Peter Freebody

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Peter Freebody
Born (1950-08-12) 12 August 1950 (age 72)
Sydney, Australia
NationalityAustralian
Alma mater
Scientific career
FieldsLiteracy education, classroom interaction and quantitative and qualitative research methods
Institutions
Doctoral students Stephen Billett

Peter Freebody (born 12 August 1950 in Sydney) is an Australian Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Past appointments included Professorial Research Fellow with the Faculty of Education and Social Work and a core member of the CoCo Research Centre at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. [1] His research and teaching interests include literacy education, classroom interaction and quantitative and qualitative research methods. He has served on numerous Australian State and Commonwealth literacy education and assessment advisory groups. Freebody, with Allan Luke, originated the Four Resources Model of literacy education. [2]

Contents

Personal history and career

Freebody was born on 12 August 1950 in Sydney, Australia.

He received his Bachelor of Arts (Honours 1st Class) in Education from the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia in 1973. He received his Diploma in Education from the Sydney Teacher's College in 1973 and his Teaching Certificate from the New South Wales Department of Education in 1974. In 1980 Freebody received his PhD from the School of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Illinois, U.S.A. After receiving his Diploma in Education in 1973, he taught for a year at Normanhurst Boys High School in New South Wales, Australia before taking a position as lecturer at the Center for Behavioral Studies in Education, University of New England, New South Wales from 1975 to 1977. He served as a research assistant at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois from 1977 to 1979 and as a Visiting Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California from 1979 to 1980.

Returning to Australia in 1981, Freebody took a position as Lecturer, and in 1985 he became a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Behavioral Studies in Education, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales. From 1992 to 2002 he was a professor with the Faculty of Education at Griffith University in Brisbane, Queensland. In 2003 he moved to Singapore as Professor and Deputy Dean (Research) at the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice, National Institute of Education (part of Nanyang Technological University). Returning to Australia in 2005, Freebody took a position as Professor in the School of Education at the University of Queensland in St. Lucia. In 2007 he accepted a Professorial Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney.

Journals and other bodies

His work has appeared in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly , Harvard Educational Review , and the American Educational Research Journal . He has also contributed numerous invited entries in international handbooks and encyclopedias on literacy, critical literacy, and research methodology. He has served on numerous Australian state and national advisory groups in the area of literacy education, and was senior consultant on the national on-line curriculum initiative conducted by the Curriculum Corporation. [3] He was 2015-2016 Chair of the International Literacy Association's Research Panel, and 2014 recipient of that Association's WS Gray award for contributions to literacy education internationally.

Four Resources Model

In the early 1990s, Allan Luke and Peter Freebody of Griffith University introduced the Four Resources Model in literacy education. [2] This model seeks to reconcile the debates among Whole Language, Phonics, critical literacy and others. This model postulates that in order to be a fully literate citizen, a person needs:

  1. coding competence (the ability to decode text, i.e. phonics)
  2. semantic competence (the ability to make meaning, i.e. comprehension)
  3. pragmatic competence (every day, functional literacy, i.e. writing a check, reading the newspaper, filling out a job application, etc.)
  4. critical competence (the ability to critically select and analyze texts, i.e. avoiding scams, determining reliable sources of information, etc.)

Luke and Freebody assert that no one of these resources is sufficient by itself but that each is essential. Further, the resources are not meant to indicate a sequence of instruction. Different resources should be present in instruction in varying amounts, depending upon the needs of the students. Luke has also stated that critical competence, far from being an upper level topic, can begin to be developed in year one of education and before.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Whole language</span> Educational method

Whole language is a philosophy of reading and a discredited educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children. The method became a major model for education in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, despite there being no scientific support for the method's effectiveness. It is based on the premise that learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phonics</span> Method to teach reading and writing of an alphabetic language

Phonics is a method for teaching people how to read and write an alphabetic language. It is done by demonstrating the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters or groups of letters (graphemes) or syllables of the written language. In English, this is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code.

Media literacy is an expanded conceptualization of literacy that includes the ability to access and analyze media messages as well as create, reflect and take action, using the power of information and communication to make a difference in the world. Media literacy is not restricted to one medium and is understood as a set of competencies that are essential for work, life, and citizenship. Media literacy education is the process used to advance media literacy competencies, and it is intended to promote awareness of media influence and create an active stance towards both consuming and creating media. Media literacy education is part of the curriculum in the United States and some European Union countries, and an interdisciplinary global community of media scholars and educators engages in knowledge and scholarly and professional journals and national membership associations.

Reading Recovery is a discredited short-term intervention approach designed for English speaking children aged five or six, who are the lowest achieving in literacy after their first year of school. For instance, a child who is unable to read the simplest of books or write their own name, after a year in school, would be appropriate for a referral to a Reading Recovery program. The intervention involves intensive one-to-one lessons for 30 minutes a day with a teacher trained in the Reading Recovery method, for between 12 and 20 weeks.

