How creating opportunities for students to tell their own stories and confirm their own identities enhances engagement and literacy standards.

Making learning personal: Enhancing engagement and literacy by drawing on students' cultural backgrounds

What happens to a school’s literacy standards when it worries less about test preparation and focuses instead on creative learning that draw on students’ cultural backgrounds? Interestingly, literacy improves dramatically and so too do national test results.

These are the findings of Macquarie University’s, Dr Janet Dutton, and her University of Sydney colleague, Dr Kathy Rushton. Given Australia’s anxiety about our declining standings in international education rankings, this is a potentially significant outcome.

The educational researchers are working to improve literacy outcomes for the students in a secondary school in south west Sydney, many of whom speak a language other than English at home and come from low-income households.

Rather than doing more test preparation as a means of improving literacy, they suggested a different path. As research shows student engagement is critical for successful learning, getting students really interested was the starting point.

“When students can’t see themselves in the curriculum they can feel alienated – so we wanted to create opportunities for them to tell their own stories, to confirm their own identities and to be acknowledged for what they bring to the classroom,” Dr Dutton said.

Using an established ‘identity text’ approach, the researchers then added in drama. Students wrote and told their own stories in class – and went on to interview a key family member, such as their grandmother, and presented those stories too. More details enrich the stories as class members ask questions as students ‘walk in role’, playing themselves or their chosen relative in class.

“Many were buried stories that aren’t usually told … disenfranchisement was a common theme, so too was that of older relatives escaping difficult circumstances.”

Students then work in groups to tell one personal story as a short play, often weaving English and their first language together, bringing fragments of, say, Arabic, Fijian or Vietnamese into the script.

This creative pedagogy is aligned with the curriculum and best practice; the big difference is that students aren’t sitting passively as their desks and restricted to text books but are working creatively with powerful and emotive personal experiences, and those of their peers, to build their literacy.

Drs Dutton and Rushton work “elbow to elbow” with teachers to develop creative pedagogies and model lessons. With the success of the program across Years 7-11, the approach is now expanding to other secondary and primary schools.

The direct evidence of success is found is the students’ workbooks. Analyses of students’ work from before and after the creative learning program show clear progress in key areas of literacy. But, the program also coincides with significant improvements in NAPLAN results.

“No single program improves a school’s results; there are lots of other positive things going. But we do know student engagement is critical and that improvements in test results are coinciding with better student engagement and the active affirmation of students’ diverse identities.”

Dr Dutton is a former high school teacher and Head English teacher. She spent almost two decades working in schools, before becoming a teacher/academic, then taking on a fulltime role as Lecturer in Secondary English Curriculum in/at Macquarie University’s Department of Educational Studies in 2017. Her key research interests are English curriculum development, teacher identity and professional learning and opportunities for creative literacy pedagogies.