While research in L2 language and literacy in academic contexts has shed light on learning language per se (e.g., students’ development of syntactic complexity), classroom situations, in which ESL students engage in English and make it meaningful to them, have received far less attention. With a sociocultural perspective, this qualitative case study examined the discursive practices of a face-to-face community college ESL classroom and of its online discussion forums. We found that the discourse in the face-to-face classroom tended to prioritize shaping students’ academic knowledge and identity, pushing aside knowledge and identities that were peer- or life-worldbased. In contrast, the online forums afforded discourses through which students displayed peer-based, life-world, and academic knowledge and identities, while negotiating responses to academic assignments. The study suggests that classroom-based online forums can provide a space for the legitimate display of students’ nonacademic discourses in the service of academic work.

By examining how a student from Vietnam used English to interact with her peers in an English-medium secondary school in Singapore, this paper argues for an examination of language and literacy development through a cosmopolitan lens. Building on earlier research on cosmopolitanism (e.g., Campano & Ghiso, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c; Hansen, 2010; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2010), I illustrate how a broader understanding of cosmopolitanism in language and literacy education is timely in the wake of contemporary transcultural flows that characterize globalization, the emergence of a neoliberal order in education, and a pressing need to address educational inequities encountered by the growing number of immigrant learners whose home languages may not be valued in classrooms. The data in this paper, which include politicalspeeches, school documents, and classroom interactions, are part of a larger, yearlong critical ethnographic study and are subjected to microethnographic discourse analysis (Bloome & Carter, 2014). Through investigating how local interactional events are linked to broader events in wider Singapore society, I demonstrate how my Vietnamese focal student and her Singaporean peers were able to enact and develop a cosmopolitan outlook. Implications on language and literacy development are also discussed.

Curriculum designers and literacy policymakers sometimes assume that variation in teaching practices can be minimized using scripted and standardized curriculum. While standards and common understandings can be helpful, scripted curricula ignore the fact that curriculum is an enacted practice orchestrated by individuals. While reading scholars have studied this issue, it has yet to be examined in writing studies. In a four-month ethnographic study, I examined how a kindergarten teacher interpreted scripted writing curriculum through enacted lessons. The interpretation problematizes the ideologies embedded within curricular scripts, including emphases on genre, mechanics, and printed texts. Analysis of child writing revealed a socially constructed practice in which genre, mechanics, and letters were tied to social intentions and meanings. While scripted curricula can confine teachers’ abilities to make responsive decisions, I document how the focal teacher translated curricular materials with students, thus creating space for official curriculum, teaching practices, and children’s writing to coexist. Such flexible spaces make room for both teacher and student voices in innovative and inventive writing pedagogies.

This article argues that an understanding of writing as translingual requires a shift to a different orientation to literacy—i.e., from autonomous and situated to negotiated. Such an orientationtreats the text as co-constructed in time and space—with parity for readers and writers in shaping the meaning and form—and thus performed rather than preconstructed, making the multimodal and multisensory dimensions of the text fully functional. Going beyond the native/nonnative and monolingual/multilingual speaker binaries, this study demonstrates that both student groups can orient themselves to such literate practices in the context of suitable pedagogical affordances. Drawing from teacher research informed by an ethnographic perspective, the study identifies four types of negotiation strategies adopted by writers to code-mesh and readers to interpret texts: envoicing, recontextualization, interaction, and entextualization. Envoicing strategies set the conditions for negotiation, as it is a consideration of voice that motivates writers to decide the extent and nature of code-meshing; recontextualization strategies prepare the ground for negotiation; interactional strategies are adopted to co-construct meaning; and entextualization strategies reveal the temporal and spatial shaping of the text to facilitate and respond to these negotiations. The analysis points to the value of a dialogical pedagogy that can further develop the negotiation strategies students already bring to the classroom.

