Collaborative inquiries in diverse literacy classrooms to understand learning opportunities

This chapter focuses on the work the authors have done, and are doing, to foster sustained ongoing critical inquiry in literacy education with frontline workers and children in low socio-economic status (SES) and culturally diverse communities in Australia. The authors outline their own professional autobiographies in this regard as they examine how they have worked alongside others to build literacy knowledge through planned and meaningful context-bound interactions. Their point of departure will be to see ‘research’ as sets of repertoires of practices that provide opportunities for learning for all involved and as processes of negotiation of something new. The chapter identifies the challenges and the benefits of long-term collaborative inquiry and draws upon a recent research collaboration to share a data collection method - teacher-produced classroom video tours-and examples. Through two video tours, we examine how teachers’ classroom organisation for writing time indicates how they juggle and prioritise different opportunities for children to learn.