Practical challenges and possibilities for the integration of academic literacy in a first year subject

Changes to Queensland teacher accreditation (Queensland Government, 2009) have increased teacher educators’ responsibility for graduate literacy. This paper offers a perspective on the implementation of a general literacy initiative into a specialist subject. Specifically, it details the engagement process undertaken with a broad academic literacy agenda, the First Year Literacy Initiative (FYLI), to refresh Foundations of Educational Technology, a first year education subject at James Cook University. An action research approach was used to identify and respond to key resourcing, pedagogical, assessment, and knowledge-based challenges and strategies. As subject lecturer I provide a preliminary evaluation of four strategies including (i) general-to-contextual resource adaptation, (ii) a teach-to-learn approach, (iii) a guidance-not-remedial approach to literacy feedback, and (iv) a collaborative action research approach to literacy integration across first year subjects.