This is an index of education articles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Synthetic phonics</span> Teaching reading by blending and segmenting the sounds of the letters

Synthetic phonics, also known as blended phonics or inductive phonics, is a method of teaching English reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words.

Critical literacy is the ability to find embedded discrimination in media. This is done by analyzing the messages promoting prejudiced power relationships found naturally in media and written material that go unnoticed otherwise by reading beyond the author's words and examining the manner in which the author has conveyed his or her ideas about society's norms to determine whether these ideas contain racial or gender inequality.

Kenneth Goodman was Professor Emeritus, Language Reading and Culture, at the University of Arizona. He is best known for developing the theory underlying the literacy philosophy of whole language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Composition studies</span>

Composition studies is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States. The flagship national organization for this field is the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

High frequency sight words are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode. Sight words were introduced after whole language fell out of favor with the education establishment.

Allan Luke is an educator, researcher, and theorist studying literacy, multiliteracies, applied linguistics, and educational sociology and policy. Luke has written or edited 17 books and more than 250 articles and book chapters. Luke, with Peter Freebody, originated the Four Resources Model of literacy in the 1990s. Part of the New London Group, he was coauthor of the "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures" published in the Harvard Educational Review (1996). He is Emeritus Professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia and Adjunct Professor at Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reading</span> Taking in the meaning of letters or symbols

Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch.

William Cope, known as Bill Cope, is an Australian academic, author and educational theorist who was a research professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, He has also been the Managing Director of Common Ground Publishing at the university.

Multiliteracy is an approach to literacy theory and pedagogy coined in the mid-1990s by the New London Group. The approach is characterized by two key aspects of literacy - linguistic diversity and multimodal forms of linguistic expressions and representation. It was coined in response to two major changes in the globalized environment. One such change was the growing linguistic and cultural diversity due to increased transnational migration. The second major change was the proliferation of new mediums of communication due to advancement in communication technologies e.g the internet, multimedia, and digial media. As a scholarly approach, multiliteracy focuses on the new "literacy" that is developing in response to the changes in the way people communicate globally due to technological shifts and the interplay between different cultures and languages.

The Rouge Forum is an organization of educational activists, which focuses on issues of equality, democracy, and social justice.

A dialogue journal is an ongoing written interaction between two people to exchange experiences, ideas, knowledge or reflections. It is used most often in education as a means of sustained written interaction between students and teachers at all education levels. It can be used to promote second language learning and learning in all areas.

Joseph Lo Bianco AM is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, and serves as Past President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. From 2011–2017 he designed, led and implemented a 6-year, 3-country language and peace building initiative for UNICEF in Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand. He has previously worked on peace building activities in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s, and in several other settings. He is a language planning specialist, recognised for his work on combining practical problem solving language policy with academic study of language problems. He has published extensively on bilingual education, English as a second/additional language, peace building and communication, multiculturalism and intercultural education, Asian studies, Italian language teaching and the revitalisation of indigenous and immigrant community languages.

The Sydney School is a genre-based writing pedagogy that analyses literacy levels of students. The Sydney School's pedagogy broadened the traditional observation-based writing in primary schools to encompass a spectrum of different genres of text types that are appropriate to various discourses and include fiction and non-fiction. The method and practice of teaching established by the Sydney School encourages corrective and supportive feedback in the education of writing practices for students, particularly regarding second language students. The Sydney School works to reflectively institutionalise a pedagogy that is established to be conducive to students of lower socio-economic backgrounds, indigenous students and migrants lacking a strong English literacy basis. The functional linguists who designed the genre-based pedagogy of the Sydney School did so from a semantic perspective to teach through patterns of meaning and emphasised the importance of the acquisition of a holistic literacy in various text types or genres. ‘Sydney School’ is not however an entirely accurate moniker as the pedagogy has evolved beyond metropolitan Sydney universities to being adopted nationally and, by 2000, was exported to centres in Hong Kong, Singapore, and parts of Britain.

Frances Helen Christie, is Emeritus professor of language and literacy education at the University of Melbourne, and honorary professor of education at the University of Sydney. She specialises in the field of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and has completed research in language and literacy education, writing development, pedagogic grammar, genre theory, and teaching English as a mother tongue and as a second language.

Jenny Hammond is an Australian linguist. She is known for her research on literacy development, classroom interaction, and socio-cultural and systemic functional theories of language and learning in English as an Additional Language or dialect (EAL/D) education. Over the course of her career, Hammond's research has had a significant impact on the literacy development of first and second language learners, on the role of classroom talk in constructing curriculum knowledge and on policy developments for EAL education in Australia. She is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Education, University of Technology Sydney.

References

  1. "Professor Peter Freebody". Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Sydney.[ permanent dead link ]
  2. 1 2 Freebody, P., & Luke, A. (1990). Literacies programs: Debates and demands in cultural context. Prospect: Australian Journal of TESOL, 5(3), 7–16.
  3. "Peter Freebody". CoCo Research Centre, University of Sydney.

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