Within this ethnographic case study, I examine the ways that a Migrant Head Start program failed to build on the funds of language and literacy knowledge of a group of socioculturally and linguistically marginalized preschool children. Using a literacy-as-social-practice lens, I explore the children’s early literacy knowledge by focusing on the ways that reading and writing mediate the lives of the migrant farmworker community—their parents’ and community members’ lives. Observational and interview data analysis revealed literacy practices in the migrant camps that reflected their lives of bureaucratic regulation, family and community relationships, and spirituality in the migrant camps. Participant observation in the Migrant Head Start program revealed a school-based focus on only surface features of early literacy, delivered in an unfamiliar language and reflecting culturally specific beliefs and values about literacy practice that did not match those of most of the children. Analysis also revealed the ways that literacy practice among the migrant farmworkers moved and changed as the individual life experiences of the families changed, particularly in relation to increased geographic permanence over time.

Our purpose in this paper is to foreground contextual issues in studies of situated writing practices. During a year-long case study in a rural Kenyan secondary school, we applied a number of ethnographic techniques to document how 32 girls (aged 14-18 years) used local cultural and digital resources (i.e., donated digital cameras, voice recorders, and laptops with connectivity)within the context of their after-school journalism club. We take inspiration broadly from the concept of liminal spaces, which we bring together with notions of placed resources, New Literacy Studies (NLS), multiliteracies, multimodality, and identity work. We argue that the learning space of the journalism club, including its mediating digital tools, affords identities of empowerment to students’ writing and experimentation. On close examination of the transitional space of the journalism club, we see the foundational practices of situated rehearsal, appropriation, and performance of the roles and linguistic repertoires that the learners associated with competent journalists. We conclude that the club as a learning space, including its “props” and digital resources, fostered new degrees of freedom, community, equality, and creativity. We are left with questions about the characteristics of transitional learning spaces and how these might serve as fertile ground for growing competent writers in a range of educational contexts.

This article develops a theoretical understanding of the processes involved in the co-construction of a written text by a teacher and student from a Vygotskian perspective. Drawing on cultural-historical and sociocultural theories of writing and Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), this case study of a student and teacher interaction in a UK secondary school examines the social mediation of collaborative activity in the negotiation of meaning.While expressivist process theories of writing focus on the development of the authentic voice of the writer, this article contends that the development of a student’s writing abilities requires active intervention by a teacher within a constructed zone of development. Writing is viewed as a situated activity system that involves a dialectical tension between thought and the act of composition.Finally, the article will argue that the recursive and complex nature of writing development is an integral tool in the learner’s own agency in creating a social environment for development.

This article provides an initial approach for capturing moments of talk about, around, and for writing to explain why writing groups and writing conferences are so often considered “transformative” for the people involved. After describing the widespread and yet disparate transformations so often attributed to collaborative writing talk, I introduce applied conversation analysis (CA) as a method for getting at what is often difficult to identify, document, and explain: the intricacies of moments that underlie, if not directly account for, transformations. At the core of this article, I present a case study of a writer, Susan, and tutor, Kim, and analyze their talk and embodied interactions around writing. In particular, two sequences of their talk—the first an example of “troubles telling,” or attending to a reported trouble (Jefferson, 1981, 1984, 1988) and the second an enactment of humor that names asymmetrical power relations (Holmes, 2000)—illustrate the ways in which building affiliative relationships might allow for naming and poking fun at, if not restructuring, power relations. Further, self-reports from interview data indicate how the occasions of talk between Susan and Kim mark shifts in thinking about themselves, their writing, and their commitments—shifts that can be attributed to their relational, affiliative interactions and that provide supporting evidence for the transformative power of collaborative writing talk.

Despite a growing awareness among teachers of the importance of recognizing and valuing a broader range of students’ literate resources and experiences, including those that are culturally and linguistically linked, in many language arts classrooms students’ literacy practices continue to be marginalized—remaining peripheral to, if not at odds with, the central work of the classroom. This ethnographic study, featuring a sixth-grade African American girl, examined one such case of marginalization that occurred in an urban English language arts classroom during an integrated novel study unit. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, the study considers how a student-authored play showcasing cultural and linguistic resources disrupted the planned curriculum and how tensions were negotiated by the teacher, student, and researcher. In spite of the student’s efforts and the teacher’s best intentions, hegemonic centripetal forces resisted and ultimately marginalized students’ literate interests and agendas in this classroom. Recommendations from this research include planning on, and for, dialogism by deliberately structuring curricula so there is both time and space for students’ literate interests, resources, and abilities.

