Contents

• Editorial – Thinking about diversity again
  
• Diversity in different times   Jennifer Rennie
  
• ‘My Grandma never lived in Gooligulch’: Exploring gender and national identity in a critical literacy classroom    Ola Issa
  Media representations of Muslims in Australia can be considered highly gendered and skewed. The stereotypes of patriarchal oppressive males and oppressed passive females are presented as natural. Controversies around critical literacy and values in public and independent schools have framed recent media debates about schooling in Australia. This article describes an attempt to utilise one of the identified principles of critical literacy – that is the need to problematise classroom and public texts – as a way to work with students in the middle years. Through close analysis of the representations of gender and culture in a range of texts pitched at young children, students in a Muslim independent school explored and repositioned themselves in relation to these elements of Australian identity. Knowledge was presented as provisional, providing students with opportunities for critical readings of the world, and equipping them to effect positive social change.
  
• Homework for refugee middle school students with backgrounds marked by low levels of engagement with English school literacy   
  Karen Dooley
  Homework presents many challenges for refugees from Africa who are arriving in Australian schools with histories of little, no or severely interrupted schooling. This is evident in the emergence of school- and community-based homework help, clubs and tutoring programs for the students. The aim of this article is to describe the homework support options accessed by eight students from Burundi, Rwanda, Eritrea and Sudan, who participated in a study of pedagogy for African refugee students in the middle years of schooling, and the views on homework held by their parents and teachers. The article shows some tensions between family and school expectations and the dilemmas that arise for teachers in a broader context of public concern about homework and the issuing of an official policy statement on excessive and repetitive homework. It is argued that application of policy guidelines needs to account for disadvantages that potentially accrue to students who cannot design their own independent study programs. Further, it is suggested that integration of skills and meaning-based pedagogy inherent in recent approaches to literacy education has the potential for ensuring that students receive the forms of homework that they require.
  
• PRACTICAL STRATEGIES
  A challenging middle school SOSE unit and a resource for teaching teachers explicit strategies to support literacy learning    (insert)
  Patsy Norton
  
• U-CAN READ: Literacy intervention in years 3–10: A macro/micro vision of a parent education program    Kaye Lowe, Debbie Martens & Kelly Hannett 
  
• New literacies in a globalised world    Simone Smala