“Tjaa,I Do Have Ears,But I Do Not Hear”: New Literacy Studies and the Awakening of a Hearing Teacher

To address the low literacy achievement of minority students, the sociocultural movement of the New Literacy Studies (NLS) encourages us to expand on current understandings of literacy. Instead of thinking of literacy as a neutral set of skills transferable from one setting to another, NLS researchers encourage us to contextualize literacy within individuals’ social and cultural realms. In this view, there are multiple literacies. As a literacy teacher of students who are deaf, I have witnessed students struggling with school-based literacy learning. As I began to examine what I was doing within the classroom, I realized that my assumptions about literacy instruction were the main source of students' struggles. In this study I explore how I used the theoretical perspective of the NLS to expand my understanding of literacy. The findings suggest that, in order to base literacy instruction on students' resources, teachers need to learn to negotiate conflicting educational Discourses on reading and writing, to create a space within the classroom for students to bring in their literacy practices, and to recognize and preserve students' agency and identity in their learning. Findings also indicate the vital role of writing in deaf students' learning of Icelandic.     

Good Readers Get Smart: Reading Orientations in a Second-Grade Classroom

The primary goal of this research is to better understand my students' reading orientations – what they believe it means to be a successful reader. I also seek to identify the relationship between those beliefs and my teaching. The data come primarily from six focal students in my second-grade classroom in an urban public charter elementary school in Oakland, California. Focal students were observed, interviewed, and asked to discuss and rank vignettes of readers with varying reading behaviors, skills, and habits. In addition, I drew on systematic reflections about my own teaching and students. Results showed that focal students shared reading orientations toward aspects of fluency, such as accuracy, and knowledge-level comprehension skills, such as retelling events from a story. Results also showed that students' responses correlated closely with teaching points emphasized both within my classroom and around the school. These results, in combination with data from observations, led me to discover that students' reading orientations may have both public and private aspects. In other words, their stated preferences might differ from their private inclinations. These findings suggest that teachers need to be organized and intentional around the messages that they send to students about successful reading. They also suggest that teachers create environments in which various purposes and reading behaviors are valued.     

That Awkward Moment I Became Irrelevant

If you have ever found yourself asking, “Why don't students see the relevance in what I am teaching them?”, you are not alone. I recently discovered that I had become out-of-touch with what college students find relevant. My purpose in writing this commentary is twofold: (1) to reflect on and improve my own practice, and (2) to encourage my fellow instructors to reflect on their own practice to ensure what they teach is perceived as relevant by college students today.     

Teaching About Love and Practicing Feminist Pedagogy in a College Classroom

Being a feminist teacher, working on gender equity education, including teaching, reading, writing, and doing research on this topic, has become a commitment for me. I have frequently reflected my teaching practices and occasionally found new teaching strategies in the classroom. I always try to bring new topics or issues into the classroom in order to raise students' gender consciousness. I also try hard to figure out what can be done to empower students. Teaching about love is one way I use to empower college students in the gender course. This article is about my teaching experiences. I intend to discuss the teaching strategies, particularly focusing on the topic of love, to explore the possible ways of practicing feminist pedagogy.     

Reading beneath the lines of children's stories

This paper is drawn from a study of 10-12 year-old children's stories, the specific purpose of which was to provide a means of investigating the influence of television and videos on children's imagination. Faced with the need to understand nearly 500 stories from their authors' points of view, that is interpreting the authors' meanings and intentions rather than constructing my own meaning as a reader, I found myself wondering how the 'reading' of these texts was to be undertaken. The paper describes the technique I devised for this task and what I found it could reveal about the subtlety, complexity and multiple meanings that can often be discovered in children's stories.The potential power of such an approach to reading children's writing raises issues about the assessment of school writing.     

Activity genre: a new approach to successful inclusive teaching

In this paper, I examine why constructivist practice in mathematics education, while appealing to pre-service teachers' hearts and minds, does not necessarily deliver the empowered and liberated students that many educators and policy developers seem to take for granted. I argue that this may be so because constructivist practice, although it fosters the construction of important and necessary intellectual knowledges, reinforces power/ knowledge relationships of teacher authority that these students experienced at school. I draw on a post-structuralist analysis of my own constructivist practice in teacher education to show how investments of power/knowledge and subjectivity were played out to effectively maintain the status quo , severely limiting the students' experiences and appreciation of problem-solving or investigative ways-of-being in mathematics (education). In the conclusion, I suggest steps that might be taken in teacher education to help students recognise the powerful constitutive effects of discourses and to think about the kinds of classroom relationships that might be most engaging and enabling for learners.     

