In this study, writing and reading workshops are viewed as sites for the employment of tools, for learning what to do with concrete objects, where even material things with no language in them can make one smarter and able to do new things. This ethnographic study of a multi-age primary classroom in the USA (with children aged five to eight) yielded data that included field notes and videotape. Data were analyzed within a Vygotskian framework to determine the affordances, both intended and unintended, of the varied concrete tools the teacher placed in the classroom. Emphasis is placed upon the ways these tools are designed to mediate culturally-sanctioned states of mind. Complications arise when children import motives from other contexts and use the tools for interactions and activities not sanctioned by the teacher and school. Consistent with activity theory, tools are examined as being situated within actions, discourses, and activity systems.
This article examines how a teacher drew on her urban students’ outside-school literacies to inform teaching and learning in a reading/language arts classroom. The following findings are discussed: curricular invitations the teacher offered to students; the teacher’s curriculum development process; the relationships between the genres of students’ outside-school literacies and those of the school; and the subject positionings taken up by the students and the teacher in the classroom. The article demonstrates how teachers may affirm the out-of-school literacies of urban students and connect these literacies to the formal curriculum, thereby enhancing students’ in-school literacy engagement and success.
If reading is understood as consisting of multiple kinds of thinking, then listening is one of the most important forms of mental action in which readers engage. Readers must hear sentences in order to make sense of nested syntactic relationships. They also must hear sounds that occur within the text in order to participate in its world, and they must attend to the voice(s) of the text or narrator. This article explores the forms of listening that expert readers engage in and suggests ways in which listening connects to fluency and the syntactic cueing system. Using a passage of a short story, it analyzes the text's demands on readers' thinking about sound. It goes on to describe specific pedagogical practices through which a group of teachers supported students' mediation of listening in independent reading workshops. Minilessons and individual conferences are discussed as sites of intervention and teaching.
This review of empirical research focused on the preparation of writing teachers synthesizes findings from 82 articles published between 2000 and early 2018. The new understandings generated through this analysis are presented in two sections. First, we provide an overview of how the studies we reviewed draw from and circulate dominant discourses of writing, leading to a call for more transparency and clarity on the part of scholars who study writing and writing pedagogy. Then, we explore experiences in literacy teacher education that may shift the writing identities, beliefs, or teaching practices of prospective writing teachers. We position these shifts as being potentially disruptive to the often uninterrupted circulation of powerful discourses in important and generative ways, since the teaching of writing in the 21st century must break from inherited traditions to best prepare writers to use their voices actively and confidently in the world.
Background/Context This is the first research study to examine the content basis of Payne's in-service teacher education program, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, though others who have reviewed the book have agreed with our analysis. The study took place within a policy context in which the federal government, with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (2002), created a new category of students (economically disadvantaged) whose test scores would be monitored by officials in the U. S. Department of Education. This law ensures that the improvement of poor children's test scores becomes a major concern of every public school in the country. These federal requirements have fueled the demand for professional development programs such as that offered by Ruby Payne and her Aha! Process, Inc. Purpose This article reports on an examination of the content of Ruby Payne's professional development offerings, as represented in A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Given the immense popularity of the program, an assessment of its representations of poor people is warranted and significant. We analyzed the relationship between Payne's claims and the existing research about low-income individuals and families. This study of Payne's work provides administrators and teachers with an evaluation of the reliability of Payne's claims. It also provides scholars in education, anthropology, sociology, and related fields with a description and critique of one of the more common conversations that is engaging teachers about the nature of the lives of many of their students, and the struggle to identify directions in which to improve schooling for the most vulnerable students in the education system. Research Design This is a qualitative research study whose data were derived from an analysis of A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Conclusions/Recommendations Our critical analysis of Payne's characterizations of people living in poverty indicates that her work represents a classic example of what has been identified as deficit thinking. We found that her truth claims, offered without any supporting evidence, are contradicted by anthropological, sociological and other research on poverty. We have demonstrated through our analysis that teachers may be misinformed by Payne's claims. As a consequence of low teacher expectations, poor students are more likely to be in lower tracks or lower ability groups and their educational experience more often dominated by rote drill and practice.
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