At universities, scholars in English studies manage what Gieryn (1999) called disciplinary boundary work (the rhetorical making and policing of boundaries that construct the discipline and its institutional formations as different from other disciplines and social formations) through categorical contrasts, including: literary criticism vs. writing studies/rhetoric; scholarship vs. creative writing; quantitative vs. qualitative research; university vs. K–12 schooling; university vs. workplace; and, of course, that most basic border of disciplinarity”disciplinary knowledge vs. everyday belief and culture. The two research reports in this issue of RTE both address college-level work in the field and both highlight interesting ways in which current theoretical and methodological developments are putting pressure on disciplinary boundaries in English studies.

Drawing from a study of one student’s literate engagements with English studies and fan fiction and related fan art over her two years in an MA program, which also reached back to the earlier writing she did for English classes and other writings before the study began, this article employs sociohistoric theory to examine the profoundly dialogic interplay of vernacular and disciplinary literate activities. Following a detailed look at the student’s extensive involvement with fan fiction, the article elaborates the trajectory of linkages between fan fiction and English studies, paying particular attention to the repurposing of literate practices across these activities, the synergies and tensions that texture such interactions, and the long-term implications they have for the production of literate practice and person. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical attention to the heterogeneous assemblage of literate practices and identities that may be mediating literate action and, in particular, to the role vernacular literacies can play in developing disciplinary engagement and vice versa.

The ethics and efficacy of explicitly teaching disciplinary discourse conventions to undergraduate students has been hotly debated. This quasi-experimental study seeks to contribute to these debates by focusing on the conventional special topoi of literary analysis”conventions that previous Writing in the Disciplines (WID) research indicates are customarily tacitly imparted to literature students. We compare student writing and questionnaires from seven sections of Writing about Literature providing explicit instruction in these disciplinary conventions to those from nine sections taught using traditional methods. We examine whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions helps students produce rhetorically effective discourse, whether English professors prefer student discourse that uses these conventions, and whether explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions hampers student expression, enjoyment, and engagement. Five English professors who rated the student essays gave higher ratings to essays that engaged the special topoi of their discipline. Furthermore, they significantly preferred the essays written by students who had received explicit instruction in these topoi. Meanwhile, students who received explicit instruction in the special topoi of literary analysis indicated comparable, often higher levels, of engagement, enjoyment, and perceived opportunities for self-expression to those students who experienced the course’s traditional pedagogy. These findings suggest several implications for WID instruction and research relating to student and faculty professionalization in higher education.

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Martha Bigelow, Martine Braaksma, Deborah Dillon, Jessie Dockter, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Tanja Janssen, Karen Jorgensen, Richa Kapoor, Lauren Liang, Bic Ngo, David O’Brien, Mistilina Sato, and Cassie Scharber.

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David E. Kirkland argues that our understanding of literate practice in relation to space needs to be radically reworked to account for new digital dimensions that are dispersed, discontinuous, and yet deeply woven into everyday and institutional worlds. His account highlights the way these digital spaces pepper the official landscape of schooling, fracturing the dominance of official discourse as students’ diverse linguistic, literate, and semiotic practices infuse this complex composite space.

This study explored how voice developed in the English writing of 57 Chinese teachers of English who participated in a three-week writing workshop during a summer institute in a large, urban school district in southeastern China. Teachers from grades 3 through 12 wrote daily in English in a workshop environment. Primary data sources were pre- and post-workshop writing samples. Supporting data included various teacher writings completed in the course of the workshop, daily written reflections, a final essay exam, anonymous course evaluations, and biographical and professional surveys. The pre- and post-workshop writing samples were assessed using the 6 + 1 Trait® analytical model of scoring writing (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 2006). Scoring showed that the teachers’ writing improved significantly in the course of the institute, but the greatest gain was made in the trait of “voice””the distinctive, individual way in which a writer speaks to a reader. This finding will be considered in light of the current direction of educational reform in China and of current debates over the value of teaching voice in diverse writing contexts. The study had implications for the teaching of writing to English language learners and for the professional development of teachers of writing, including those who teach English as a Foreign Language.

This four-year longitudinal study examines the transitions of an early-career teacher from her completion of a graduate program with English certification (grades 7-12) into teaching literature in an urban high school. Our central question was how Beth’s pedagogical knowledge was shaped over time by her consistent efforts to enact two key principles: (1) the centrality of students’ meaning making and (2) the need to maintain high academic expectation for all students. The tensions that resulted from her department’s stances toward these principles led to consequential transitions (Beach, 1999, 2003) for Beth’s learning and development. An activity-theoretical analysis showed that over time Beth’s development was shaped by the values, experiences, and practices of other teachers in her immediate professional communities and in contexts external to the department. Rather than relying on a single activity setting, Beth’s pedagogical knowledge and practices developed out of an interweaving of conceptual and practical tools based on the constructivist principles of her teacher education program, her deepening knowledge of English studies, her students’ learning, her enactment of new teaching practices, and her involvement in this longitudinal research project. This study raises questions regarding stage theories of teacher learning and development, suggests a horizontal notion of teacher development grounded in sociocultural theory, and provides evidence for the positive and lasting effects of teacher education and reflective practice.

