36
Barriers to teachers using digital texts
in literacy classrooms
Eileen Honan
Abstract
In many accounts of school literacy teaching and
learning, there are claims that young people’s famil-
iarity with digital texts (ICTs) could provide teachers
with opportunities to plan exciting and innovative
activities. It would seem, however, that despite
intensive research and exemplary practices over the
last 20 years, the infiltration of ICTs into literacy
classrooms is not widespread. This paper reports on
one study where teachers discussed, argued and
thought about their uses of digital texts in their
classrooms. It provides some insight into the reasons
why literacy teachers do not engage with digital texts
as part of their everyday literacy activities. It also
shows teachers using institutional and societal dis-
courses about the value of students’ home experiences
to their schooling, the production of digital texts for
presentation of print-based work and the importance
of technical knowledge about computers and new
technologies, to describe and in part to overcome the
barriers to using new technologies in their literacy
classrooms.
Key words: digital texts, literacy classrooms, teachers,
ICTs in classrooms
The context
The field of New Literacy Studies has produced rich
accounts of the social and cultural contexts in which
literacy practices occur (Barton, 1994; Gee, 1996; Street,
2005). Recently, electronic literacies have been the
focus in a number of productive studies of contexts in
which young people engage with language via such
digital spaces as social networking sites, mobile
phones and websites (e.g., Dowdall, 2006; Hull, 2003;
Pahl and Rowsell, 2005). Many of these studies have
also decried a widening gap between the contexts in
which young people engage with digital technologies
in their daily lives and the practices of schooling (Gee,
2003; Lankshear and Knobel, 2003). As a result of the
infiltration of digital technologies into young people’s
everyday lives, the different ‘‘ways with words’’
(Heath, 1983) in homes and schools have become more
problematic and their relationship complex.
In recent years, this complex relation between home
and school literacy practices has been made even more
problematic by contrasting views of what constitute
r UKLA 2008. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Barriers to teachers using digital texts in literacy classrooms
meaningful and worthwhile literacy teaching and
learning practices in the classroom. These emerge from
contradictory and conflicting discourses about what
counts as literacy (Rowan and Honan, 2005). In the
United Kingdom, Australia and the USA, government-
sponsored enquiries have led to recommendations
about specific approaches to literacy teaching (Depart-
ment of Education, Science and Training, 2005;
National Reading Panel, 2000; Rose, 2006) that are
restrictive, formulaic and prescriptive.
However, at the same time government policies and
initiatives have encouraged teachers to engage with
their students’ digital worlds (see, e.g., in Queensland
the SmartClassrooms initiative at http://education.
qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/, and in the United King-
dom, the work of BECTA, http://www.becta.org.uk/).
But media commentators call for ‘‘back to basics’’
skills-based approaches, schools are held accountable
for the results of high stakes national testing outcomes
on book and paper-based assessments, while curricu-
lum packages are sold to schools with the promise that
they do not require teachers to have any professional
knowledge to deliver them effectively. It is no wonder
that within this climate, teachers find it difficult to
make a space within their literacy classes for digital
texts.
The project
The research study reported on in this paper aimed to:
 investigate the teaching of digital literacy practices
in one school in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia;
 apply the Four Resources Literacy Framework
(Freebody and Luke, 2003) as a mapping tool to
investigate the types of resources being encouraged
by teachers in their literacy teaching practices
around digital texts;
 engage teachers in self-reflexive work that would
encourage the development of new pedagogical
practices to improve the use of digital texts in their
literacy classes.
This research project was one of an ongoing series
(Honan, 2004, 2007), that involve the researcher in
working with teachers acting as co-researchers reflect-
ing critically on their own practices (Kincheloe, 2003).
Literacy Volume 42 Number 1 April 2008
Table 1: The Four Resources Literacy Framework
Breaking the code of texts
The emphasis here is on decoding and encoding texts.
Some examples include:
Alphabetic awareness
Recognising letter–sound relationships
Word building/manipulating units of sound
Spelling
Recognising conventions or mechanics of texts
Using texts functionally
The emphasis here is on understanding the purpose of
different texts.
