Members of the Alan C. Purves Award Committee introduce the winner of the award for Volume 39 of Research in the Teaching of English, Mollie Blackburn. Her winning article is entitled “Disrupting Dichotomies for Social Change: A Review of, Critique of, and Complement to Current Educational Literacy Scholarship on Gender”; it was published in May 2005.

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At the 2005 NCTE Annual Convention in Pittsburgh, Mollie Blackburn received the Alan C. Purves Award, given each RTE volume year for an article that holds particular promise to enhance classroom practice. Professor Blackburn’s award-winning article, “Disrupting Dichotomies for Social Change: A Review of, Critique of, and Complement to Current Scholarship on Gender and Literacy,” appeared in the May 2005 issue of RTE. In the essay that follows, she reflects on the further implications of this work for teachers and schools.

The following is the text of Randy Bomer’s presidential address, delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in November 2005.

This conceptual essay employs psychoanalytic theory in exploring the difficulties the author’s son experienced in learning to read. Emphasizing the profoundly affective and subjective dimensions of one child’s movement toward and against literacy, the author considers the potential of psychoanalytic perspectives in helping teachers and researchers better understand and respond to children’s resistance to reading.

This article presents case studies of three adolescent girls’ literacy-related school experiences over a three-year period, focusing on the girls’ own accounts of their instructional and institutional interactions.

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One under–researched writing practice of today’s millennial youth is online journaling. Despite the plethora of online journals on the Internet and their ubiquitous use by adolescents, little research has been conducted on online journaling as a literacy practice.

In this essay, I address the problem of White racism in the classroom, proposing a way of reading racist discourse that takes into account its emotional dimensions and hence its persuasive appeal for White students.

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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, Peggy DeLapp, Deborah Dillon, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Julie Kalnin, Timothy Lensmire, and David O’Brien, Karen Jorgensen, Lauren Liang, Gert Rijlaarsdam, and Tanja Janssen.

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A successful collaboration resulted in a researcher and a teacher linking professional development with change in small-group reading instruction and student achievement.

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This teacher-research study examines the roles of talk and metaphorical representation in the construction of personal and social literary interpretation.

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The research reported here examined word study as an approach to spelling instruction. In particular, the researchers investigated kindergarten children’s transfer of specific words, word knowledge, concepts about print, and strategies for spelling unknown words to their self-selected journal writing.

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The authors gave the following talk at the 2004 NCTE Annual Convention in Indianapolis upon receiving the Alan C. Purves Award, presented to the RTE article from the previous volume year judged most likely to have an impact on classroom practice (“The Road to Participation: The Construction of a Literacy Practice in a Learning Community of Linguistically Diverse Learners,” v. 38, pp. 85-124).

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In this article, we present secondary students’ perceptions of their writing and writing instruction. Using the NCTE/IRA Standards as the foundation for a survey, we questioned nearly 2,000 public-school students concerning what they wrote, how they wrote, and the extent to which they wrote in their language arts classes.

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In literacy and composition studies, efforts to develop data-driven theories of disciplinary writing expertise and of writers’ developmental processes in joining specific discourse communities have so far been limited. This case study, of one writer’s experiences as an undergraduate history major, parses the multiple knowledge domains comprising disciplinary writing expertise and compares his beginning and later work for signs of developmental progress. A conceptual model of five knowledge domains writers must draw upon—discourse-community knowledge, subjectmatter knowledge, genre knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, and writing-process knowledge—is applied to the data both for analysis of the case and for exploring the usefulness of the conceptual model for further empirical and theoretical work. What results is a fuller depiction of the complexities of gaining expertise in any given discourse community, as well as an indication of the importance of educators across all disciplines considering the multi-dimensional and developmental nature of their curricula for building literacy skills.

Understandings of the ways home and school languages shape classroom dynamics and influence development, identity, and subsequent school success are important for teachers of both bilingual and African American students. This article builds a link between these complementary bodies of research by analyzing interactions in a second grade mainstream classroom in which the language development of bilingual and African American children were simultaneously relevant. We focus on two qualitatively different kinds of classroom language use: when instruction was solely in English, and when Spanish became a tool for instruction. Our findings suggest that the latter language practice subsequently marginalized the participation of English monolingual students; this especially affected the African American students in the classroom, who were interactionally delegitimized as participants in bilingual interaction despite their desire to participate in both languages. This study suggests the need to ensure that multilingualism is brought into the classroom as a resource for all students. Recognizing this need, however, necessitates interdisciplinary research that crosses the fields of second language acquisition, bilingual education, and sociolinguistics. Such disciplinary boundary crossing can usefully inform teachers and researchers looking for new understandings of language learning in contemporary classrooms.