This study examines discussions of model papers in a high school Advanced Placement English classroom where students were preparing for a high-stakes writing assessment. Much of the current research on talk about writing in various contexts such as classroom discourse, teacher-student writing conferences, and peer tutoring has emphasized the social and constructive nature of instructional discourse. Building on this work, the present study explored how talk about writing also takes on a performative function, as speakers accent or point to the features of the context that are most significant ideologically. Informed by perspectives on the emergent and mediated nature of discourse, this study found that the participants used ventriloquation to voice the aspects of the essays that they considered to be most important, and that these significant chunks were often aphorisms about the test essay. The teacher frequently ventriloquated raters, while the students often ventriloquated themselves or the teacher. The significance of ventriloquation is not just that it helps to mediate the generic conventions of timed student essays; it also mediates social positioning by helping the speakers to present themselves and others in flexible ways. This study also raises questions about the ways that ventriloquation can limit the ways that students view academic writing.

Elizabeth Birr Moje argues for a nuanced and reflective appraoch to the study of adolexcents’ use of digital technology.

This teacher-researcher study explored the manner in which students created video compositions in a secondary English language arts media studies program. The study found that video composition is a complex, recursive process that allows for sequential multimodal representation of thoughts and ideas. Four areas are addressed: video allows for the expansion of compositional choices, demonstrates the verisimilitude of students’ initial concept to videotaped image, highlights the visuality in students’ re-presentations of ideas, and provides research methodological considerations.

Changing Conceptions and Uses of Computer Technologies in the Everyday: This study focused on 189 sixth and seventh graders in two large suburban schools and their use of computer technologies as part of their everyday literacy practices. We were especially interested in the students’ conceptions of computer technologies and how computer use varied across grade and reading levels. Findings showed that many students, especially sixth graders, were far less interested in computer technologies than is suggested by common conceptions. Findings also showed an important shift between sixth and seventh graders toward more interest in practices that provided social interaction or entertainment.

Based on longitudinal data from a three-year ethnographic study, this article uses discourse analytic methods to explore the literacy and social practices of three adolescent English language learners writing in an online fan fiction community. Findings suggest that through their participation in online fan-related activities, these three youth are using language and other representational resources to enact cosmopolitan identities, make transnational social connections, and experiment with new genres and formats for composing.

The editors introduce the three research studies and the Standpoints essay in this issue, all of which deal with the relations between digital technology and the development of adolescent literacy.

The 2008 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s recipient, Beth Maloch, for “Beyond Exposure: The Uses of Information Texts in a Second Grade Classroom,” which appeared in the February 2008 issue of Research in the Teaching of English (pp. 315-362). Here the committee discusses the importance of Maloch’s work and its implications for teaching and future research.

The RTE editors introduce the articles in Volume 43, Number 3.

Anne Ruggles Gere and Daniel Berebitsky take the No Child Left Behind legislation as their starting point to review relevant literature on teacher quality. They document what is becoming an increasingly disturbing pattern: discrepancies in the distribution of highly qualified teachers with the most experienced teachers being the least likely to work with students from diverse social and economic backgrounds.

Kathleen Blake Yancey’s presidential address was delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in San Antonio, Texas, on November 23, 2008.

Beth Maloch reflects on her Alan Purves Award-winning article, which was chosen because of its demonstration of the ability of one teacher to make a difference in young students’ use of informational texts to develop complex, literate lives.

The year-long case study described in this article examined the transactions between a sixth grade social studies teacher, Mrs. O’Reilly, and a struggling reader within her classroom, Sarah, in relation to the reading-task demands of their classroom. Findings indicated that Mrs. O’Reilly’s transactions with Sarah were influenced by a cognitive, print-centric view of reading and the identity she created for Sarah based on that view of reading. Sarah’s transactions with the reading task demands were influenced by how she identified herself as a reader and her goal to prevent her peers from seeing her as a poor reader. The findings from this study suggest that teachers and researchers need to find ways to identify and be responsive to the role of identity in the classroom.

This article is an exploration of how an alternative text reflects the multiple identities of one high school Latina, focusing in particular on her religious identity. In this ethnographic case study, the author addresses three questions: 1) In what ways does literacy activity inside the school, in the form of the science scrapbook, allow for this student to construct her religious self inside as well as outside of school? 2) How is one student’s science club scrapbook a symbolic representation of the struggle between the spiritual and material worlds that she negotiates? and 3) How does this scrapbook challenge traditional notions of identity and highlight the complexity of presenting a religious self in the public domain? In describing one student’s engagement with religion via her scrapbook, the article argues for a more complex and nuanced view of religion, literacy, and identity.