Some examples include:
Using texts in different ways both in and outside school
Knowing what is expected at school
Reading, writing, speaking and listening for real
purposes
Using a variety of texts appropriately
The methodological principles adhered to include the
payment for classroom release so teachers could spend
adequate amounts of time on the research focus, and
the development of a collegial relationship that is not
part of the usual expert/novice binary opposition
(Grundy et al., 2001).
Rather than focusing on the exemplary teachers and
schools that are often (justly) celebrated in accounts of
integrating digital technologies into literacy class-
rooms, my concern was to work with teachers who
were not particularly innovative, nor at the forefront of
new approaches. I was assisted in the selection of a
school by staff from the Brisbane Catholic Education
Office. With my concerns in mind, the BCEO identified
a school that they described as ‘average’, with
adequate equipment, located in a reasonably econom-
ically comfortable area of Brisbane, Australia. It was a
small Catholic primary school that had been open for 5
years. At the time of the study, it had approximately
200 students, enrolled from Grade 1 through Grade 5,
and by 2009 would cater for the entire primary years of
Year 1–7.
The Curriculum Co-ordinator, who had a particular
interest in using digital technologies, selected four
teachers from the staff to participate in the study. At the
time of the study, two of the four teachers were
teaching Grade 2 classes, one a Grade 3 class and the
other a Grade 3/4 class. The teachers are identified by
their chosen pseudonyms. Anne and Lily were the
Grade 2 teachers, both of similar ages (mid-30s), with
Anne having recently returned to teaching after
maternity leave. Charlie, the Grade 3 teacher, was a
graduate in her second year of teaching and Austin, the
Grade 3/4 teacher, had initially trained as an English/
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Participating in the meanings of texts
The emphasis here is on making meaning from the text.
Some examples include:
Active participation to gain meaning from texts and
illustrations
Drawing on own experiences and prior knowledge
Comparing own experiences with those of the text
Comparing experiences with similar texts
Understanding how a text works
Critically analysing and transforming texts
The emphasis here is on understanding how texts are
constructed within social contexts.
Some examples include:
Recognising that texts are not neutral but represent
particular views, voices and interests and silence others
Understanding how texts are crafted to the interests and
ideologies of the writer
Questioning/challenging texts and understanding that
their designs and discourses can be critiqued and
redesigned in novel ways
Drama secondary teacher but had recently moved into
primary teaching.
The teachers were released from their classrooms for 5
full day meetings over a period of 3 months in 2006.
These meetings involved discussions, arguments and
reflections on teachers’ current and possible literacy
teaching practices. Between each of the full day
meetings, teachers worked in their own classrooms to
collect data and trial new strategies related to their use
of the Four Resources Framework. The data collected
by myself, and the focus of the analysis reported on in
this paper, were transcriptions of the discussions
during the full day meetings.
These conversations were very different from the
standard research interview (Silverman, 2001). The
tape recorder was placed in the centre of the table at
each meeting and the researcher and the teachers all
engaged in the methodological choices about turning it
on and off, making instant decisions about what was
worthy of recording. The recorder therefore captured
some of the arguments, the negotiations and the
disagreements, as well as the more standard reporting
and question/answer interactions.
While the initial aim of the project was to explore the
relationship between the Four Resources Framework
and teachers’ work with digital texts, the analysis of
these transcriptions revealed that there was an
unexpected focus in the teachers’ talk. They talked
about why they did not use digital texts at all in their
classrooms, rather than the development of literacy
practices around these texts. In this paper, I describe
these teachers’ difficulties in overcoming institutional
and societal barriers to find ways forward in their daily
38
practice. I would suggest that these teachers’ situations
are reflective of the wider context of teaching-as-usual,
where, despite intensive research and exemplary
practices over the last 20 years, digital technologies
have not infiltrated into the everyday practices of
schooling (Pearson and Somekh, 2006; Walsh et al.,
2007).
Beacuse the language of the Four Resources Frame-
work is used by the teachers in their talk about these
barriers, I have included some background informa-
tion about this literacy model and its relation to the use
of digital texts in classrooms.