The committee reviews important research works in the teaching of English that have been published in the last year. Committee members include Richard Beach, Peggy DeLapp, Lee Galda, Lori Helman, Timothy Lensmire, and David O’Brien, Gert Rijlaarsdam, and Tanja Janssen.

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So much has been made over the crisis in English literature as field, as corpus, and as canon in recent years, that some of it undoubtedly has spilled over into English education. This has been the case in predominantly English-speaking Anglo-American and Commonwealth nations, as well as in those postcolonial states where English remains the medium of instruction and lingua franca of economic and cultural elites. Yet to attribute the pressures for change in pedagogic practice to academic paradigm shift per se would prop up the shaky axiom that English education is forever caught in some kind of perverse evolutionary time-lag, parasitic of university literary studies. I, too, believe that English education has reached a crucial moment in its history, but that this moment is contingent upon the changing demographics, cultural knowledges, and practices of economic globalization.

Drawing on data gathered during a fourteen-month study of reading practices among poor and working-class girls, this essay explores the challenges of creating a responsive and critical reading pedagogy across boundaries of class. Set largely in a summer and after-school reading program for pre-teen girls, the study addressed the question of how a pedagogy centered around literature might accord the possibility for girls to read, speak, and value in more than one class-specific voice. The complexities of creating such a critical reading project are explored through narratives that chronicle the interplay of the material, the psychological, and the discursive in girls’ textual preferences and literary responses. Assuming the dual voice of teacher and ethnographer, the author argues for a new poetics of inquiry that can convey the nuanced complexities of reading, voice, and psychological experience among girls growing up in working-poor America.

Quantitative analyses using CLASS 3.0 software and qualitative discourse analyses were conducted of the instructional and institutional effects of tracking in high- and low-track American literature classes taught by the same teacher, a participant in a national study of the effects of dialogic classroom discourse patterns on student achievement. The quantitative analyses of class activities and discourse patterns revealed somewhat different amounts and kinds of dialogic discourse in the two classes, but could not account for much of the difference in achievement between the two groups. A more detailed qualitative analysis of teacher interviews and classroom discourse, using discourse analysis to look at both how the classroom discourse positioned students vis-à-vis course content, and how students in the two tracks were characterized by the teacher, showed how instruction was influenced by the teacher’s cultural models of students’ institutional identities. The teacher’s identification with the high-track students aided her in enacting a curriculum that was more academically challenging and more coherent, both intertextually and culturally. These analyses suggest that institutional and instructional effects of tracking are inextricably interwoven where the teacher’s conceptions of students’ needs and abilities constrain the level of instruction and the coherence of the curriculum.

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Last spring our profession lost one of its leading voices—Stephen P. Witte, Knight Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Kent State University. Here, a few of his close friends and colleagues remember Steve and his many contributions to our field.

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The question of whether written genres can be learned through explicit teaching or can only be acquired implicitly through writing in authentic contexts remains unanswered. The question is complicated by the different parameters associated with teaching genre to first- or second-language learners, to children or adults, in settings in which the genre is authentically used or in settings (such as writing classes) in which genre learning is decontextualized. Quantitative studies of teaching genre offer mixed results, but in particular, there are no control-group studies of first-language adults. In this paper, we report research on teaching the genre of the laboratory report to first-language university students in biology labs. In this posttest-only control-group study, the treatment was the use of LabWrite, online instructional materials for teaching the lab report. We hypothesized that the treatment group would be more effective in: (1) learning the scientific concept of the lab, and (2) learning to apply scientific reasoning. Results of holistic scoring of lab reports for hypothesis 1 and primary-trait scoring for hypothesis 2 showed that the lab reports of the LabWrite students were rated as significantly higher than those of the control group. A third hypothesis, that students using LabWrite would develop a significantly more positive attitude toward writing lab reports, was also supported. These findings suggest that first-language adults can learn genre through explicit teaching in a context of authentic use of the genre.