Barbara Comber
Biographic Data
| ID | 759011 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barbara Comber |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barbara |
| FAMILY NAME | Comber |
| SIGNATURE | COMBER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8364-1676 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 10 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Learners, environments and differences – insights from literacy research
Purpose The purpose of this article is to introduce qualitative research in literacy that has been significant in educators understanding difference in young people’s literacy learning. Design/methodology/approach The approach has been to select influential investigations that have impacted over time and to summarise the insights provided. Findings This article foregrounds research that helps educators understand learner difference as positive re…
Many truths, many knowledges, many forms of reason: Understanding middle‐school student approaches to sources of information on the internet
Sourcing information related to socio‐scientific issues requires sophisticated literacies to read and evaluate conflicting accounts often signified by disagreement among experts, multiple solutions or misinformation. Much of the previous work exploring how young people approach conflicting information has tended to focus on students in the secondary and tertiary years, often taking an epistemic approach to analysis, rather than a literacies lens.…
Classroom participation: Teachers’ work as listeners
This article examines teachers’ work as part of the everyday life of classrooms, schools and communities—as curriculum design, dynamic pedagogies and as an oeuvre which is assembled over time. One of the hardest aspects of the everyday work of teachers, and perhaps one of the most under-rated and under-studied, is listening, really listening. This article firstly explores the dangers of teachers not listening. Secondly, it highlights the contribu…
Boys, science and literacy: Place-based masculinities, reading practices and the ‘science literate boy’
The fields of science and literacy education continue to be shaped by pervasive gender inequality. Previous research has documented how the formation of a ‘science identity’ is contingent on access to science capital while research in literacy education continues to highlight how boys struggle in their literacy acquisition. Despite a robust scholarship on gendered literacy practices and gender in STEM subjects, to date, there has been little inve…
Mathematics homework and the potential compounding of educational disadvantage
Parental involvement in schooling has been shown to have a positive impact on children's educational outcomes.With changing mathematics curricula and pedagogical approaches as a context, we explore how mathematical dispositions emerge through gendered and classed experiences with mathematics homework.We share the experiences of mothers from eight Canadian families as they negotiate mathematics homework with their children.We consider the impact o…
Communing to re-imagine figured worlds
The importance of community has been widely recognised in the field of early childhood education. However, the various ways it has been conceived, together with taken-for-granted notions of education, have made it difficult to actualise the processes involved in contextually meaningful ways. This article draws on cultural models theory to explore educational leaders’ re-imagining and redesigning of early childhood educational learning communities…
Scoping review of conceptions of literacy in middle school science
Literacy skills are essential if students are to access knowledge and achieve academic success in middle school science. A key difficulty with interpreting literacy practices in any discipline is the problem of conceptualising what constitutes literacy. Our study contributes new understandings to the discipline of science where there are ongoing debates concerning the meaning of literacy and confusion regarding what constitutes essential literaci…
How do rural Australian students’ ethnogeographies related to people and place influence their STEM career aspirations
Few studies in science education have examined how place-based experiences influence students’ STEM career aspirations. Rural school students’ lived experiences of place and non-traditional STEM career aspirations such as farming are scarcely considered in dominant narratives around science aspirations and career pathways. Adopting a critical relational perspective that considers place as a lived experience we ask How do rural Australian students…
Signing up to be tested: The costs of participation in high stakes literacy standardised assessments
Middle school students’ science epistemic beliefs – Implications for measurement
‘We don’t read in science’: Student perceptions of literacy and learning science in middle school
Building on work that brings literacy instruction and student science learner identity together, this study addresses a gap in research related to student experiences as readers in middle school science classrooms. To understand student perceptions of pedagogical approaches to reading in science, we asked 45 middle school students to reflect on what sort of reading participation was valued in their classroom and what they thought characterised a …
Thinking spatially: A springboard to new possibilities
This article argues that geographical theories are generative when to comes to understanding how educational disadvantage is produced and reproduced across generations. Spatial theories can inform critical interrogation of the ways in which students and their families from particular places, such as communities of poverty are represented in the media. Yet spaces and places can also become rich curricular resources when treated as assets for desig…
Digital writing from the start to the end: Creating a book for a friend
Many young children engage independently and/or collaboratively in self-initiated digital experiences. These experiences vary and may include digital play or gaming, web searching, communication with others, and with curriculum and entertainment-related content. Yet children’s digital experiences are contingent upon the design of the technologies to which they have access, the subsequent activities that are encouraged and the opportunities for in…
The Science of Adolescent Literacy
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
In Dimmed Memory of Otto and Hayes: Workforce Literacy at Wanda's Fish Fry
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Critical Literacy in Action: Difference as a Force for Positive Change
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Disrupting the 'boys don't read' discourse: Primary school boys who love reading fiction
This article disrupts dominant discourses around boys and reading that often homogenise young males as reluctant, disengaged and, at times, adversarial readers. Rather than essentialising boys, we argue there is a need for a more sophisticated knowledge base about the influences, constraints and diverse experiences of boys as readers in society today. Drawing on interviews ( n = 30) with Year 4 (8 to 9‐year‐old) boys at six schools, we consider t…
Critical Literacy as a Way of Being and Doing
This article focuses on critical literacy as a way of being and doing around the globe. Orientations to critical literacy, models for instruction, key aspects, and new directions are shared.
