English Language Arts/ Teacher Training
Individual Goals and Academic Literacy: Integrating Authenticity and Explicitness
Beck presents a case study exploring tensions between explicit instruction in an era of standards and reform and authentic inquiry-based teaching and learning. She finds that making the study of literature and writing more relevant and personal has the potential to unlock learning for many so-called struggling readers and writers.
We’re Smarter Together: Building Professional Social Networks in English Education
Cercone’s article highlights a model for collaborations that affect communities universities and staff development opportunities.
Announcements
News of interest to CEE members and other teacher educators.
The Editorial We: What Is There about Change in This Issue of English Education?
Editor Michael Moore talks about the new administration in Washington and what it might mean for education. Introducing the articles in this issue of English Education he discusses what the Department of Education can learn from the work that these authors are doing.
NCTE Journals and the Teacher-Author: Who and What Gets Published
Intrigued by the paths by which K–12 classroom teachers come to publish articles about their work Anne Whitney undertook a project to clarify the extent and character of contributions classroom teachers have made to three journals that have become the standard-bearers for scholarship directly applicable to language arts classrooms: Language Arts at the elementary level Voices from the Middle at the middle school level and English Journal at the secondary level.
Book Walk: Works That Move Our Teaching Forward: Developing Personal Literacies: Writing through Reading
Central to any serious consideration about the development of a writing identity is the axiom that reading plays a fundamental role in such development. Nicholas Paley reinforces this principle by discussing three personal experiences with reading that were key in the formation of his own writing consciousness. The discussion of these experiences is organized in a non-sequential way in order to suggest the recursive intertwined nature of reading’s power in the forming of a writing identity.
Co-Learning Agreements in Research and Teaching: Another Approach to Collaboration in Teacher Education
This article looks at a research partnership between a high school English teacher and a university teacher educator focusing on the impact of their work of co-teaching two integrated courses in the university’s teacher education program. Findings from a study conducted during their third year of working together were used to revise the course work during the authors’ fourth year of collaboration.
Performing “Teacher”: A Case Study of a National Board Certified Teacher
In a longitudinal cross-disciplinary study of teachers’ experiences with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification process in Georgia discourse related to the notion of performance surfaced in the data in a variety of ways. A poststructural perspective suggests an explanation for how teacher performances are enabled and limited through what it means to be “teacher” in this society.
The Other Tradition: Populist Perspectives on Teaching Poetry, as Published in English Journal, 1912–2005
In 2005 we began a comprehensive review of every article published in English Journal on the topics of poetry and its teaching since its first issue in 1912. Did high school English teachers and college professors in 1914 or 1945 or 1963 see the teaching of poetry as we see it today? Did they have similar problems and concerns? Is the sense of history that directs our own practice today accurate or is a revision of that historical sense in order?
Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Literature-Based Discussions in a Cross-Institutional Network
This article examines how secondary English teachers serving as preservice mentors developed pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of literature discussions by participating in a cross-institutional teacher educator network. The joint creation of dialogic space in the English Educators’ Network provided a context where mentor teachers expanded their understandings of discussions to a dialogic view of literature-based discussion involving the interaction of reader text and multiple worldviews.
The Editorial We: Themed Issue on Creating Dialogic Spaces to Support Teachers’ Discussion Practices
Welcome to our second themed issue on Creating Dialogic Spaces to Support Teachers’ Discussion Practices. We are pleased to bring you this issue guest edited by Dorothea Anagnostopoulos and Emily R. Smith. Proposals for themed issues are sent to English Education’s Editorial Advisory Board. (The members of the Board are listed on the first page of each issue.) The Board is instrumental in selecting from among the number of proposals we’ve received. Individual contributions are further reviewed before they are accepted for inclusion. We’ve selected two more proposals to be developed in the last two years of our editorship.
Watching What We Say: Using Video to Learn about Discussions
This article considers the benefits and challenges of using English teacher candidates’ videotaped discussions of literature as tools to facilitate authentic and engaging discussions of literature. More specifically this article examines the use of teacher candidates’ videotaped discussions in a secondary English methods course to expand candidates’ conceptions of both the purposes of discussion in the secondary English classroom and the teacher’s role in them.
