New Literacies in One Rural South African Elementary School

Abstract

This longitudinal qualitative research study addressed a three-year professional development project, ProjectSouth Africa, we conducted in one rural elementary school, Williams Primary School in the Western Cape of SouthAfrica, with eight Reception to Grade 3 teachers. Our research investigated “What happens when teachers engage in PD that is focused on the integration of simple technologies to teach literacy?” We also studied the extent to which thisPD reflected success in children’s literacy learning, both from the teachers’ perspectives and on national and provincialstandardized tests. We situated this study theoretically in critical literacy as social practice. We adopted a transformativeconstructivist grounded theory (CGT) methodological approach (Charmaz, 2005) that centralized the phenomenastudied which contributes both to personal and societal transformation. This study presents findings from our analysisof a subset of data that focused directly on teachers’ use of technology to teach literacy. We found personal transformation in all eight teachers in their use of technology to create classrooms in which new literacies were enacted. This, we argued, led to societal transformation in that teachers shared this knowledge locally, district-wide, and with other literacy teachers and researchers at an international conference.