This article begins with a review of the forms of writing promoted in the Common Core State Standards. Across content areas, Common Core encourages teachers to attune students' writing to rhetorical concerns of audience, purpose, task, and disciplinary thinking. To address these concerns, teachers might take a rhetorical approach to the study of genres. In this view, genres are seen as resources writers use to build and act in particular situations. That is, genres help writers shape their writing to fit particular audiences, purposes, tasks, and forms of disciplinary thought. This article explains the rhetorical approach to genre studies by describing how particular genres (e.g. lab reports) are used by people to negotiate particular situations (e.g. labs in chemistry classes). Examples are offered throughout the article of how genre studies can be carried out in classrooms.

This article examines two approaches to teaching content area literacy: a strategies approach focused on general practices of reading and writing and a disciplinary approach attuned to the particular discourses of particular domains. Basil Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device is used to critique both approaches' assumptions about content area literacy. Neither approach, it is argued, accounts for the ways content areas bring together discourses from multiple fields. The strategies approach, for instance, does not account for the ways literacies in different content areas are bound up with different discourses. The disciplinary approach, on the other hand, conflates content area discourses with university and professional discourses. At the same time, the disciplinary approach minimizes content area discourses' connections to the discourses of domains such as the public sphere and everyday life. At the end of the article, Bernstein's ideas are used to formulate questions content area teachers might consider when teaching different ways of reading, writing, speaking, thinking, and listening.One of the most productive debates currently underway in literacy studies revolves around content area literacies, or literacies used in secondary school math, science, social studies, and so forth. Parties to the debate argue over whether and how content area literacies should be taught as discrete sets of practices used in discrete communities. Some educators and researchers, including authors of popular texts on literacy instruction, emphasize continuities across content areas and promote common strategies for

This article revisits Goody's arguments about literacy's influence on social arrangements, culture, cognition, economics, and other domains of existence. Whereas some of his arguments tend toward technological determinism (i.e., literacy causes change in the world), other of his arguments construe literacy as a force that shapes and is shaped by disparate social processes. This article also reviews the critiques of Goody's work developed in the subfield of sociocultural literacy studies. Although the critics are right to object to the elements of technological determinism in his work, their rejection of his larger project leads them to miss ideas that can help clarify literacy's role in the transformation of society. Moreover, their misreading of Goody's work contributes to the field's underestimation of the distinct force of literacy and overestimation of the force of local cultures. In other words, how they misread Goody's work limits the depth of the answers that they provide to questions about literacy and its relations to culture, economics, politics, and other social spheres. These relations can be better understood when Goody's work is reread with an interaction model of literacy that figures changes in literacy as conditions of and conditional upon changes in other domains. Equipped with this model, researchers may rectify the supposed technological determinism of Goody's approach and the cultural determinism of some sociocultural accounts of literacy. Researchers may then synthesize these ideas to develop approaches that clarify literacy's evolving relations with other aspects of the world. This article concludes by explaining how a revised understanding of genre may bring into view the interplay between literacy and different social processes.

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debate has taken place. We readily acknowledge the importance of other approaches to literacy research, including those that foreground cognition (e.g.,

Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have an easier time than others in producing generic texts and getting their texts deemed "legitimate" by recognized authorities. Gee's theory, meanwhile, does not explain precisely how and where (i.e., at which conceptual level) communicants come to match Discourse to situation. This article contends that these limitations may be surpassed if the two theories are brought together in a particular way. In this new approach, genres and Discourses are viewed as mutually constitutive forms: Genres exist within Discourses and Discourses exist within genres. In adopting this approach, it is argued, researchers may study how particular genres are made to elicit performances of Discourses connected to particular social groups. Keywords genre, discourse (oral or written), critical theory, poststructuralism, postmodernism, sociolinguistics, writing, composition Recently, when analyzing student portfolios, I ran up against certain limits of rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of big-D Discourse (explained below). At the time, I was studying two high schools' career portfolio programs. Collin 77Students at these schools are required to build portfolios out of artifacts from classes, extracurricular activities, and outside endeavors. In personal essays, students explain how these artifacts plot out their trajectories into paid work. At the end of the school year, seniors present their portfolios to exit interview panels composed of educators and businesspeople. My intention was to study career portfolios from two angles: as compositional forms and as the creations of differently positioned actors. To study the portfolio as a compositional form, I drew from rhetorical theories of genre. To understand how students from different backgrounds use linguistic resources to compose themselves as different kinds of people, I employed Gee's theory of Discourse. As I pursued my analysis, however, I discovered these two theories were limited in crucial respects.In contemporary theories of rhetoric, genres are often defined as "typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations" (Miller, 1984, p. 159; see also Bawarshi, 2003;Bazerman, 1988;Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Campbell & Jamieson, 1978;Devitt, 2004;Freadman, 1994;Freedman & Medway, 1994;Russell, 1997;Schryer, 1994;Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). These theories offer productive ways of seeing how genres position individuals to recognize and build certain kinds of situations, take on identities appropriate to those situations, and act in accordance with those identities. Additionally, rhetorical theories of genre provide ways of understanding how actors adapt genres to suit unique conjunctures of space and time. Howeve...

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Background Education researchers are paying increasing attention to student activism and to the social production of school spaces. Few studies, however, have brought these two concerns together to examine how student activists work to rebuild school spaces in line with their political commitments. In the present study, I address this gap at the intersection of two important research trends. Purpose I examine how a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) endeavored to build its school as an inclusive environment open to students of different sexual orientations. Focusing on the semiotic dimension of spatial production, I investigate how a conflict over a sign on the GSA's bulletin board functioned as one front in an ongoing struggle to produce the school's main hallway as a particular kind of space. As signs and constructions of space may be interpreted in different manners, I provide alternate ways of reading the conflict. Setting The setting for this study is a school serving a racially diverse, working class neighborhood in a major city in the Northeastern United States. Participants The participants were members of their school's GSA. Research Design This is a qualitative site-based investigation. I collected data by using ethnographic tools including observation, interviewing, and document collection. Specifically, I sought to gather data on different actors’ different understandings of the conflict over the bulletin board. I analyzed data by using methods of naturalistic qualitative analysis and semiotics-focused discourse analysis. Findings Study participants read the conflict over the bulletin board in different manners. Each reading construed the conflict as (re)building school spaces in particular ways. Crucially, each construction either validated or invalidated LGBTIQ identities in the space of the school. Conclusions No one reading of the conflict and no one construction of the space of the school were necessarily “conclusive” or “correct.” Rather, the meaning of the conflict and the features of school space were struggled over and negotiated by actors at the school. These struggles highlight how conflicts over meaning are often disagreements over the construction and inhabitance of social spaces. In light of these findings, researchers should expand their analyses of student activism to consider how, through semiotic activity, activists work to rebuild and act in school spaces. Furthermore, researchers should produce studies helpful to activists working to build schools as more just and inclusive environments.