In this article, we describe the findings from a 5-year multilevel project in which we studied 4 high-poverty school districts that were attempting to change to a literature-based literacy curriculum in line with State Department of Education manifestos. The various studies in the project drew on classroom observations, interviews with teachers and administrators, and various documents and reports from schools, the State Department of Education, and the media. Our analyses reveal the obstacles to change and some of the unintended effects of change methods. In particular, we document substantial differences between centralized and decentralized districts in their relationships and ways of talking. We conclude that unless there is radical change in the ways that administrators and policymakers view educational change, literacy instruction in the 21st century will remain much the same as it is now.'often, only excerpts appear in these anthologies, similar to the traditional high school literature anthology.
This case study explores the perspectives of a group of sixth-grade language arts students concerning their views of the contexts of reading and responding to books in school. The researcher took the role of participant-observer and characterizes this study as a qualitative interpretive case study. As participant-observer, the researcher collected data in the form of fieldnotes, interviews, and written responses; the researcher analyzed data using the constant comparison method. Results of the study indicated that in this setting children respond to texts differently in the contexts under which they read and write about books. There were four different classroom contexts for responding to books in school: "silent" reading, book selection, writing, and aesthetic activity. Three conclusions were drawn from the study and make up an emerging grounded theory: (a) Children respond to books in patterns specific to school contexts, (b) Classroom contexts for reading and responding to books are socially constructed through children's interactions, and (c) Children constructed a community of readers by interacting with one another to respond to books in socially constructed contexts serving as information networks.This study was inspired first by my own love of books and reading and second, by the work of Galda (1988) who suggests that readers' responses to books are influenced by the nature of the reader, the text, and the context. We seem to know more about readers and texts than we do contexts for responding to books. Specifically, there seems to be a need for an investigation of the social construction of the contexts for reading and responding to books. Thus, this study was conducted to 379
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