From Research to Practice: Recontextualizing the CLASS Program across Boundaries
As former middle and high school English teachers secondary English teacher educators and educational researchers the authors were challenged to negotiate the worlds of their research center and the various schools where they worked with teachers. They used the CLASS system to mediate meetings between researchers and teachers participating in the CELA Partnership for Literacy study and learned that research tools can become “boundary objects†that facilitate movement between discourses.
Creating Dialogic Spaces to Support Teachers’ Discussion Practices: An Introduction
This issue of English Education examines efforts to support English teachers’ development of classroom discussion practices. The featured articles explore how teacher educators and university researchers work with preservice and in-service teachers to create dialogic spaces within and across university teacher education and secondary English classrooms to support this development.
The Trouble Is English: Reframing English Studies in Secondary Schools
Examining the sociocultural hierarchies implicit in the ways in which texts are positioned in and out of classrooms may significantly broaden our ability to ask questions about texts and power—the heart of the English education mission “to envision a more democratic and just society” (Alsup Emig Pradl Tremmel & Yagelski 2006 p. 281). To ignore these positions risks a significant silence regarding the ways in which texts live in and shape the world.
The Legacy of English Education at NYU
With the retirements of John Mayher Marilyn Sobelman and Gordon Pradl the NYU program in English education marks the end of an era. To reflect on and celebrate that legacy we organized a session at appropriately the New York Convention of NCTE in November 2007. Featuring the retiring faculty and a random collection of our alumni the session was celebration reunion and sober reflection on the past present and future of NYU’s program.
The Editorial We: Where We Are Now
Editor Michael Moore notes that his five-year editorship of English Education is half over. Reflecting on what he’s seen and done so far he makes note of some immediate trends and then introduces the articles found in this issue.
Teaching and Learning Dialogically Organized Reading Instruction
There is substantial evidence that children and adolescents learn more in dialogic environments and have a deeper understanding of what they read. But looking beyond these measures for student performance (which are helpful in quelling the concerns of those who sound the drumbeat for standards-based instruction) we believe there are strong philosophical reasons for establishing classroom contexts in which students’ voices shape the direction of subsequent learning.
Supporting Teacher Educators’ Use of Hypermedia Video-Based Programs
This article provides critical feedback to teacher educators not only on general literacy and technology issues but also firsthand experiences implementing a hypermedia video-based environment in university courses. This article also presents some of the challenges that individuals might face when integrating hypermedia video-based tools such as Reading Classroom Explorer (RCE) into classrooms.
The Editorial We: What We Don’t Know
Michael Moore introduces the articles in this issue.
What We Know about English Language Arts Teachers: An Analysis of the 1999–2000 SASS and 2000–2001 TFS Databases
In my current role as an English educator I am alarmed to see too many promising beginning teachers leave the profession shortly after they start. While multiple small and/or case studies have examined the negative induction experiences of novice teachers the profession is still not successful in lowering the attrition rate.
Book Walk: Works That Move Our Teaching Forward Ancestors in Literacy: Sixteen Reading Researchers
Shaping the Reading Field offers the reader a compilation of short biographies chronologically and thematically arranged of 16 influential reading “pioneers.” English teachers and educators interested in undertaking and promoting research as professional development will find examples researcher narratives and guiding frameworks.
Seeing Like a Teacher
As coeditor of the April 2006 issue of this journal Tara Star Johnson wrote an eloquent essay in which she explored “the increasing bureaucratic pressure to mass-produce homogenize and monitor students” as manifested in the No Child Left Behind Act and the NCATE accreditation process. The story I wish to tell parallels Johnson’s and I hope adds to it in useful ways.
Beyond Strategies: Teacher Practice, Writing Process, and the Influence of Inquiry
Though it is now difficult to imagine any language arts teacher at any grade level not knowing about “the writing process” many of the teaching practices employed in classrooms in the name of said writing process suggest that teachers may have different understandings about what the writing process entails as a model of writing and learning to write conceptually or epistemologically.
