A Thrice-Learned Lesson from the Literate Life of a Five-Year-Old

This story about teacher transformation focuses on revisiting the same pivotal first-year teaching experience with a young child at three times throughout the author’s career. Each revisiting of this story leads to important lessons about language, literacy, and culture. The experience, based in the classroom and in the real world with a five-year-old boy, caused her to question Vygotsky’s notion of “the more knowledgeable other.”