Research in the Teaching of English - Volume 35, Issue 4, 2001

In this paper I examine the role of imagination in literacy learning using data collected over a 5-year period in my primary classrooms. My conception of imagination as a missing component in literacy instruction was raised by a child’s question about the importance of the read-aloud experience as a daily literacy practice. That question, and my failure to answer it effectively for my student, prompted me to undertake a close study of imagination and its role in discourse acquisition. The study progressed from a general look at how imagination makes itself visible in the work of children to a conceptual structure that proposes an inside-out theory of literacy learning. This structure presents identity, discourse appropriation, and what I am calling the authoring process as essential elements that are unified through the imaginative actions of students as they come into contact with the texts, tools, and props of each discipline. I argue that to be successful and meaningful to all, literacy teaching must begin and end with a focus on imagination.

Four case studies of proficient undergraduate writers from working-class backgrounds were conducted in the context of a course preparing sophomore and junior students to be tutors for first-year basic writers. It was found that, in contrast to much of the theorizing by and about working-class academics that emphasizes loss, a stronger theme in these students’ narratives of growing academic literacy was gaming. Students explained their experiences in ways that suggested a greater degree of agency, an awareness of themselves as writers in a contact zone, and a stance of tricking teachers on the way to producing acceptable texts. These findings suggest that writing in the contact zone of the classroom may require a double-voicedness that need not always be heard by instructors but is nevertheless important to students.

The purpose of this research was to examine both what it means to teach writing and what it means to write in a first-year university course in the history of science. More specifically, I investigated what students learned about writing when the focus was mainly on subject matter and only secondarily on writing and rhetoric. A number of converging methods of research were used to address this issue: audiotaping classroom discourse and taking field notes, interviewing students and collecting retrospective protocols about their responses to a writing assignment, and analyzing students’ texts. The analyses indicated that classroom discourse focused primarily on framing concepts that brought into focus different and conflicting conceptions of the scientific method and the ways authorship in history is colored by writers’ subjectivity and perspective taking. Although students’ interpretations of the writing assignment were not very detailed, the texts they wrote revealed some understanding of how to use comparisons as a tool for analysis in writing history, the importance of attending to context in examining a given historical phenomenon, and the extent to which writing history is both interpretive and rhetorical. Yet neither the focal students nor the other students participating in this study responded uniformly to the assignment. The data raise the question of whether disciplinary courses in writing provide an authentic alternative to the space general writing skills courses currently occupy, particularly if such classes exist as sites where students are introduced to critical thinking and argumentative writing in college.

Twice a year, in the May and November issues, RTE publishes a selected bibliography of recent research in the teaching of English. Most of the studies appeared during the six-month period preceding the compilation of the bibliography (June through December, 2000, for the present bibliography), but some studies that appeared earlier are occasionally included. The listing is selective; we make no attempt to include all research and research-related articles that appeared in the period under review. Comments on the bibliography and suggestions about items for inclusion may be directed to the bibliography editors. We encourage you to send your suggestions to [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected]. You may also submit comments or recommend publications through the Annotated Bibliography page of RTE’s World Wide Web site at http://www.ncte.org/rte/.