In order to prepare effective writing teachers, teacher educators need an understanding of how preservice preparation programs, inservice professional development, and the policies and practices of K-12 schools work together to influence teachers’ writing instruction. This qualitative case study uses complexity theory (Davis & Sumara, 2006) to analyze how one teacher learned to teach writing within and through the emergent, nested, interacting systems of teacher education and the school where she took her first teaching job. Data sources were fieldnotes of her teaching and interviews about her instructional decisions, which were coded using constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and the theoretical lens. Findings indicate the teacher’s understanding of writing instruction emerged through interactions between systems as she reproduced and recombined the ideas, values, goals, and activities she encountered within her undergraduate and graduate courses, her school district, and her sixth-grade classroom. The study concludes with discussions of the dynamics of learning to teach writing that emerged through the research and the implications of these dynamics for teacher education, educational policy, and future research.

This article discusses the ways issues of audience and authority are encountered and addressed by classroom teachers who write journal articles for publication. Drawing on an interview study of K-12 classroom teachers who have published articles in NCTE’s journals Language Arts, Voices from the Middle, and English Journal, we show that teachers developed and deployed strikingly different conceptions of audience at different points in their composing process. Before and after writing, they acknowledged the wide and mixed readership of those journals, including university-based scholars; however, while drafting their articles they thought about a much more limited group of “teachers like them.” In doing so, these teacher-authors found a concrete way to navigate the contested place of classroom teachers in wider education discourses. We highlight two major implications of this work. First, it complicates the standard advice to writers to “know your audience,” showing instead how considerations of audience are closely linked to questions of one’s status relative to members of that audience. Second, our work might complicate understandings of legitimate peripheral participation and how members of communities of practice are positioned relative to one another vis-à-vis authority: teacher-authors manipulated notions of authority, temporarily redefining some readers as more central and others as more peripheral, in ways that shifted according to the authority stances those definitions allowed them to take in composing.

Permeable textual discussion occurs when the unofficial texts and discursive practices and personal histories that are already recognized and valued in students’ cultures are scaffolds to academically sanctioned literacies. Ideally, permeable textual discussions are safe havens where students’ identities (racial, gender, world views) are intentionally interwoven with classroom texts, and classroom communities are formed that responsively address matters of student identity. Yet the social contexts and instructional practices of academic tracking may shape how students reveal their identities during textual talk. This project examines the conditions of permeability during textual talk in tracked classrooms taught by the same teachers using the same texts. Using ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, the author examines how two tracked urban middle school language arts students of African American heritage revealed and hid their identities during textual talk and the instructional moves that precipitated textual talk.

Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.

Using a sociohistoric developmental lens, this paper traces the construction of texts composed by fifth graders in an urban classroom in order to answer the following questions: How do children develop as writers in school? How do writing and drawing function in children’s texts? How do teaching practices shape children’s writing development? Ethnographic data collected in a fifthgrade classroom reveal how children used drawing to create classroom texts. Data show that drawing is not simply a developmental preface to writing. Rather, when given guided intellectual freedom, children integrate writing, drawing, and pictures in sophisticated and creative ways. The author traces children’s text development to show how schooling as an institution bounds and limits their use of their authorial prerogatives, their textual possibilities, and ultimately their developmental potential. She concludes by asserting that we must reconsider development in writing to include not only orthographic symbols, but also the wide array of communicative tools that children bring to writing. Any analysis of development that fails to include an analysis of the corresponding institutional practices and ideologies is liable to be no more than a contribution to the efficacy of that developmental model.