The Four Resources Framework and digital texts
The Four Resources Literacy Framework was devel-
oped by Peter Freebody and Allan Luke (see, espe-
cially, Freebody and Luke, 2003) in Australia and has
been widely used in curriculum and policy, especially
in Queensland (http://education.qld.gov.au/literacy/
index.html).
The framework is based on understanding that
becoming an effective literacy user requires the
development of four repertoires of practice: code
breaking; participating in the meaning of texts; using
texts functionally; and critically analysing and trans-
forming texts. It was developed by drawing on existing
research into effective literacy teaching, and ‘‘shifts the
focus from trying to find the right method to whether
the range of practices emphasised in one’s reading
programme are indeed covering and integrating a
broad perspective of textual practices that are required
in new economies and cultures’’ (Luke and Freebody,
1999). The recognition and validation of their current
teaching practices along with the provision of oppor-
tunities to explore new approaches has been especially
valued by teachers who have engaged with this
framework (Honan, 2004) (Table 1).
While investigations into the use of digital literacies in
schools use a variety of approaches, including Kress’
Table 2: Code-breaking practices with print and digital texts
Digital-based texts
What do I need to know about how the text is
constructed to make sense of it?
Which typographical conventions are familiar?
Which are new?
How does the use of sound, colour, moving
images and different design programs help me
interpret or make meaning of this text? (How do I
crack this?)
If this text has conventions new to me (flash, .mwv
files, etc.) how will I work them out?
Can I predict where the links (traversals) will take me?
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visual grammar (Unsworth, 2006; Walsh, 2006) and
critical literacy (Lankshear and Knobel, 2003), there is a
common understanding that the literacy requirements
of print-based and digital texts are different. One of the
aims of this research was to investigate whether the
Four Resources Literacy Framework could be used as a
mapping tool to explore these different literacy
requirements. Existing versions of the Four Resources
Framework – including those unpublished, used in
undergraduate teaching and by other researchers
(Deakin University, 2001) and on the Myread website
http://www.myread.org/ – were used to construct a
version of the framework that contained questions
specifically relevant to digital texts. Table 2 represents
the code-breaking resource, specifying the different
kinds of questions that would be asked of print and
digital texts.
The framework was shared with the teachers at the
beginning of the project and there were many discus-
sions conducted around its meaning. However, it was
clear that teachers found it extremely difficult to think
about engaging with any kinds of literacy work around
digital texts. Finding ways to overcome these difficul-
ties became the focus of our ensuing work. In
particular, the barriers included a lack of teacher
knowledge about students’ home uses of digital texts,
a classroom focus on the technical knowledge of new
technologies and an overemphasis on the production
of digital texts as the outcome of a unit of work. Each of
these issues is explored in more detail below.
Home uses of digital texts
Initially the teachers posed the question, ‘‘what do our
students know about digital texts?’’ to provide a
context for exploring their classroom use. They
engaged in whole-class discussions, and asked stu-
dents to draw and write about the kinds of digital
screens they were familiar with outside of school. The
results of these activities surprised the teachers who
were unaware of students’ detailed knowledge of
different digital forms. Here, Anne and Charlie explain
Print-based texts
Are there any words in the text that I do not know the
meaning of?
How will I find out what they mean?
Are there any symbols in the text that I do not know the
meaning of?
How will I find out what they mean?
Why are different fonts/colours used?
What kinds of sentence structures are used in the text?
How will my knowledge of spelling conventions help me
to decode the text?
Literacy Volume 42 Number 1 April 2008
what they have learned:
Anne: ‘‘The handheld games – we probably could have
gone for half an hour and there was quite a
heated discussion and debate about, no that’s not
the double spring one, that’s the one, you know,
the detail they knew about those games . . . ’’
Charlie: ‘‘And I was surprised about the different types
of games that they could play. So they had CD
games . . . They had online games . . . games
that were sent to them from a relative by email
. . . And then there’s another online game that
they play where they can even chat to each
other . . .’’
