Assoc Prof Mukhlis Abu Bakar to Publish Book Chapter on Negotiating School Literacy

Between 2005 and 2007, Assoc Prof Mukhlis Abu Bakar, Assoc Prof at NIE’s Asian Languages & Cultures (ALC) Academic Group, Assistant Head/ALC (Malay), and Programme Leader for the BA(Ed) in Malay Language Specialisation, worked with eight families on a project on “Malay Children’s Lived Experience of Literacy – Main Study”.  

Over the past 12 years, Assoc Prof Mukhlis has made occasional contact with two of the focal participant families and, with the approval of the Institutional Review Board, began to record and review some of these conversations. This led him to new research questions that he addressed in a chapter entitled “Negotiating School Literacy: Tracing the Literacy Trajectory of Preschoolers into Adulthood”, which will be published in an upcoming book, Charting an Asian Trajectory for Literacy Education: Connecting past, present and future literacies, edited by Su Li Chong.

The chapter incorporates the 2005/2007 ethnographic data, the more recent 2018/2019 interview data, as well as Assoc Prof Mukhlis’ own autobiography. Comparisons are drawn between the literacy trajectory of the two participants and Assoc Prof Mukhlis’.

A webinar on “Charting an Asian Trajectory for Sustainable Literacy Education” was held on 25 August 2020 to promote the book, where 11 (of 12) authors convened to talk about their respective chapters to an audience of more than 50 participants.