In this article, we examine writing in the context of new communication technologies as a kindof everyday literacy. Using an inductive approach developed from grounded theory, we analyzeda 32,000-word corpus of college students’ Instant Messaging (IM) exchanges. Through our analysis of this corpus, we identify a fifteen-item taxonomy of IM language features and frequency patterns which provide a detailed, data-rich picture of writers working within the technological and situational constraints of IM contexts to creatively inscribe into their written conversations important paralinguistic information. We argue that the written features of IM function paralinguistically to provide readers with cues as to how the writing is to be understood. By writing into the language paralinguistic cues, the participants in our study work to clarify, or more precisely disambiguate, meaning. Through a discussion of four of these features—eye dialect, slang, emoticons, and meta-markings—we suggest how the paralinguistic is inscribed in IM’s language features.

In this methodological and theoretical article, we address the need for more cross-case work on studies of literacy in use within different social and cultural contexts. The Cultural Practices of Literacy Study (CPLS) project has been working on a methodology for cross-case analyses that are principled in that the qualitative nature of each case, with its layers of context and interpretive meaning making by the researcher, is maintained while still allowing for data aggregation across cases. We present a model of a literacy practice that emerged from this work as one that may contribute to the work of other literacy researchers who are looking for theoretically driven ways to analyze and interpret ethnographic accounts of literacy practice on a larger scale and to answer questions about literacy practice across studies. We describe our theoretically based coding scheme, as well as the development of a large ethnographic database of literacy practices data and the technical aspects of lifting ethnographic data into a large database. We also provide a description of a pilot cross-case analysis as an example of the promise of such qualitative cross-case databases.

Despite a long debate and the accompanying call for changes in the past few decades, grammarinstruction in college English classes, according to some scholars, has remained largely “disempowering,” “decontextualized,” and “remedial” (Micciche, 2004, p. 718). To search for more effectiveand empowering grammar teaching, this study explores the use of corpora for problem-basedlearning/teaching of lexicogrammar in a college English grammar course. This pedagogy wasmotivated by research findings that (1) corpora are a very useful source and tool for languageresearch and for active discovery learning of second/foreign languages, and (2) problem-basedlearning (PBL) is an effective and motivating instructional approach. The data collected andanalyzed include students’ individual and group corpus research projects, reflection papers oncorpus use, and responses to a post-study survey consisting of both open-ended and Likert questions.The analysis of the data found the following four themes in students’ use of, and reflectionsabout, corpus study: (1) critical understanding about lexicogrammatical and broader languageuse issues, (2) awareness of the dynamic nature of language, (3) appreciation for the context/register-appropriate use of lexicogrammar, and (4) grasping of the nuances of lexicogrammaticalusages. The paper also discusses the challenges involved in incorporating corpus use into Englishclasses and offers suggestions for further research.

This ethnographic study explored the ways in which media, particularly television, connected with English language and literacy practices among Sudanese refugees in Michigan. Three families with young children participated in this study. Data collection included participant observation, interviews, and collection of artifacts over 18 months, with a focus on television events as the units of analysis. Data analysis focused on television practices connected with literacy practices for adults and children. Results indicated that television offered important cultural connections with participants’ beliefs, values, and attitudes regarding their Sudanese heritage, the new U.S. context, and religious practices. Both adults and children believed television was an important resource for learning and recognized potential problems with too much viewing. Most significantly, analysis suggested important connections between television practices and the development of both English language abilities for all family members and the development of real-world literacy practices, especially for the children.

This case study describes how one eighth-grade student, Jon, asserted Native identities in texts as he attended a middle school in the western United States. Jon—a self-described Native American, Navajo, and Paiute with verified Native ancestry—sought to share what he called his Native culture with others in his school wherein he was the only Native American, despite his perception that schools have historically suppressed this culture. To study how the texts that Jon designed in school may have afforded and constrained the expression of Native identities, the authors collected three types of data over the course of eight months: (a) interviews from Jon and his teachers; (b) fieldnotes from classroom observations; and (c) texts that Jon designed in school. Grounded in theories of social semiotics and multimodality, the findings from this study suggest that different forms of representation afforded and constrained the expression of Jon’s desired identities in different ways due to their different physical properties, due to their historical and immediate uses in context, and due to the extent to which they fulfilled different metafunctions of communication. Recognizing the tensions and ironies associated with using some forms of representation, Jon sought to combine and use multiple representations to construct desired identities and to negate undesired ones.