Like others (Warschauer et al., 2004), the teachers had
also underestimated their students’ access to compu-
ters, reflecting their lack of awareness of students’
funds of knowledge (Comber and Kamler, 2004; Moll,
1992).
Austin: ‘‘When we were talking about it, every student
in my class has access to a computer at home.
Every single student had a computer at home.’’
Charlie: ‘‘My class as well . . . they all have access and
some even have their own.’’
This lack of awareness of their students’ access to
digital technologies had a direct impact on classroom
practices as the teachers all seemed to be working from
a position where their students were unfamiliar with
the technology being used. Lily here hints at one of the
reasons for this contradiction:
Lily: ‘‘So I was overall pretty impressed with what they
can do. But I thought it was very different type of
technology that they’re using at home and what
we’re using at school.’’
To these teachers the skills and knowledge gained in
the home were of little value in the classroom context.
This echoes the ‘‘discourses of deficit’’ used by teachers
when they describe students’ home literacy practices
(Comber and Kamler, 2004), and illustrates these
discourses being used to devalue and negate the funds
of knowledge about digital technologies that students
bring to school (Honan, 2006).
Even when they were trialling new practices as a result
of the enquiry, these discourses impacted on the
teachers’ decisions about the types of digital texts they
used in their classrooms. While they had discovered a
wealth of diversity in students’ home lives, they
selected website texts and ‘educational’ software to
focus on during their literacy lessons. When I asked
the teachers about this gap, they responded in terms
of access. Each teacher had five computers in the
classroom, making it relatively easy to set up a whole
class or small group lessons. While it is commonplace
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to have computers in classrooms (especially in primary
schools), as well as the absence of other digital
technologies such as mobile phones and handheld
games, it is the way computers are used that is an
issue.
The increase in social networking sites such as
MySpace, Youtube, Xanga, etc., and the development
of blogging and Wiki tools, has not had an impact on
the teaching practices of this particular group of
teachers. Despite concern about ‘digital immigrants’
(Prensky, 2001), this is not an age issue. All the teachers
were competent with using computers and other kinds
of new technologies. However, in their classroom
practices, it was not only their students’ home uses of
digital texts that were neglected: the teachers’ own
competence and expertise seemed to be ignored in
their classrooms. They seemed surprised when I
suggested they could draw on their own daily uses
of digital technologies.
Operational work in classrooms
The teachers’ lack of awareness of students’ knowl-
edge of digital technologies also had an impact on
classroom literacy practices. When they described their
existing classroom practices involving digital texts, a
theme, noted by others, predominated: a focus on
teaching students the technical or operational skills
needed to use the technology, rather than the literacy
resources needed to create or make meaning from the
texts (Bigum et al., 1997; Lankshear et al., 2000). These
technical skills included, for example, using word
processing software and keyboarding skills:
Anne: ‘‘they’re being asked to type, select different
fonts, forward a clip art sort of thing, open and
close files to get their work. So it’s keyboard slash
handwriting and they’re doing keyboard skills to
familiarise themselves with where the keys are
and the functions and then they have to save that
work into their own folder.’’
Here, Lily emphasises the skills students need to
operate the technology rather than the literacy
resources needed to play the game:
Lily: ‘‘So in order to play the games the children have to
be able to turn the computer on, log on as a year 2
student, and navigate the desktop in order to find
the game or the internet whatever they’re doing.
If playing the game from the server, the children
log into the game using their username and
password – . . . some of the games require to know
who you are. And not all of them do that. And if
using games on the internet the children must find
the game in the favourites section.’’
40
In these excerpts, Anne and Lily describe their existing
classroom practices, before the enquiry began. Yet,
even after exploration of the Four Resources Literacy
Framework, when they designed new activities to
encourage students to use these literacy resources with
digital texts, the teachers focused on teaching students
how to operate the system. For example, here Lily
describes her trial:
Lily: ‘‘I found myself doing things like code-breaker
because I’ve got year 2s and some of them aren’t
very familiar with using a computer, we did the
whole how do I get onto the internet to start with,
so we turn the computer on, so can you find the
icon ok which one, e, and what does the e stand
for? And clicked into that ok now what do I do if
I want to go somewhere . . . And we also talked
about how we looked at the web address and we got
to our site and what did we do wrong? And they
said well they’ve got www. So what does that
stand for? And no one knew of course.’’