Is My Adolescent/Adult Struggling Reader Dyslexic
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
The Apple and the Acorn: Generating Adolescent Literacy Learners
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Critical Literacy and the Importance of Reading With and Against a Text
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Reading With and Against Curriculum
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Language Comprehension Development au Naturel
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Earning or Learning, or Not: Reconnecting Young Adults With Learning Through Multiliteracies Pedagogy
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Educative encounters of a different kind: Pedagogies of everyday life
Lately I have been thinking and writing about the idea of a teacher’s oeuvre – the notion that over time teachers create a significant body or work that might be compared to that of an artist or composer. I have argued that too often the contributions that teachers make remain invisible, under-valued and unknown in the field of education. This is true certainly when compared to the impact of educational theorists and researchers. Classroom teache…
Teachers' work and pedagogy in an era of accountability
A great deal of educational policy proceeds as though teachers are malleable and ever-responsive to change. Some argue they are positioned as technicians who simply implement policy. However, how teachers go about their work and respond to reform agendas may be contingent upon many factors that are both biographical in nature and workplace related. In this paper we discuss the work of middle school teachers in low-socioeconomic communities from t…
Mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers’ work: Federal policy, local effects
This paper explores how mandated literacy assessment is reorganising teachers' work in the context of Australia's National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy, which was implemented in 2008. Students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are tested annually, with school results publicly available. The wider policy context and the emergence of different forms of interconnected educational work associated with the testing phenomenon are described. Taking a…
Researching for social justice: Contextual, Conceptual and Methodological Challenges
Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary scho…
Disrupting the 'boys don't read' discourse: Primary school boys who love reading fiction
This article disrupts dominant discourses around boys and reading that often homogenise young males as reluctant, disengaged and, at times, adversarial readers. Rather than essentialising boys, we argue there is a need for a more sophisticated knowledge base about the influences, constraints and diverse experiences of boys as readers in society today. Drawing on interviews ( n = 30) with Year 4 (8 to 9‐year‐old) boys at six schools, we consider t…
Managerial Discourses: Tracking the Local Effects on Teachers'and Students' Work in Literacy Lessons
Many truths, many knowledges, many forms of reason: Understanding middle‐school student approaches to sources of information on the internet
Sourcing information related to socio‐scientific issues requires sophisticated literacies to read and evaluate conflicting accounts often signified by disagreement among experts, multiple solutions or misinformation. Much of the previous work exploring how young people approach conflicting information has tended to focus on students in the secondary and tertiary years, often taking an epistemic approach to analysis, rather than a literacies lens.…
Mathematics homework and the potential compounding of educational disadvantage
Parental involvement in schooling has been shown to have a positive impact on children's educational outcomes.With changing mathematics curricula and pedagogical approaches as a context, we explore how mathematical dispositions emerge through gendered and classed experiences with mathematics homework.We share the experiences of mothers from eight Canadian families as they negotiate mathematics homework with their children.We consider the impact o…
Introduction: Critical Discourse Analysis, or Life After the Linguistic Turn
(1997). Introduction: critical discourse analysis, or life after the linguistic turn. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 325-327
Managerial Discourses: Tracking the Local Effects on Teachers'and Students' Work in Literacy Lessons
Getting Out of Deficit: Pedagogies of reconnection
The fact that children growing up in poverty are likely to be in the lower ranges of achievement on standardised literacy tests is not a new phenomenon. Internationally there are a myriad of intervention and remedial programmes designed to address this problem with a range of effects. Frequently, sustainable reforms are curtailed by deficit views of families and children growing up in poverty. This article describes an ongoing research study enti…
Urban Renewal From the Inside Out: Spatial and Critical Literacies in a Low Socioeconomic School Community
This article focuses on how teachers worked to build a meaningful curriculum around changes to a neighborhood and school grounds in a precinct listed for urban renewal. Drawing on a long-term relationship with the principal and one teacher, the researchers planned and designed a collaborative project to involve children as active participants in the redevelopment process, negotiating and redesigning an area between the preschool and the school. T…
