Student agency is an important construct for all students, especially those marginalized because of their linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, or migratory identities. Refugee-background students may experience marginalization according to many and sometimes all of these factors; agency is thus critical to understanding their negotiation of schooling in general and literacy tasks in particular. While many studies have explored various dimensions of agency, we know little about how agency can be enacted and developed by minoritized students within instructional contexts. This qualitative case study addresses this gap by asking: How do two adolescent refugee-background students display evidence of agency when engaging in literacy tasks? What teacher practices contribute to facilitating or inhibiting student agency? Data sources include classroom observations, student work samples, and interviews with students and teachers. Data analysis was conducted using a combined inductive/deductive approach. Findings reveal three agentive practices through which students engaged in literacy tasks: agentive resistance leading to disaffection, agentive resistance of imposed identities, and interactive negotiated engagement. While the first practice led to disengagement, the latter two led to opportunities for students to agentively reshape dehumanizing narratives of multilingual refugee-background students. Teacher agency in curriculum planning and implementation was essential in guiding students to either engage in or resist literacy tasks. Since the forced displacement that refugee-background and some immigrant students experience is contrary to the concept of self-determination, we argue that engaging them in an agentive manner has the potential to help students reclaim that sense of agency within classrooms and challenge deficit perceptions.

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.

This paper focuses on the literacy development of 26 children who were prenatally exposed to crack or cocaine. It reports observations of them during the first year of a six year longitudinal study of their literacy development. Among the specific literacy behaviors targeted for the monthly observations of the children were storybook reading behaviors, writing development, book handling skills, and orthographic knowledge. At the end of the first year, the literacy development of these children appeared to be within the parameters of what might be considered normal literacy development.