English Education - Volume 40, Issue 2, 2008

Playmaking for Girls, founded by Rachel May and directed by Susie Spear Purcell, assembles a diverse ensemble of teaching artists committed to using playwriting and performance to help with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated teen girls to help them think and thus act for themselves’ (Freden, 2001, p. 70). These teaching artists, with the guidance of Synchronicity Performance Group, understand that literacy is a civil right for adjudicated youth. Their aim is to demonstrate that this kind of programming can allow these young women to re-enter schools, the workplace, and their communities with a sense of integrity and possibility.

This article discusses a professional development text by Ruby Payne that claims to inform teachers about the lives and minds of children from poor households. We use Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 2005; Rogers, Malancharuvil-Berkes, & Mosley, 2005) to examine how the author enlists readers’ participation in deficit discourses about the poor.

This life history study focuses on a group of European-American, female preservice teachers and how they have learned literacy across contexts within their lives. Specifically, I examined these teachers’literacy stories’ or stories they told about their own learning to read, write, and interpret texts, looking closely at how they used narrative to convey their agency as learners.

A critical reflection of the efficacy of my teaching and the pedagogies I embody is potentially important because under the continual threat of No Child Left Behind and some research that may devalue qualitative research, I want to support my students in their efforts, while offering them a well-rounded understanding of different pedagogies and possible applications.