UKLA has selected a winner for Literacy, for the prestigious UKLA/ Wiley Research in Literacy Education Award 2020.
The Award is given annually for papers judged to be exemplary in terms of the criteria applied. Literacy is a peer reviewed journal with an international reputation for excellence. The panel chair is Dr. Wayne Tennent.
The winning author will be honoured at the UKLA International Conference in Oxford from 2 to 4 July 2021 and invited to present a seminar at the conference.
The winner is for the following paper:
Candice Satchwell, Collaborative writing with young people with disabilities: raising new questions of authorship and agency, Vol 53. Issue 2, pages 77- 85.
Wayne Tennent, chair, writes: This paper focuses on one part of a wider 3-year project which investigated literacy in the lives of vulnerable children in the UK. The focus of the paper is David, a young man with Downs syndrome. David has difficulties with speech, idiosyncratic grammar and physical difficulties with writing. The paper outlines how David was able to produce a short story through a process of co-creation using collaborative participatory methods. David’s voice is given prominence in the paper as the entire short story is presented. This forces the reader to acknowledge the particular social, cultural and historical contexts which have shaped David’s voice. The paper thus problematises the concept of authorship, and it raises the issue of how the voices of marginalised children are heard generally (or not). It also raises questions about approaches to the teaching of narrative in (supposedly) inclusive mainstream classroom, and whether the collaborative process presented here could be of value.
The shortlist was chosen by panels convened by Literacy editors Dianne R. Collier and Natalia Kucirkova
Panel: Wayne Tennent (Chair), Frances Bodger, Sue Dymoke, Lynda Graham, Chris Lockwood, Jonathan Solity and Kat Vallely.
The panel would like to congratulate all of those authors who were nominated for the award, and Wiley for their continued generosity in supporting this award.
More information about the award can be found here and you can read the winning open-access article here.