In their 1985 report, Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading, Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson defined reading and proposed five principles that guide its successful enactment: (1) reading is a constructive process, (2) reading must be fluent, (3) reading must be strategic, (4) reading requires motivation, and (5) reading is a continuously developing skill. In this article we revise the definition from reading to literacy and rethink the principles in response to theoretical and empirical developments in the intervening years with regard to the processes of, and contexts for, reading. Our updated principles include: (1) literacy is a constructive, integrative, and critical process situated in social practices; (2) fluent reading is shaped by language processes and contexts; (3) literacy is strategic and disciplinary; (4) literacy entails motivation and engagement; and (5) literacy is a continuously developing set of practices. We redefine each principle and offer new explanations in light of what we now know.
Studies of literacy intervention classes have measured reading gains through standardized assessments, but few have considered the impact on students' identities. I used theories of identity and positioning to answer two questions: How did institutional and interpersonal acts of positioning in two literacy intervention classrooms build on, change, or challenge students' personal histories and identities as readers? How did these acts shape students' understandings of themselves as readers over time? I collected and analyzed interviews, field notes, and artifacts.Analyses revealed that ongoing positioning in one classroom thickened one student's identity as
Secondary literacy instruction often happens to adolescents rather than with them. To disrupt this trend, we collaborated with twelfth-grade "literacy mentors" to reimagine literacy teaching and learning with tenth-grade mentees in a public high school classroom. We used positioning theory as an analytic tool to (a) understand how mentors positioned themselves and how we positioned them and (b) examine the literacy practices that enabled and constrained the mentor position. We found that our positioning of mentors as collaborators was taken up in different, sometimesunexpected ways as a result of the multiple positions available to them as well as institutionallevel factors that shaped what literacy practices were and were not negotiable. We argue that future collaborations with youth must account for the rights and duties of all members of a classroom community, including how those rights and duties intersect, merge, or come into conflict within and across practices.
At the end of the twentieth century, genre theorists and practitioners debated the possibility of explicitly teaching genres in classrooms. Though the debate is decades old, it continues to be relevant to contemporary discussions about literacy instruction because it addresses questions about how to provide all students with access to genres of power. In this article, I highlight one example of explicit genre instruction in Australia that is particularly noteworthy for its critical and dialogic aspects, and then make connections between this approach and similar theoretical and pedagogical work in the United States. I conclude with a discussion of some of the implications for pedagogy that are derived from my analysis.
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