Teachers who have participated in Summer Institutes of the National Writing Project (NWP) have often claimed “it changed my life.” What do teachers mean when they say this? What does it mean to “transform” in a professional development setting, and what might researchers and professional development providers gain from an understanding of teacher transformation as a kind of teacher learning?

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Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English Richard Beach, Martha Bigelow, Martine Braaksma, Deborah Dillon, Jessie Dockter, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Tanja Janssen, Karen Jorgensen, Julie Kalnin, Lauren Liang, Bic Ngo, David O’Brien, Mistilina Sato, and Cassandra Scharber; Richard Beach et al. reviews important research publications in the teaching of English.

Teachers and students often express an aversion to poetry based on their experiences with printbased poetry texts that typically dominate school curricula. Given this challenge and the potential affordances of new and multimodal technologies, we investigate how preservice and inservice teachers enrolled in a new literacies master’s course began to interpret poetry multimodally, through PowerPoint.

This study was designed to investigate 19 preservice and practicing teachers’ conceptions of the role of new technologies in literacy education. The study documented how these conceptions, as well as my own, evolved over time and impacted the content and curriculum of a university course.

In this article I use a double theoretical lens of Bourdieuian (1985, 1991) and Bakhtinian (1981, 1986) perspectives on social space and the dialogism of everyday literacy events to analyze and discuss a classroom literacy event. In this event, which takes place in a diversely populated classroom with a social justice language arts curriculum, four boys read aloud intertextual stories while managing the shifting power dynamics of their social hierarchies.

We look forward to building on and expanding the role of RTE in shaping and disseminating research on writing, reading, literacy, literary response, and literature education.

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach, only the developmentally based method took into account students’ expected developmental growth patterns in narrative composition.

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This paper describes how one group of Euro-American, middle-class two-year-olds living in the southern US learned to form and enact locally appropriate textual intentions and literate identities as they participated in writing events. Data were collected during a nine-month ethnographic study of two-year-olds’ and adults’ interactions at a preschool writing table.

This article explores a third-grade teacher’s use of critical writing pedagogy to encourage students’ exploration of issues that were important in their lives from personal as well as social perspectives.

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In this At Last essay, Susan Lytle addresses issues of teacher research, work that is shaped by and that shapes the complexity of teachers’ knowledge and learning, and is based on the accumulation of robust and meaningful experiences leading to classroom expertise. Assuring her readers that teacher research is alive and well, even in the current politically charged atmosphere of scripted instruction and curriculum-driving mandated testing, Lytle presents the case for teachers’ contributions to our understandings about classrooms and teachers’ own understandings about how to make classrooms, teaching, and learning better.

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The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the uses of informational texts within an ethnically diverse, second grade classroom and how the teacher carefully scaffolded students’ developing understandings about these texts. A community of practice theoretical framework was employed to better understand the ways in which informational texts were embedded within the larger classroom community (Lave&amp;Wenger, 1991).

The following is the text of Joanne Yatvin’s presidential address, delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in New York City in November 2007.

Research on persuasive writing by elementary children posits primarily a developmental perspective, claiming that elementary-age children can effectively argue through talk but not through writing. While this view is commonly held, this article presents counterevidence.

These two recipients of this year’s Alan C. Purves Award reflect on their work (reported in RTE Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 269–303) on “A Cognitive Strategies Approach to Reading and Writing Instruction for English Language Learners in Secondary School” and the lessons they learned from their original research study as they tried to replicate the project in two additional districts outside their service area, to determine if the implications of their study would hold beyond the local context. The Alan C. Purves Award is given to the RTE article in the previous volume year judged most likely to impact educational practice

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Martha Bigelow, Deborah Dillon, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Julie Kalnin, Cynthia Lewis, David O’Brien and Mistilina Sato, Karen Jorgensen, Lauren Liang, Gert Rijlaarsdam, and Tanja Janssen.

This article examines the role of intergenerational relationships in the lives of experienced poets and writers (“soldiers”) and emerging poets and writers in what the author terms Participatory Literacy Communities (PLCs). Drawing from Wenger’s (1998) concept of communities of practice, the author uses data from two examples of PLCs—Black bookstore author events and spoken-word poetry “open mics”—to complicate notions of reciprocity and mentoring in the out-ofschool literacy practices of people of African descent. Three soldiering traditions are discussed: soldiers as literacy activists and advocates, soldiers as practitioners of the craft, and soldiers as historians of the word.

This article examines seven online grammar guides for instances of linguistic sexism. The grammar sentences from .edu Websites were analyzed based on NCTE’s “Guidelines for Gender-Fair Use of Language” (2002) using the criteria of generic he and man; titles, labels, and names; gender stereotypes; order of mention (firstness); and ratio of male to female. Of the 3,220 sentences analyzed, 3,020 occurrences of gendered language were found and were analyzed based on gender-fair language criteria.