Making a Difference: Early Career English Teachers Research Their Practice
Making a difference : early career english teachers research their practice
Teachers' work and pedagogy in an era of accountability
A great deal of educational policy proceeds as though teachers are malleable and ever-responsive to change. Some argue they are positioned as technicians who simply implement policy. However, how teachers go about their work and respond to reform agendas may be contingent upon many factors that are both biographical in nature and workplace related. In this paper we discuss the work of middle school teachers in low-socioeconomic communities from t…
Researching for social justice: Contextual, Conceptual and Methodological Challenges
Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary scho…
Critical Theory and Literacy
Critical theory is typically referred to in the singular, but the term refers to multiple theories coming from different disciplinary traditions, which compete with each other for dominance and engage in debates about their relative explanatory power.
Mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers’ work: Federal policy, local effects
This paper explores how mandated literacy assessment is reorganising teachers' work in the context of Australia's National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy, which was implemented in 2008. Students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are tested annually, with school results publicly available. The wider policy context and the emergence of different forms of interconnected educational work associated with the testing phenomenon are described. Taking a…
International Handbook of Research on Children's Literacy, Learning, and Culture
The International Handbook of Research in Children's Literacy, Learning and Culture presents an authoritative distillation of current global knowledge related to the field of primary years literacy studies. Features chapters that conceptualize, interpret, and synthesize relevant research Critically reviews past and current research in order to influence future directions in the field of literacy Offers literacy scholars an international perspecti…
International Handbook of Research on Children's Literacy, Learning and Culture
Critical Literacy and Social Justice
Given the global escalation of gaps between rich and poor, contemporary work in critical literacy needs to overtly question the politics of poverty. How and where is poverty produced, by what means, by whom and for whom and how are educational systems stratified to provide different kinds of education to the rich and the poor? Yet rather than critical literacy, international educational reform movements stress performative standards on basic lite…
It’s not about punitive’: Exploring how early-career teachers in high-poverty schools respond to critical incidents
This article explores how early-career teachers working in high-poverty schools in Australia account for their decision-making during critical classroom incidents. Classroom management solutions are problematized by investigating how two teachers take up particular positions, make decisions, and enact what they believe to be ‘quality teaching’ in context. Through a combination of interviews and observations of teachers ‘in situ’, we examine what …
Texts, Identities, and Ethics: Critical Literacy in a Post‐Truth World
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Working Critically and Creatively With Fake News
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
How Practitioners Can Inform Policy
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Critical Literacy as a Way of Being and Doing
This article focuses on critical literacy as a way of being and doing around the globe. Orientations to critical literacy, models for instruction, key aspects, and new directions are shared.
Is My Adolescent/Adult Struggling Reader Dyslexic
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
The Apple and the Acorn: Generating Adolescent Literacy Learners
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Critical Literacy and the Importance of Reading With and Against a Text
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Reading With and Against Curriculum
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Language Comprehension Development au Naturel
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Earning or Learning, or Not: Reconnecting Young Adults With Learning Through Multiliteracies Pedagogy
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Educative encounters of a different kind: Pedagogies of everyday life
Lately I have been thinking and writing about the idea of a teacher’s oeuvre – the notion that over time teachers create a significant body or work that might be compared to that of an artist or composer. I have argued that too often the contributions that teachers make remain invisible, under-valued and unknown in the field of education. This is true certainly when compared to the impact of educational theorists and researchers. Classroom teache…
The Science of Adolescent Literacy
This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates
Pedagogy (37 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Political science (21 works) · Literacy (19 works) · Mathematics education (19 works) · Literacy, Media, and Education (16 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (11 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Education Systems and Policy (8 works)