5 min read

Edwin Creely, Monash University and Fleur Diamond, Monash University

NAPLAN results indicate a decline in students’ ability to write. Outcomes in literacy, including writing, affect student achievement across multiple subject areas (including maths and science).

Read more: NAPLAN writing tests hinder creativity, so what could we use in their place?

There is a clear link between students being engaged with writing and the quality of literacy outcomes. Students’ willingness to write can be promoted by making writing more enjoyable and meaningful to young people, with authentic connections to their lives.

The power of expressive writing

Research in English and literacy education consistently shows when teachers are given the scope to tap into students’ interests, they can produce work of high quality. To increase students’ enjoyment of writing, more time could be given to creative forms of writing such as poetry, song lyrics, short scripts, personal memoirs and comic pieces, and combinations of different types of texts with visual materials in multimodal and digital composition.

We now have a rich body of research and toolkits that support teachers in writing instruction. Building on good writing instruction, it’s also important for writing to be an activity done for intrinsic purposes such as pleasure. The Australian Association for the Teaching of English asserts the importance of this goal.

Writing is more than work for achieving an outcome. It’s identity work. In the enjoyment of writing, student writers can find themselves and discover the power of language. Powerful literacy skills can be gained in this discovery, with lifelong implications.

Tackling the decline in writing for pleasure in schools

Despite the link between writing for enjoyment and positive literacy results, there is accumulating evidence that writing instruction in schools is becoming limited. The current focus on forms of writing tested in standardised formats, such as tests like NAPLAN and PIRLS, puts pressure on teachers and schools to narrow writing instruction. Typically, this would mean a focus on producing essays, persuasive pieces, reports, recounts, descriptive writing and procedural texts.

Read more: Decluttering the NSW curriculum: why reducing the number of subjects isn't the answer

In NSW, Geoff Masters, the CEO of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), is overseeing a comprehensive review of that state’s curriculum. He has already noted teachers and school leaders are bound by an inflexible curriculum. This includes approaches to writing and literacy that focus too heavily on prescribed functional texts. Other research by ACER suggests the need for more openness and innovation in teaching writing.

Teachers are committed to improving their students’ writing, given the emphasis in class on assessment of writing by NAPLAN and other international tests. But they also need to feel they can allow more time for unstructured or personal writing that promotes creative writing identities for students.

For example, teaching multimodal composition (where two or more modes such as written language, spoken language, visual or audio are combined) and writing designed for performance alongside mandated forms of writing (such as persuasive, narrative or instructional writing) would allow students to develop important skills in writing that reflect the emerging digital world and a range of necessary literacy competencies.

The key to promoting the effective writing skills needed by students is to be found in making writing engaging, meaningful and pleasurable. Every opportunity should be taken to open up the possibilities of writing for students so they want to do it and see its relevance to their lives.

There also needs to be a shift in the current policy and assessment emphasis on specific outcomes to one which empowers teachers to promote writing to learn and writing for enjoyment.

Encouraging writing for enjoyment

What can teachers and parents do at home and at school to foster an enjoyment of writing?

At home

Parents can encourage children to write for pleasure, not just for school work. For example, having a personal diary or journal, and in it writing about life, what interests them, or for imagining, storytelling and wondering.

Read more: Why the teaching of creative writing matters

At school

Teachers can open up writing for pleasure in their classrooms, either as a core activity or as an extension after other work is completed. There can be a special class time to share or perform creative and personal writing and for other students to comment about it. Teachers can also write alongside students to model good writing behaviours.

Schools can promote writing clubs where students can write together, share their writing and even self-publish it in online forums and blogs.

Edwin Creely, Lecturer in literacy and English education, Monash University and Fleur Diamond, Lecturer, Education, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

5 min read 

With the strengthening of the Australian privacy law to include mandatory data breach notification, the growing data privacy issues surrounding big tech companies like Facebook, Google - and even now Apple - the introduction of the Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in EU earlier this year, (and I’d add the recent setback with the My Health roll out), its no surprise that Gartner predicts digital ethics and privacy will be a top 10 strategic technology trend for 2019.