While Lily describes this activity as ‘code-breaking’
work, the emphasis is on technical knowledge, rather
than on the literacy knowledge needed to break the
code of a digital text. Here, Austin uses his students’
age as a reason for their lack of mastery:
Austin: ‘‘I’ve got a 3/4 class and I could be wrong but
definitely I think the Year 4 students are a lot
more confident with digital technologies in
general so the capacity to extend them and
involve them in a lot more of the other areas is
possible. I don’t get the same feeling about the
Year 3s. I think they’re still at that stage where
they’re mastering all the code-breaking stuff.
This is a stereo and this is the play button, and
this is this . . . ’’
There are three significant points to be made here. First,
there seems to be a lack of understanding of how
students can transpose their knowledge of operating
hand-held games, mobile phones and computer-based
games to the classroom. This means that teachers
will spend unnecessary and unproductive time on
such basic skills as finding out what www means and
explicitly showing students how to turn on the
computer, use the play button, etc. Second, the teachers
here use the language of the four resources framework
to describe the technical instructions they provide
students. In their view, this is code-breaking work,
whereas it seems the operational work actually blocks
the engagement with any literacy practices at all. Here,
I asked Charlie to be specific about which of the four
resources she focused on:
Charlie: ‘‘we’re focusing on comic writing, I wanted
them to produce a comic differently and to be
able to look at layout as well of how the
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Barriers to teachers using digital texts in literacy classrooms
text should be read in a comic style and how
they can produce it on the computer.’’
(Author) ‘‘So which of the four resources?’’
‘‘I taught them a lot of code-breaking to
become familiar with the program and I
thought text participant as well.’’
The work to ‘‘become familiar with the program’’ is not
breaking the literacy code but is learning how to
operate the technical system. This emphasis actually
impedes the development of literacy skills. For
example, learning that clicking on a particular icon
will open a particular piece of software does not reflect
the kind of code-breaking work referred to in Table 2.
This focus on technical skills can be traced to the
‘information literacy’ discourses used, especially in
school libraries, where a series of checklists are used to
show students’ competencies with using computers,
usually expressed in terms of technical expertise.
Third, Lily is talking about her Grade 2 class and Austin
is talking about his combined Grade 3 and 4 class. It
seems then that students are doomed to repeat these
kinds of technical lessons from year to year, as each
teacher begins with a tabula rasa approach to using
computers in their classrooms. This approach of course
contradicts the teachers’ usual practices in literacy
learning where assessment records are carefully up-
dated and passed on to the next teacher, so that students
can be taught literacy at their appropriate level.
The production of digital texts
Another barrier to literacy engagement in these
contexts is the emphasis on the production of digital
texts as a final outcome for a unit. Here, Lily describes
this kind of production work:
Lily: ‘‘We’ve done a lot of digital technology. The kids
have made PowerPoints and PhotoStories and
taken photos with a digital camera and there’s all
of this stuff going on.’’
This work is associated with the production of a final
task for the unit of work. The focus is not, for example,
the ability of students to create a narrative, but the
ability of students to create a PowerPoint presentation.
The literacy work is downplayed in these kinds of
productions. Charlie points out that the production of
these kinds of digital texts changes the emphasis in the
classroom, away from literacy learning and towards
technological production:
Charlie: ‘‘Yes so if they were for example doing a
PowerPoint presentation I was focusing on
them being able to create a PowerPoint. So they
will be creating a text, but I wanted them to
become familiar with the program and being
able to do it independently because what
Literacy Volume 42 Number 1 April 2008
they’re doing now is writing a comic. I can see
that they can write a comic in print form, and
now they’re just putting the print form onto
the computer and there’s a lot of code-breaking
happening because I wanted them to become
familiar with the program. And that’s what
I’ve done a lot of, just a lot of producing. The
focus being the production part.’’
