Kate Miller

What's the problem with literacy at college? How might everyday literacy be harnessed for educational ends?Based on the first major study of literacy practices in colleges in the UK, this book explores the reading and writing associated with learning subjects across the college curriculum. It investigates literacy practices in which students engage outside of college, and teaching and learning strategies through which these can help support the curriculum. With insightful analyses of innovative practices, it considers ways of changing teaching practices to enable students to draw upon their full potential.Recent research work has challenged the myth of individual student deficit, arguing cogently that people have ‘funds of knowledge’ from diverse and vibrant cultural roots, and that these have been misguidedly disqualified by the education system. It has claimed that different ‘ways with words’ can provide valuable resources for learning. However, the empirical exploration of this claim has lagged far behind the theoretical debate. Improving Learning in College resolves this by showing the integrity and richness of the literacy practices of a significant population, not previously the focus of such research: those who take vocational and academic college courses in colleges. It addresses an issue which has not until now been developed within this research tradition: that of how these practices can not only be valued and validated, but mobilised and harnessed to enhance learning in educational settings.This book will interest all teachers, teacher-educators and researchers concerned with post-compulsory education and vocational education in compulsory schooling.

What's the problem with literacy at college? How might everyday literacy be harnessed for educational ends?Based on the first major study of literacy practices in colleges in the UK, this book explores the reading and writing associated with learning subjects across the college curriculum. It investigates literacy practices in which students engage outside of college, and teaching and learning strategies through which these can help support the curriculum. With insightful analyses of innovative practices, it considers ways of changing teaching practices to enable students to draw upon their full potential.Recent research work has challenged the myth of individual student deficit, arguing cogently that people have ‘funds of knowledge’ from diverse and vibrant cultural roots, and that these have been misguidedly disqualified by the education system. It has claimed that different ‘ways with words’ can provide valuable resources for learning. However, the empirical exploration of this claim has lagged far behind the theoretical debate. Improving Learning in College resolves this by showing the integrity and richness of the literacy practices of a significant population, not previously the focus of such research: those who take vocational and academic college courses in colleges. It addresses an issue which has not until now been developed within this research tradition: that of how these practices can not only be valued and validated, but mobilised and harnessed to enhance learning in educational settings.This book will interest all teachers, teacher-educators and researchers concerned with post-compulsory education and vocational education in compulsory schooling.

A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Recommendation The Long Beds explores the cell-like containment of the small hours when the body has no estate but its bed, while - waking or dreaming - the mind sets out on its travels, often in the realms of an old life, cherished items or relinquished connections. Central to the poems' imagery is the presence of a bedstead that has survived a bombing raid, protecting only what was bundled underneath it. In painterly language Kate Miller also trains her eye and ear outwards on grand, impersonal scenes: London at dawn, riverbanks and docks, the corridors of a great hospital: to uncover fogged experience and restore colour to memory. Her poems prod us awake at first light and release us into the morning.

Winner of the 2016 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Shortlisted for the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Award. In the informal rituals of the tide remaking its tideline, of a painter absorbed in the act of painting or of an old couple greeting the night, the English poet Kate Miller sees and charts the creative process at work. As its title suggests, Miller's striking debut collection explores perception, the poet's eye and ear trained on distances that stretch beyond comfort zones. This is a book full of movement: even quiet reflections on home and family life are rarely still. Throughout the collection Miller dwells on the unfixed and restless image and shows herself as subject to it - to the difficult illusion of physical energy in sculpture, to the changeability of skies and the insistent rhythm and presence of the sea.