The Power of the Pen: Writing Mentorship and Chicana/o M.A. Students

This article draws on my experience as an adjunct professor in the Master's program of the Department of Mexican-American Studies at a large public university in California. Seeing my students’ struggles with writing, I conceived of a set of practices of writing mentorship anchored by a series of writing workshops held in Summer 2012. In this article, I document the pedagogy and content of these writing workshops in order to think about the unique struggles and opportunities Chicana/o Master's students face in the writing process and to provide an outline for other instructors interested in developing a practice of writing mentorship.     

Ethnographic locations: the geographies of feminist post-structural ethnography

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this paper explores three key elements of what I call the geography of ethnography. These include: (1) the spatial politics involved in constructing a research ‘site’; (2) the shifting location of the ethnographer in research practice; and (3) the liminal space of the focus group. Anchored in specific interactions in ‘the field,’ the paper demonstrates how integrating insights from cultural geography and feminist post-structuralism can yield new ethnographic understandings. I argue that educational ethnographers need to better account for the geography of ethnography in order to attend to the power-laden sphere of ethnographic research.     

Education as Humanism of the Other

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on‐going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida destabilizes fixed notions of the human subject and the institutions it founds (like philosophy and education). From Derrida's points of destabilization and through a differing but similar deconstructive stance, I also consider Gayatri Spivak's suggestive question ‘Who is not the subject of humanism?’ to provide another possible trajectory for intervention that educators might take. Departing from knowledge‐based conceptions of human subjectivity, Spivak urges educators to respond to their students in meaningful encounter with the ‘Other’ while Derrida suggests human beings might begin the difficult and complex task of re‐envisioning an altered humanism, a humanism founded on the call of the Other in institutional sites like education. By an engaged rereading of the texts of human subjectivity upon which human beings are written and by turning to respond to the face of the human beings in and outside their classrooms as a means of encountering the Other's humanity, I suggest that educators be the catalyst for changing what it means to be human and education the means by which we approach a humanism yet to be.     

Classroom stories of multicultural teaching and learning

This is the second of three papers based on a 20-month study of teaching and learning in a diverse classroom in a downtown community school in Toronto, Canada. The purpose of the research was to describe the details of teaching and learning in a multicultural classroom and to document successful strategies in working with immigrant and minority students. The three papers detail the process by which this focus on classroom life led to a critique of the literature and to a new way to think about multicultural teaching and learning, which I call 'narrative multiculturalism'. In this paper, I provide a sampling of stories that illustrate what contributed to my changing thinking about multiculturalism. Four short stories focus on a participant teacher in her school, in her classroom and in interaction with her students. The stories illuminate the complexity of multicultural teaching and qualities of narrative multiculturalism. In the analysis of the stories I explore multicultural understandings that developed from the experience of being in the classroom, being in relationship with a teacher participant, and our on-going dialogue.     

Learning to Write: Plowing and Hoeing,Labor and Essaying

In this paper Amanda Fulford addresses the issue of student writing in the university, and explores how the increasing dominance of outcome‐driven modes of learning and assessment is changing the understanding of what it is to write, what is expected of students in their writing, and how academic writing should best be supported. The starting point is the increasing use of what are termed “technologies” of writing — “handbooks” for students that address issues of academic writing — that systematize, and smooth the work of writing in, Fulford argues, an unhelpful way. This leads to a reconsideration of what it means to write in the university, and what it is to be a student who writes. Fulford explores etymologically the concept of “writing” and suggests that it might be seen metaphorically as physical labor. Writing as physical labor is explored further through the agricultural metaphors in Henry David Thoreau's Walden and through Stanley Cavell's reading of that text. In making a distinction between writing‐as‐plowing and writing‐as‐hoeing, Fulford argues that some technologies of writing deny voice rather than facilitate it, and she concludes by offering a number of suggestions for the teaching and learning of writing in the university that emphasize the value of being lost (in one's subject and one's work) and finding one's own way out. These “lessons” are illustrated with reference to Thoreau's text Walden and to American literature and film.     

