the impact of the methodology in settings of educational disadvantage in Australian schools.

Further chapters describe the efficacy of the methodology around the world in a variety of languages, often in very challenging educational settings. Stories from Africa detail the successes of R2L pedagogy in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. In Europe, a ground-breaking project to adapt the methodology for the education of deaf and hearing-impaired students working in Swedish Sign Language is described. Also in Sweden, a long-term project to train teachers working in disadvantaged schools grew out of the success of the EU-funded project, Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE). Following chapters describe how the TeL4ELE project unfolded and spread R2L to Portuguese and Spanish schools and teacher education.

Chapters from the Americas provide stories of success from a US community education project with Spanish-speaking mothers learning English, a tertiary setting in Colombia where the methodology has been used as a cross-faculty initiative, and a literacy outreach program from a university in Argentina for teachers from disadvantaged local schools. The final chapters include an evaluation of the R2L methodology in comparison with other literacy methods used in Argentina, an analysis of the R2L methodology for teaching mathematics in Chile, and a project to teach scientific literacy with Indonesian school students, in Indonesian and English.

Claire Acevedo is an affiliated researcher in Language and Literacies at The Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology at the Open University.

David Rose is Director of Reading to Learn and an Honorary Associate of the University of Sydney.

Rachel Whittaker is Honorary Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Universidad Aut?oma de Madrid.