So why should schools care? 4 reasons:

1. The annual Deloitte Australian Privacy index continues to rank the Education sector as one of the weakest sectors for being transparent on privacy practices to consumers
2. A recent NTT global threat intelligence report stated the Australian education sector topped the list of attacked industries
3. The Australian Privacy Commissioner’s quarterly statistics in relation to data breach notification included 16 data breaches in the Education sector during the period 1 July 2018 – 30 September 2018 (8 of which were a result of human error!), and
4. The community – including students and parents – are paying attention!

Information security is a key element of privacy. A cyber security expert from the University of NSW was recently quoted as saying schools are just as vulnerable – if not more so – than companies when it comes to cyber security.

"Schools don’t tend to have professional IT staff with a deep understanding of security issues, although a number of schools doubtlessly have teachers who understand IT and the associated security issues" Professor Gernot Heiser.

In addition to this, schools have obligations in relation to transparency about their personal information handling practices and must apply rigorous decision making when collecting, using and disclosing such information.

Getting on top of privacy in 2019

For schools – or any child-safe organisation for that matter – it’s important to get privacy right for our kids. Quite outside the issues of community trust, there are also significant penalties that can apply if a school gets it wrong.

And, what is the one piece of data that shares a mountain of information to easily identify a person? An image (that is, a photo or video).

Images of a person are considered personal information in the context of Australian privacy law (both at the national and State/ Territory levels). As a school, you must clearly explain to your parents/guardians what images of their children will be collected and processed by the school, and the uses to which those images will be put by the school. To ensure this is done correctly:

• Provide parents with access to an up-to-date and detailed privacy policy on how the school manages personal information, and a detailed ‘collection statement’ (also called a ‘privacy notice’) relating to the taking and using of images at school. A broad catch-all ‘collection statement’ is not sufficient.
• Ensure practices, procedures and systems (i.e. a smart photo management tool that manages consent and restrictions in real-time) are in place and properly applied. This should include an ability for your school to deal with inquiries or complaints.
• Ensure you have current (i.e. at least yearly) informed consent from parents/guardians in relation to their child’s images being taken and used. In some cases, you may need to seek an additional consent – for example, where you have a new idea or initiative involving student photos, or where it is intended to use photos for specific marketing purposes. You can find additional information about consent in my recent blog post, here.

10 best practices schools can follow on image management:

1. The taking of images at school should only occur when there is a valid reason to do so and should be adequately supervised
2. Student images should be used for only intended purposes agreed to by parents/guardians
3. Location services should be turned off when taking photos on mobile devices as they attach location data to pictures taken
4. Avoid the use of photos that identify individual students. A safe compromise is to only use photos taken from behind students. Remember, school uniforms and logos in images can quickly identify your school and if you are a school of religious denomination or delivering special needs services to children, that photo may be afforded additional protections under Australian privacy law
5. If you do use photos of students, don’t refer to a student by name (even their first name) in the caption under the photo or in the post. Don’t use student name/s in the file name of the photo because if someone inspects or saves the file, the name is available for everyone to see
6. Ensure all students have dressed appropriately and images taken do not contribute or expose children to embarrassment, distress or harm
7. Do not use images of students who are considered vulnerable or whose identity requires protection (i.e. foster children)
8. Opting-out or refusal of consent in any way should not limit a student’s participation in school activities
9. Images should be carefully and securely stored in accordance with Australian privacy rules, with the consent attached for automation/cross-referencing purposes
10. Images should only be shared with third-parties for their use when it has been clearly communicated to parents/guardians as part of a school ‘collection statement’ or explicitly agreed to as part of the consent process. Note, using a ‘collection statement’ alone as the basis for sharing images to social media, marketers or others outside of the school environment is likely not going to be sufficient. A parent/guardian should be allowed to ‘opt-in’ (or elect) to have their child’s images transferred to third parties (rather than be required to ‘opt-out’).

Place a special focus on school websites & social media

Schools need to develop a policy about the use of images of children on their website and on social media. The internet is public, accessible and largely an unregulated media. Decisions to post student images on websites should take this into account. Photos taken at a school event, for example, can reveal a substantial amount of information through which children can be identified.

It is important to preserve the right of parents/guardians to request that a school remove any images of their child posted to a website or social media. Every effort should be made to take the image down as soon as possible, but the best approach is to not publish an image online if there are any concerns with the context or consent behind a photo. Once on the net, there’s no getting off!

Is your school improving its privacy practices around student images? If not, ask why not?