In what ways can teachers incorporate young people’s home and community literacy practices into classrooms when such practices vastly differ from the teachers’ literacy experiences? How can teacher education curriculum and teaching influence teachers’ pedagogical practices? How can children’s roles be pedagogically reframed and become meaningful strengths in classrooms? Grounded in these interrelated research questions, this article documents some of the influences of Freirean culture circle as an approach to inservice teacher education on the ways in which two Head Start teachers and a teacher educator negotiated and navigated within and across home and school literacy practices, co-creating a curriculum based on generative themes and making early education meaningful to children from multiple backgrounds. Further, it proposes that conducting extensive ethnographic studies is not a prerequisite to creating pedagogical spaces that honor children’s home literacy practices and cultural legacies. Findings indicate that as teachers seek to build on young children’s language and literacy strengths, it is pedagogically beneficial to engage in documenting glimpses of home literacy practices within and across contexts while simultaneously challenging and (re)positioning ethnocentric definitions of literacy by engaging young children as authentic curriculum designers.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of Spanish-English code-switching “or Spanglish” among bilingual Latina/Latino sixth graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Analysis of the data revealed significant parallels between the skills embedded in students’ everyday use of Spanglish and the skills that they were expected to master according to California’s sixth-grade English language arts standards. In particular, students displayed an impressive adeptnessat (1) shifting voices for different audiences, and (2) communicating subtle shades of meaning. It is argued that this skillful use of Spanglish could potentially be leveraged as a resource for helping students to further cultivate related academic literacy skills. The article concludes with a discussion of specific implications for how teachers might begin to leverage Spanglish as a pedagogical resource by helping students to recognize, draw on, and extend the skills already embedded intheir everyday use of language.

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.

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 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.

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.

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&Wenger, 1991).

“Where is God now?” is a question from the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel and an underlying narrative dilemma for the teachers and most student participants in this qualitative study of three Holocaust units in secondary English classrooms in the Midwestern United States.

This case study closely examines how John (a former student of mine, age eight, second grade)composed during an informal writing group at school. Using qualitative research methods, I found that John selectively took up conventions, characters, story grammars, themes, and motifs from video games, television, Web pages, and comics.

Drawing on data gathered during a seven-month study of the literacy practices of a group of White, working-class girls who have successfully navigated their high school’s English curriculum, this ethnography investigates (1) how gender and class influenced the girls’ uses of literacy in the classroom and (2) how the girls used texts from English class to construct gender.

Drawing on data from a multi-year digital storytelling project, this comparative case study offers portraits of two emerging authors”one a child and the other a young adult”who used multiple media and modes to articulate pivotal moments in their lives and reflect on life trajectories. The conceptual framework blends recent scholarship on narrative, identity, and performance, with an eye towards fostering agency. These cases demonstrate how digital storytelling, in combination with supportive social relationships and opportunities for participation in a community based organization, provided powerful means and motivation for forming and giving voice to agentive selves.

This article employs the concept of intersubjectivity to analyze developments in and discrepancies between students’ understandings of criteria for effective writing and the criteria of their teacher. It reports on a study that employed qualitative methods of interview and classroom observation in conjunction with analysis of students’ writing and the teacher’s feedback on their writing to explore the struggles of students learning the “genre of power” (Lemke, 1988, p. 89) of the literary analysis essay. The greatest challenges for the students in this study occurred for those whose goals and expectations related to this high-stakes genre of writing were not based on the same taken-for-granted assumptions about context and purpose as were their teacher’s. The article concludes by discussing teachers’ professional responsibility to negotiate shared goals for literacy with their students.

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.

This article investigates the use of oral narratives by a 7-year-old Mexican born girl (Isabela) participating in small group literature discussions in a bilingual 2nd-grade classroom in the U.S. over a year. The study is grounded in sociocultural and critical perspectives and uses narrative and transactional theories to understand literacy events.

A year-long, 2-level case study was conducted to examine both the complex writing performances of three students in a 2nd-3rd grade class and the instructional strategies of their teacher, focusing on the interplay between the children’s strategy use and the teacher’s instruction.

