Language Arts - Volume 84, Issue 5, 2007

Looking at literacy teaching across classrooms at the urban Mill City Charter School provides an opportunity to explore the importance of coherence within a school. This work was informed by teachers’ voices and classroom observations over several months. Findings suggest that when teachers and school leaders share a common theory and vision for literacy education and work in the context of a professional learning community, teachers’ opportunities to act as knowledgeable professionals, and children’s opportunities for success and empowerment through literacy may be enhanced.

Using a case study approach, the authors describe how a teacher used the tools of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to teach her fifth grade English Language Learners how to use academic language to challenge school policies regarding recess. In reflecting on these data, we discuss the potential of SFL to support teachers in responding to current school reforms.

This article documents the experiences of a single working mother as she advocates for her daughter and attempts to negotiate a shifting educational landscape that she knows has dire consequences for her child. It also documents institutional responses to this mother’s attempts at advocacy while they also adapt to the shifting landscape that imposes a central position for high-stakes testing.

The author calls into question whether learning to read and write is an exclusively logical and systematic process in which the child moves step-by-step from part to whole, as it is frequently presented in “scientific” reading research. She examines research on different types of intuitive behavior and suggests parallels in the development of literacy. She ends with suggesting ways that teachers can help facilitate intuitive awareness in literacy for their students. Such changes, she argues, will assist students’ reading and challenge the top-down control of teaching.

The author explores this question by first examining the narrow assumptions about reading and literacy that shaped the NCLB law. The author then argues that studies of literacy incorporating a sociocultural stance provide a different lens through which we can understand reading and demonstrates how she uses such research to educate pre-service teachers. Such a localized, contextualized approach to literacy helps her students to mediate the law and the particular, local realities they find in their classrooms through action research and public forums for sharing their learning.

Educators, authors, and researchers share their perspectives on No Child Left Behind – what it should do, what it fails to do, and what we can do about it.

No Child Left Behind has become a permanent fixture in the world of education. This paper seeks to use the construct of figured worlds as described by Holland, Skinner, Lachicotte, & Cain, (1998) to examine the ways policy makers and teachers navigate the world of literacy education. Viewing policy makers and teachers as participants in discrete communities, the theoretical position of figured worlds also allows for the possibility of re-viewing teachers’ positions related to NCLB as open to change. The notions of improvisation and agency are used to make spaces for teachers to rearrange the boundaries of their figured worlds and begin to shape the world of teaching from outside as well as from within.

This article features writing of a group of teachers - including several different grade level classroom teachers from an elementary school plus the special education teacher and the counselor - who came together for one year to journal about their feelings, thoughts, experiences, and struggles within the political reality of American public education. These stories give voice to some of the major themes and frustrations that other teachers, researchers, parents, and children have concerning No Child Left Behind.

Because young people are the protagonists in their stories, and because they are written to give a sense of hope and inspiration for the possibilities life holds, children’s literature challenges the prevailing idea that it is success on reading tests that will determine success in life. The books that are reviewed in this section are selected because they focus on characters, young and grown, human and fantastic, who exhibit characteristics that cannot be measured on tests: courage, humanity, ingenuity, a sense of humor, and kindness. They tell readers of the power of family, of friendship, of most especially, of story, in their lives.

A teacher reflects on the desirability of a law that requires even recently arrived immigrant children who don’t speak English to take standardized tests as an indicator of their intelligence.