Utilizing a complex theory of teacher learning and practice, this chapter analyzes ~120 empirical studies of content teacher development (both preservice and in-service) for working with multilingual learners as well as research on content teaching for multilingual students. Our analysis identified three dimensions of quality content teaching for multilingual learners that are complex and intricately connected: context, orientations, and pedagogy. This chapter explores the results of our literature analysis and argues for improving content teaching for multilingual students through improved theoretically grounded research that embraces, explores, and accounts for the expansive complexities inherent in teacher learning and practice.
I detail findings from an ethnographic study of a high school remedial reading class, with a particular focus on students’ perceptions of what it means to be literate and how their mandatory enrollment in the course impacted their identities. Compounding students’ experiences was the existence of a high‐stakes reading examination that all students in the district must pass to graduate high school. Findings describe the contrast between school literacies that students learn in class and their own literate practices, which neither youth nor their teacher recognized as literacies, as well as the functioning of the remedial reading class as a sort of “purgatory” that holds and segregates students, the majority of whom are students of color and/or from marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds, for semesters on end. Still, students employed tactical literacies to subvert the teacher’s directives and reclaim their time. These findings suggest that common approaches to remediation may be a cause of youth disinterest in reading and that youth literacies may be leveraged in service of broader literacy goals, although the school must first acknowledge them.
Blending the Deweyan idea of "experience" with the work of contemporary literacy pedagogues and classroom examples, this paper explores the implications of Dewey's principles upon today's classroom contexts. If experience is a central component to education, how might Dewey's ideas help to re-focus our scattered perceptions of what literacy learning "ought" to be in the 21st century? Furthermore, what possibilities are created therein for language arts teachers and students?
1971/2009) elucidation of the difference principle, which holds that inequality in a society is to be tolerated so long as it stands to benefit the least advantaged. More recent scholarship focused on educational justice has demonstrated the shortcomings of the classroom--level enactment of democratic equality and moralistic justice (e.g., Jencks, 1988), and has theorized the possibilities posed by prioritarian, or "strong humane" principles of justice (Schouten, 2012). Amid this intellectual landscape, this paper asks a how classroom teacher's understanding of justice impacts her educational practice, and examines the relationship between district accountability policies and the ways in which decisions about the distribution of educational goods are made and enacted in classrooms.Using data from an ethnographic case study of a high school remedial reading classroom, this paper addresses two objectives: First, it illustrates how a focus on educational accountability impacts the participant teacher's beliefs about the nature of educational justice. Secondly, this paper examines how these beliefs, in turn, impact her actions in the classroom with her students. In so doing, this paper articulates how the ambiguity inherent in the concept of "justice" allows for its invocation in a wide variety of contexts and purposes. Additionally, it points to a broader "double bind" (Bateson, 1999) in which increasing numbers of educators find themselves: Should we devote our energy and resources to prepare students to pass high-stakes standardized assessments, or should we direct our focus to ensuring students are well-positioned to flourish as adults and citizens? As in the case I describe, these aims are sometimes in conflict. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:In order to situate the context of the case described in this paper, I draw upon two bodies of literature. First, I introduce competing theories of educational justice, including Reich's (2013) distinction between educational "adequacy" and "equality," as well as Jencks's (1988) taxonomy of different approaches to equality in terms of educational opportunity. Laden's (2016) conception of the two "pictures" of justice, distributive and relational, further (and necessarily) complicates this landscape. These philosophical perspectives underscore the relative flexibility of justice as a concept, and urge a more thoughtful consideration of what, exactly, educational justice is, and how it might best be enacted.Secondly, I engage research and theory from the field of literacy studies, including notions of literacy sponsorship (Brandt, 2001) and school--sanctioned literacies (Finders, 1997) to describe the literacy practices that occurred in the classroom of Ms. Harper, my teacher participant. Further, I look to sociocultural scholarship on youth literacies (Duncan--Andrade & Morrell, 2008;Kinloch, 2010; Street, 1995;Vasudevan & Campano, 2009) to position the philosophical discourse surrounding educational justice within the context of secondary literacy. Such a positi...
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