This semester-long qualitative study explores the effects of a high-stakes, direct writing test on 3 teachers and their students in 1 rural Maryland high school. Out of the 23 students in both classes, 14 students had been identified for special education services for physical or learning problems; all had either failed the test once or had not yet taken it. The researchers conducted interviews with teachers and students, observed their classrooms, and collected samples of student writing and other artifacts to address 3 questions: (a) How did the test influence teacher beliefs about writing instruction? (b) How did these teachers adapt their instruction to respond to the demands of the test? (c) How did students who had not passed the test respond to their writing instruction and how did preparation for the test affect their attitudes/beliefs about writing? Our findings suggest that an emphasis on test preparation diminished the likelihood of the teachers’ engaging in reflective practice that is sensitive to the needs of individual students, that the high-stakes assessment process discounted the validity of locally developed standards for assessing writing, and that the criteria for passing the test failed to take into consideration the rich variety of American culture and the complexity of literacy learning.

Presents a school-year-long case study of a fourth-grade boy with a history of language difficulties. Describes development of a set of curriculum-centered, classroom-based strategies for language and literacy support. Focuses on changes in the student's language constructions and communicative competence, in the form of the teacher's supportive strategies, and in the speech/language pathologist's role in the classroom.

Uses activist ethnographic field work to explore institutional language skills used by inner-city residents as they negotiated social services institutions. Shows residents’ critical awareness and political acumen as they complied with and resisted the structuring ideology of institutional agents. Raises questions about the methods of key critical pedagogues and the appropriateness of their assumption of false consciousness among disenfranchised people.

Examines, using grounded theory methods, an interactive, televised writing course taught via Teletechnet, a distance-education program at Old Dominion University. Shows how technology affects a writing classroom and influences the construction of students as writers. Suggests that institutional contexts are reconfigured in televised instruction as virtual and material spaces that allow interesting tensions to emerge.

Takes a systematic approach to defining and operationalizing the notion of discourse community, drawing on data from an ethnography of writing in a workplace setting. States that a single genre varied in form and function depending on the specific discourse communities in which it was used--writing events took on layered meanings in relation to other communicative activities.

Historically, the Bible has occupied a prominent—though sometimes disruptive—position in American education. The 1963 Bible study benchmark case, Abington v. Schempp (1963), ruled that the Bible is worthy of study, and that such study is constitutional. Both religious and educational organizations support a literary study of the Bible in public schools because it is great literature and because it is foundational for understanding Western culture. The purpose of this study was to determine the current, actual place of Bible literature in high school English classes and the reasons that affect its place. The study used quantitative and qualitative methods: survey, interviews, and observations. It included observations of three models of teaching Biblical literature: a) a full-year elective course, b) a required grade unit, and c) a Bible unit in a humanities course. The study found that Bible literature seems to play an extremely small role in high school literature programs. While 81% of high school English teachers reported it was important to teach some Bible literature, only 10% taught a Bible unit or course. High school textbooks average one fourth of one percent (.260%) from the Bible. Though 55% of college English instructors personally recommended that secondary English majors take a Biblical literature course, only 38% had done so. The wide gap between recommended study and actual study of the Bible is filled with misinformation, contradictory attitudes, and confusion. Two problems of teaching Bible literature are: dealing with religious beliefs and non-beliefs of teachers, parents, and students; and overcoming ignorance. Some college professors, administrators, English department chairs, and librarians did not know what Bible literature was taught in their schools or that teaching Bible literature was legal.

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This study examined the effects of three study conditions (review only, study questions, and analytic essay writing) on high school students writing and learning from text (concept application, immediate recall, delayed recall, and recall of manipulated content). An experienced social studies teacher and two levels (general and academic) of her eleventh grade U.S. history course participated in the research. Observational and case study techniques were employed to describe the teacher’s pedagogy, and then a volunteer group of students from each class read, reviewed or wrote about their reading, and were tested on learning from selected history passages. Analyses of the students’ writings indicated their varying approaches to studying and writing about the passages. Both forms of writing enabled both groups to perform better on all learning measures, with the academic students consistently outperforming the general students. Analytic writing was associated with higher scores on concept application, while study questions led to better general recall in the immediate and delayed conditions. When recall was further analyzed for the number of content units contained in the written responses to the two writing tasks, more content units appeared in the analytic writing in both the immediatea nd delayedc onditions. Although the general students’ performanceso n this posttest measure were not as strong as the academic students’ performances, they benefited more from analytic writing than from answering study questions about the history passages. Because both instructional context and academic ability seem to influence students’ performances on writing-to-learn tasks, the study suggests the need for research that will disentangle these influences to identify the effects of pedagogy and student ability on learning from writing.