Here again, Charlie explains teaching students how to
operate the programme in code-breaking terms. But
she also acknowledges that the ‘real’ literacy work has
taken place in writing a print-based text and
students are simply transferring this into a digital
format. This kind of publishing work has been a
common feature of literacy classrooms for some time,
where students are encouraged to ‘publish’ their
writing using a word processor, etc. and does not take
into account the different kinds of literacies used in
digital spaces. Even the ‘comic’ or ‘cartoon’ genre that
Charlie is using alters in style and function, depending
on the medium in which it is found, for example in a
newspaper, comic book, website or on a television
screen.
Here, Lily explains the problems of achieving literacy
outcomes for a unit of work that ended with the
production of a PowerPoint presentation:
Lily: ‘‘And they had it, all the different aspects of what
the PowerPoint presentation needed, . . . they
inserted all the photos, they’d used the speech
bubbles and they’d moved and made different
sizes of them to put them in the right spot for
the slide. But they didn’t get the outcome that I
wanted which was also being able to understand
how to write a cartoon strip. Because in the speech
bubbles they have, God said to Noah, build me
an ark. And there was no punctuation and you
know . . . ’’
Lily goes on to describe one student’s inability to
transfer his knowledge of print literacy into the
digital space of a PowerPoint presentation. She refers
to the distracting features of the technologies, but also
points out that the literacy teaching had occurred
around the production of a print-based plan. Even
though she refers to it as ‘digital literacy’ the work
done to create a PowerPoint presentation was not
literacy work at all:
Lily: ‘‘whether or not that was simply because he was
distracted with the digital literacy, because in his
plan, his written plan, he had from what I saw he
did have the right type of structuring. . . . I’m
thinking he didn’t use his plan . . . it doesn’t even
have the bit like the most important part of the
story of Noah when God sends the rainbow and
promises never to flood the world again, doesn’t
even rate a mention. But I know for a fact that was
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in his plan. So whether he got distracted and
carried away with the whole digital literacy . . . it
looks beautiful. But it’s not right.’’
It is no wonder then, that teachers like Lily find it
difficult to see a place for digital texts in their literacy
classrooms. To Lily the ‘digital literacy’ of the Power-
Point software actually blocked her students’ achieve-
ments of outcomes. Lily has spent a lot of time teaching
students about the operation of the program rather
than thinking about how a text is actually constructed
in this digital space.
The emphasis on production of digital texts is not
surprising given the focus in curriculum documents
and in professional development packages. Teachers
are encouraged to think about the ways in which they
can use PowerPoint and other kinds of presentation
software, including the development of websites, to
share their students’ work and to display final
products. As Lily points out this kind of work takes
an enormous amount of time:
Lily: ‘‘I mean it just takes so much time. It really has
taken an enormous amount of time. So I think
that’s why and it’s not that I don’t use it, because
I do. Because I think it’s important. But I think
that’s why I maybe don’t use it as much . . . ’’
Lily makes pragmatic decisions on a daily basis about
what to teach and how to teach it and the over-
whelming work involved in the production of 24
PowerPoint presentations (one by each child) has
impacted on her understanding of the integration of
digital texts into her classroom.
Ways forward in finding spaces for
digital texts
Institutional and societal discourses about the value of
students’ home experiences to their schooling, the
production of digital texts for presentation of print-
based work and the importance of technical
knowledge about computers and new technologies
acted as barriers to these teachers finding spaces to
incorporate digital texts into their literacy classrooms.
However, by the end of the enquiry, the teachers in this
study had found new ways to understand the
integration of digital texts into their literacy teaching
and learning.
Yet, these new ways were not straightforward, and
each productive suggestion made was countered by a
discussion of the problems that could be encountered
in making such changes to their teaching practices. For
example, the teachers’ exploration of the Four Re-
sources Literacy Framework drew attention to the
outcomes in the English curriculum, and to the
achievement of these outcomes through reading
42
activities based on digital texts. Austin explains his
new understanding:
Austin: ‘‘I think if you go to the syllabus documents . . .
it will break it down, it will say specifically we
want you to cover say, if it was a narrative
structure, paragraphing, noun groups, verbs
things like that. You can do all of those things
using digital texts without making it an add-
on. If you see digital texts as any other, you
treat digital texts the way you would treat any
other texts, so if I had to go and teach sentence
construction, instead of picking up a novel or
something like that, I can pick up something
else like a digital text and do the exact same
thing with it and that’s normal part of my
everyday practice. I haven’t had to go and do
any extra hours preparing that.’’
