Discourse co-ordinations within adult literacy teaching

This article addresses the question of who benefits from a case study investigation into the politics of identity co-ordination by a group of adult literacy teachers working in regional, rural and remote communities of Central Queensland. The benefits of this research will be shown to be theoretical, conceptual and pedagogical in nature. Theoretically, there are benefits from testing Gee's (1996a) argument that there is indeed a 'big D' notion of Discourse through which certain kinds of teachers define themselves as different from other kinds of teachers. Conceptually, this means that viewing literacy in social terms fosters the investigation of the nature of adult literacy teachers' work and their identification with a particular social network. Pedagogically, teachers and teacher educators benefit because the study reports on the ways in which these adult literacy teachers claim agency for professional power and responsibility in their pedagogical practices enacted in regional, rural and remote communities.