This essay describes some of the primary features of educational criticism, an arts-based approach to qualitative inquiry. We first examine the aims of this approach, focusing on its potential to heighten our perceptions of the classroom. We next discuss four dimensions of educational criticism: descriptive (intended to vividly render the qualities that constitute an educational performance or product); interpretative (represented in the conceptual frameworks that allow critics to account for the attributes and patterns of interaction they have observed); normative (involving a process of articulating those values that inform conceptions of goodness within a given domain); and thematic (concerned with the utility of extracting some type of general understanding, image, principle, or lesson that transcends the particular of an individual case). Finally, we address questions of rigor as they apply to educational criticism and other forms of qualitative research. Specifically, we identify three criteria (consensual validation, structural corroboration, and referential adequacy) appropriate for assessing the credibility of such work. In suggesting criticism as one potential model for educational inquiry, we hope to encourage those researchers who seek to create compelling and richly textured accounts of current classroom practice.

Flinders and Eisner begin their article by justifying the use of educational criticism on the basis of two analogies: the researcher-as-critic and teaching-as-art. While not disputing that such comparisons can be useful and illuminating, I argue that they are neither sufficient nor necessary as an underlying basis for their approach. Hinders and Eisner present a clear discussion of the dimensions of educational criticism that demonstrates the potential value of this approach. They also identify and address some of the challenges to such qualitative methods that come from a field that still depends on a quantitative mindset. I recognize that there are many who are not ready to accord educational criticism the value of a science on this basis, but that does not mean that it needs to be associated with in order to be useful. In the end, it is on the basis of the descriptions and practices of educational criticism that such an approach will have to be judged. Flinders and Eisner, along with their colleagues, have gone a long way in moving this process, and its practice, forward. Having said that a discussion of art is not necessary to justify their approach, some further thinking about the links between art - both the traditional and the more controversial views of it - and teaching may be illuminating. Additional analyses help us to recognize that, on the one hand, we can elevate teaching to the status of an - to be looked at and admired by connoisseurs. But, on the other hand, it also suggests that the representation, discussion, and interpretation of education can be experiences - like television, performance art, and movies - in which anyone can participate.

This article describes the patterns of literacy development in children froms table home environments who were prenatally exposed to crack or cocaine. The article includes a brief overview of observations from the first year of study followed by a focus on patterns of development observed during Year Two. During the second year, the children continued to develop in what is considered to be an age appropriate manner, with onlys even children receiving special education support. A few children experienced setbacks in their learning, but there seemed to be reasonable causes for these setbacks. During this secondy ear, the importance of classroom context, as established by the teacher, became an important aspect in the literacy developmeont this group of children. The article concludes with one case study highlighting the importance of classroom context in a child’s literacy development.

The present study investigates the experiences of 17 children—all designated by school evaluators as “remedial” readers—as they interpreted and performed text through classroom theatre. Through participant observation, audio and video recording, artifacts, and interviews, the patterns of children’s text interpretation were analyzed to show how these children learned to take on the roles of actor, character, and critic in planning, performing, and evaluating their performances. As actors, the children were provided with opportunities to shoulder the “mantle of expertise,” experiencing the creative and critical features of a dramatic curriculum. As critics, the children learned to emphasize the roles of rules, resources, and the bases for common knowledge in their dramatic interpretations. As characters, they shifted perspective from self to other through voice, physical action, and connection to other characters. This year-long study details how these children moved from a perception of drama as uninhibited expression much influenced by media experiences to a perception of the bounded and negotiated nature of theatrical production influenced by careful text interpretation.