This new understanding of the connections between
curriculum outcomes and the use of digital texts was
significant in that it led teachers to think about the
daily incorporation of these texts in their literacy
lessons (e.g., during literacy rotations). Yet, Lily was
quick to point out her problems with these ideas:
Lily: ‘‘but I think that also comes back to the resources
issues. Books and print texts are something that
we have right around us everywhere with lots of
different examples and different things and I know
you can get all the same thing on digital texts but
when you’re working in a classroom with 24 kids,
you don’t have as much. . . I do think that the
exploration of digital technologies can take longer
than other ways of doing things.’’
While the group agreed that these were reasonable
concerns, they re-emphasised Austin’s theme of ‘‘you
treat digital texts the way you would treat any other
texts’’ in their ensuing discussions. So for example, the
group realised that students could use digital texts in
one of the group activities planned for a literacy
rotation, instead of a print-based text. This may seem to
be a minor change but its significance lies in the
difference between this inclusion and the more
common ‘add-on’ practices observed in many class-
rooms. It is also significant that the group shifted their
thinking to the integration of digital texts into their
daily literacy practices. In this way they began to
develop new approaches to a ‘‘a literacy of fusion’’
(Millard, 2003).
These small moves forward in the teachers’ thinking
about using digital texts in their classrooms must be
read within a context of the societal and institutional
barriers described in this paper. Teachers can only
move forward in making pedagogical changes when
the structures and organisations around them are also
changed. For example, it is becoming common for
primary schools to locate computers in hubs, labora-
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Barriers to teachers using digital texts in literacy classrooms
tories or withdrawal rooms. While these central
locations may be efficient for cabling and networking,
they detract from teachers incorporating digital tech-
nologies into their daily practices.
Policy and curriculum that focus on the production of
digital texts encourage teachers to think about digital
texts as the final outcome of a unit of work, rather than
texts to be used in their daily teaching. Indeed, in many
cases, this kind of production work is highlighted and
extolled as exemplary work. For example, the recent
SmartClassrooms initiative (http://education.qld.gov.
au/smartclassrooms/) in Queensland recommends
samples of this work to be included in a teacher’s
digital portfolio to be submitted as part of gaining an
‘‘ICT Pedagogical Licence’’.
Also, it is of some concern that the gap is widening
between the types of digital texts students use in their
homes and those engaged with during school activ-
ities. It seems beyond the capabilities of any education
system to respond quickly to new technological
demands (Lewis and Fabos, 2005; Millard, 2003). Of
course, technological changes are rapid, and systems
do find it difficult to keep up with the latest, but it is not
necessarily the equipment that needs updating. It is the
thinking around pedagogical practices when using
digital texts, so school-based encounters with new
technologies are not restricted to the depressingly
familiar activities of producing slide presentations,
publishing of paper-based ‘stories’ using word proces-
sing software or repeated learning of basic technical
skills.
Concluding thoughts
One of the aims of this research was to explore the
relationship between the Four Resources Model and
teachers’ work with digital texts. However, analysis of
the discussions held around this exploration revealed
that teachers emphasised the barriers to using digital
texts at all, rather than the improvement of literacy
teaching and learning. Despite these barriers, the
teachers did make small moves forward in their
thinking about new pedagogical practices. Such
changes can only take place when organisational and
structural changes are also implemented. There is a
need for education systems to respond in more
productive and creative ways to these new uses of
digital texts, providing spaces for teachers to engage
with these texts in order to provide genuinely enga-
ging and rewarding activities for their literacy learners.
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Eileen Honan, School of Education, The Univer-
sity of Queensland, St Lucia, 4072 Australia.
e-mail: e.honan@uq.edu.au