Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Seeds of Hope: Reflecting on Five Years of Research in the Teaching of English, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/57/4/researchintheteachingofenglish32470-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Multimodal Research for Racial Justice, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/57/3/researchintheteachingofenglish32352-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: The Future as Collaborative: Reading and Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/57/2/researchintheteachingofenglish32150-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Black Origin Stories and Futures, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/57/1/researchintheteachingofenglish31998-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Storying and Restorying as Cathartic Hope, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/56/4/researchintheteachingofenglish31861-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Centering Disability in Literacy, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/56/3/researchintheteachingofenglish31636-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Literacy and Imperialism, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/56/2/researchintheteachingofenglish31473-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Childhoods across Borders, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/56/1/researchintheteachingofenglish31340-1.gif

Informed by Bakhtin's theorization of voice as well as cross-disciplinary studies of scaling, the authors explore how a group of young filmmakers rendered one focal immigrant student's familial history by centering speakers addressing the topic of immigration from multiple levels, thereby connecting multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in their multimodal storytelling to illustrate the costs of dehumanizing policies. In this case study, drawing from classroom observations, student work, and interviews with both students and teachers, the authors also highlight the importance of teacher agency in creating opportunities for refugee-background students to interactively engage in the language arts classroom. Drawing from interviews, observations, and analysis of student writing, the authors construct a detailed case study of how one student writer negotiated her stance toward the discourse of literary analysis based on her own writerly identity as a creative writer, illuminating the importance of critically attending to the ideological implications of teaching discipline-specific writing.

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: “You Can Still Fight”: The Black Radical Tradition, Healing, and Literacies, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/55/3/researchintheteachingofenglish31183-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Drawing Out the A in English Language Arts, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/55/2/researchintheteachingofenglish31019-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Literacy Policy-as-Pharmakon: Indeterminacy in a Time of Contagion, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/55/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30898-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Decentering and Decentralizing Literacy Studies: An Urgent Call for Our Field, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/4/researchintheteachingofenglish30735-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Literacy, Migration, and Dislocation, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/3/researchintheteachingofenglish30518-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Critical Digital and Media Literacies in Challenging Times: Reimagining the Role of English Language Arts, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/2/researchintheteachingofenglish30639-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: The Politics of Teaching Literature, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/54/1/researchintheteachingofenglish30238-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Ethics and Literacy Research, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/53/4/researchintheteachingofenglish30139-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Toward Methodological Pluralism: The Geopolitics of Knowing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/53/3/researchintheteachingofenglish30033-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors’ Introduction: Collective Knowledge Production and Action, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/53/2/researchintheteachingofenglish29862-1.gif

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Bridging Generations in RTE: Reading the Past, Writing the Future, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/53/1/researchintheteachingofenglish29752-1.gif

Preview this article: Announcing the Alan C. Purves Award Recipients (Volume 49): Critical Approaches to Language Research with the Potential to Change Educational Practice: This Year’s Purves Award Honorees, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/50/3/researchintheteachingofenglish28164-1.gif

y copy of the first issue of Literacy in Composition Studies is thoroughly marked up.It engages issues, questions, and even anxieties I have carried with me over my roughly twenty years as a teacher and literacy researcher.In an effort to continue the conversation I am going to take up two themes that thread through many of the initial articles and their responses.The first theme regards the conceptual tropes we use to describe our work.The second relates to transformative potential and, equally as important, limitations of scholarship that is directed to providing access and opportunity to historically disenfranchised students and communities.This interest in equity is something I believe many share across the areas of Literacy Education and Composition and Rhetoric.In his opening essay, Bruce Horner argues for a shift from spatial to temporal metaphors in the conceptualization of literacies.Spatial metaphors risk essentializing literacy practices-exoticizing or romanticizing them-and even reproducing the very autonomous ideologies the field has worked so hard to deconstruct.A methodological focus on temporality may help researchers work through some of these contradictions (Horner 4-5).In a similar vein, many of the subsequent authors invoke the terms "purpose, " "labor, " "intentionality, " "process, " "circulation, " "work, " and "movement, " a historicizing direction that I for the most part endorse, and which seems to be in line with the empirical realities of global migrations and transnationalism.My qualification is because phrases like "emergent dynamism" shade into the discourse of neoliberal incursions into education, which valorize innovation, as there will always be new literacies, and literate identities, to market.A renewed emphasis on temporality may also exist in tension with another acknowledgement made by several of the contributors: that there is often, following Pierre Bourdieu, significant social inertia and reproduction in the field of education, even as we work within and against the system to try to expand what constitutes academic knowledge and practice.This tension can induce some self-reflection and soul searching for scholars who try to balance an analytical disposition, the pressures to generate new terms and ideas for the academic market, and the desire to make a difference in students' lives.My own contribution engages these themes from the vantage point of having taught and conducted research with elementary school students and their families in predominantly under-

This article draws on a four-year practitioner research study of a university partnership with an all-boys public elementary school to analyze students’ socially situated literacy practices thatoccurred on the margins of a curriculum driven by high-stakes testing. We bring together critical literacy (Freire, 2007; Janks, 2010; Luke, 2000), realist theory (Alcoff, 2006; Mohanty, 1997;Moya, 2001), and Gramsci’s (1971) conception of the organic intellectual to provide a layered framework for understanding how students at our research site mobilized their cultural identitiesfor critical ends, what we define as “organic critical literacies.” Through illustrative examples of third- and fourth-grade African American boys’ interactions with fiction and nonfiction texts,we examine how students critiqued common ideologies that devalued them, their school, and their city, and enacted more humanizing visions. The elementary students whose work we featurewere realizing their capacities as emerging organic intellectuals, translating their singular critical insights and observations into a broader dialogue that had more universal resonance. Weconclude by discussing the educational, epistemological, and ethical implications of our study.