Linguistic Features of Middle School Environmental Education Texts

The language used in environmental education texts has linguistic features that affect students' comprehension of concepts and their ability to envision solutions to environmental education problems. This paper shows what 143 middle school students focused on and what they failed to focus on when reading texts about biodiversity issues and identifies linguistic features of the texts that can account for this. Since much evaluation of students' knowledge of academic subjects, including environmental education, is done through reading and writing assignments, it is important to examine how environmental education texts present issues to students and what students write after reading environmental education texts. We suggest that features of texts such as abstract nouns and lack of explicit agents impede students' full comprehension of complex issues and obscure the causes and solutions to environmental problems. We present guidelines for teachers and materials writers to make abstract concepts more accessible to middle school students.     

Writing and pseudo‐writing from Internet‐based sources: implications for learning and assessment

In recent years, plagiarism has been on the increase across the Western world. This article identifies Internet access as a contributory cause of this trend and addresses the implications of readily available Internet sources for the teaching and assessment of writing in schools. The basis for the article is a previous study showing a wide incidence of plagiarism in the Internet‐based writing of students in three classes at upper secondary school level in Norway. I relate the students' choices to writing as a cognitive process and as a cultural practice. My basic assumption is that the students' writing is work. It is this work we have in mind when we relate writing to learning and when we assess students' skills on the basis of their written texts. Access to the Internet changes the premises for this work because writing can be replaced by ‘pseudo‐writing’. ‘Pseudo‐writing’ is a work reducing writing practice, which neither excludes nor coincides with what we traditionally associate with plagiarism in schools. The main point in this article is that when students have access to the Internet during essay writing, the result is unavoidably a product of both writing and pseudo‐writing. Internet access thus leads to greater uncertainty about the role writing plays in student learning and makes it more difficult to take written assignments into account in assessing students' school results and effort.     

Feminisms and science education: one science educator's exploration of her practice

This article relates stories of what I have learned by engaging in autobiographical analysis of my work as a science educator, over a seven year period. These stories can be described loosely as 'a play with three acts'. During each act I am played by a somewhat different feminist character who is not only influenced by her own pedagogical and philosophical underpinnings (feminisms) but, by her own disciplinary and institutional contexts. The first act presents an historical feminist perspective. The second act can be described as an emerging postmodern feminist story. The third act is a feminisms story which is where I currently locate my practice.     

What I ‘Know’: Literary Studies and the Teaching of English

This essay unfolds through a series of juxtapositions, involving storytelling and writing of a more analytical nature. In thinking about what I ‘know’ as an English teacher, my aim has been to present my ideas in a form that might do justice to the contradictions and complexities of my professional life, including my continuing efforts to negotiate a pathway between the rich particularities of the educational settings in which I have worked and my knowledge and values as an English teacher. My primary focus is on how my literary education has shaped and been shaped by my work as an English teacher vis-à-vis a devaluing of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge that has occurred through standards-based reforms. I attempt to make the standpoint from which I am writing an object of scrutiny, thus producing an account of what I ‘know’ that arises out of my work as an English teacher and returns to it as a necessary dimension of a politically committed praxis.     

Reading for Assessment: How teachers ascribe meaning and value to student writing

This paper is about how teachers read student writing in the context of criteria-based assessment as it currently operates in secondary schools in Queensland, Australia. Throughout, the term 'reading' is understood to encompass responding to students' writing and assessing it for grading purposes. In the paper, attention focuses on different types of knowledge that teachers have available to them, including what is referred to metaphorically as 'knowledge files'. Of special interest are the ways in which knowledge files can be accessed to open up (or close down) pathways for reading student writing produced for assessment. Also of interest is the interplay that occurs between stated assessment criteria, as supplied to students when they commence an assessable task, and other considerations that influence how teachers read and ascribe meaning and value to student papers.     

Towards controlling variables: A theoretical appraisal and a teachable result

This study examines the nature of discourse in which students talk with each other about what they think. Of particular interest are student-generated inquiry discussions in which the students engage in extended student-student-student interactions without much intervention from myself, the instructor. Data sources include audio- and video-tapes of class discussions, copies of student papers, and my reflective journals. Analysis involves interpretating utterances in terms of indicators of inquiry learning, student questioning, and collaborative sense-making. Two aspects of my practices seem to foster student-generated inquiry discussions: distributed authority and quietness. I no longer view myself as a facilitator of discussions but rather as an organizer of learning events in which my students share the authority to make decisions about what to say and do next. I practice 'quietness' by waiting before and after students talk (wait time), listening to the details of other people's thinking without interrupting them (attentive silence) and withholding my own opinions and understandings while assisting others in expressing theirs (reticence).