English Education - Volume 45, Issue 4, 2013

This article describes an adolescent’s development of multiliterate and multilingual writing practices and identities. It further explores how a literacy teacher enacted a writing pedagogy of multiliteracies that assisted the youth in building writing practices and identities. Data include interviews of the young woman and her teacher, classroom observations, and literacy artifacts produced and used by the adolescent. These data are analyzed using theories of identity, positioning, communities of practice, and multiliteracies. Findings include that the youth developed her writing practices and identities over time and across multiple contexts of multiliterate and multilingual practices. Within and across these communities, the dimensions of apprenticeship, positioning, and recruitment of multiliterate and multilingual repertoires were essential to the youth’s development of writing practices and identities. These dimensions were also central to the literacy teacher’s enactment of a writing pedagogy of multiliteracies. The article asserts that attending to the processes through which young people develop their multiliterate and multilingual repertoires and identities can assist educators in creating supportive literacy environments for youth. It offers recommendations for literacy scholars and educators in this regard.

In recent years the field of literacy education and research has seen an increased attention to disciplinary literacy instruction—the teaching of discipline-specific and valued ways of reading, writing, knowing, and communicating knowledge. This article is about disciplinary literacy, specifically disciplinary reading as it is understood by preservice teachers of English language arts. Data were collected from two cohorts of preservice English teachers (2010–2011; 2011–2012). Qualitative content analysis of preservice teachers’ writings and interview data suggests that “reading” in the discipline of English encompasses a range of approaches to texts. It can mean paying attention to the language and form of the text, or exploring the social and cultural worlds within the work. It can also mean applying different interpretive lenses, such as the lens of race, class, gender, or culture. Much of the data also contained preservice teachers’ ideas for and concerns about teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents. Insight into preservice teachers’ perspectives on disciplinary literacy can support the work of teacher educators, student teaching supervisors, and mentor teachers.

This article extends the conversation on English education as preparation for democratic participation. The author journeys through a cycle of action research, analyzing one classroom case study to improve her practice of curricular negotiation in a methods of teaching writing course.