This commentary continues a dialogue which began among literacy teacher educators attending an alternative format session about mentoring in the academy at a national conference. Literacy teacher educators participated in an informal discussion centered on the nature of mentoring in the academy for doctoral students, untenured professors, and tenured professors. Doctoral students focused on their changing identities and roles in the academy, their concerns about navigating the political infrastructure of academia, and the importance of assuming a proactive stance towards obtaining mentoring, especially for part-time doctoral students. Untenured professors focused on the ways they were inventing and reinventing themselves within the power and politics of academia and their need for more holistic mentoring during these turbulent times. Tenured professors were able to embed mentoring experiences into their scholarly work and find ways to benefit or learn from mentoring experiences. These mentors also found comfort in more informal mentoring that included self-initiated endeavors centered on mutual interests. Our commentary draws on these discussions as well as the professional literature on mentoring to describe the importance of mutual trust and reciprocity in mentoring throughout all stages of academia with attention to cultural and linguistic diversity.
When You Think About Students reading in the mathematics classroom, what immediately comes to mind? What text sources do students generally read in a mathematics classroom? Are you picturing students reading a textbook or a workbook? do you see students reading problems and checking their answers? In many classrooms across the united states, this textbook work is exactly what reading in the mathematics classroom entails (Alvermann and moore 1991; bean 2000; Hiebert et al. 2003), particularly since the textbook has a profound influence on both what is taught and what is learned (Koehler and grouws 1992).
Reading is a developmental process beginning with a foundation built in the primary grades and continuing throughout the lives of students and adults. Misconceptions arise that every child will learn to read by third grade, thus, students will be able to read for a lifetime. However, different sophisticated reading skills are needed as students progress through grade levels and in life. Reading becomes more complex. The processes of reading, which are necessary for more intensive study, change from learning to read, the focus of elementary school instruction to reading to learn (Chall, 1983). Text becomes a source of information using technical terms and graphics to further explanations. We specifically emphasize that reading instruction should also change in middle schools, as students are required to engage in more intensive study of subject matter (Irvin, 1992). Adolescent students in middle schools must be critical consumers of information from a multitude of print sources which requires different and additional reading strategies than are used during the learning-to-read phase of instruction.
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