Productive Tensions: Student Teachers’ Handling of Sociocognitive Conflicts during the Classroom Discussion
Student teachers often find themselves in a dilemma when leading classroom discussions about texts. These conflicts may not necessarily be a reflection of student behavior or classroom management. Instead they may be a sign of active engagement and students taking the challenge beyond their current knowledge level. These episodes of sociocognitve conflicts can be the “intellectual high point of the lesson” and have the potential of leading to true discussion and true learning.
The Moral of the Story: Agency in Preservice Teachers’ Literacy Stories
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.
Catching Butterflies
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.
What We All (Supposedly) Know about the Poor: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Ruby Payne’s “Framework”
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.
“Speaking” the Walk, “Speaking” the Talk: Embodying Critical Pedagogy to Teach Young Adult Literature
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.
The Editorial We: The Tools of our Trade
The key to this issue is in understanding how four outstanding writers use the tools of their trade; to help understand how individuals use language to manipulate social and cultural forces. The four authors in this issue challenge our readers to critically examine and question some of the pervasive discourses that we encounter as educators.
English Teacher Learning for New Times: Digital Video Composing as Multimodal Literacy Practice
Suzanne Miller examines the meaning of shifting notions of literacy for English education drawing on her work in a long-term digital video composing project and in an ELA teacher education class to look at teachers’ engagements with this newly accessible multimodal literacy practice. She argues that English teachers need support for new kinds of embodied multimodal learning in order to be prepared for teaching students in 21st-century classrooms.
Infusing Multimodal Tools and Digital Literacies into an English Education Program
In this article the authors stress the importance of using interactive Web 2.0 tools within methods courses and practicum sites by reflexively noting how and why these tools function to achieve certain rhetorical purposes and foster constructivist learning.
The Arts, New Literacies and Multimodality
The arts multimodality and new literacies studies each with its own distinct principles together can redefine literacy and what constitutes being literate. To recognize the roles that each of these fields plays in literacy necessitates a cultural shift in reading interpreting creating and responding to a range of multimedia messages. The everyday literacies that learners bring to the classroom blur the lines between traditional literacy and unpredictable literacy which promotes reading and writing through multimedia to create morphed and altered texts.
The Editorial We: Themed Issue on the Arts, New Literacies, and Multimodality
Guest Coeditors Jerome C. Harste and Peggy Albers introduce English Education’s first themed issue on the Arts New Literacies and Multimodality.
Imagining New Possibilities with Our Partners in the Arts
The authors believe that teachers who have deep knowledge about different arts disciplines can and should work together to create curriculum that fosters inquiry about life itself rather than the mastery of fragmented knowledge and skills. Fine arts teachers know something different from what ELA teachers know. So curriculum that is thoughtfully planned to make the most of multiple arts disciplines enables students to develop deep emotive intensity intentionality as learners and useful insights into human experience.
Writing Out of the Unexpectedx
In this tale of a single event told from the perspectives of multiple narrators Erick Gordon Kerry McKibbin Lalitha Vasudevan and Ruth Vinz write about their work together on a Student Press Initiative (SPI) writing project at Horizon Academy the Department of Correction/Department of Education high school at Rikers Island Jail in New York City. They focus on an incident that troubles them and makes them rethink the very foundations of their project.
Composing Storied Ground
David Schaafsma Gian Pagnucci Rob Wallace and Patricia Lambert Stock narrate their own linked academic histories as narrative inquirers.
Composing Narratives for Inquiry
The guest coeditors in this issue David Schaafsma and Ruth Vinz discuss their understanding of stories as research. Stories are our way of coming to terms with the conditions situations and questions in education.
Storytelling as Scholarship
Sondra Perl Beth Counihan Tim McCormack and Emily Schnee help us see how the teller and tale like the dancer and the dance are inseparable. Writerly intentions balance scholarly concerns in tales they share from their work.
The Editorial We: Focus on Narrative Inquiry
Editor Michael T. Moore introduces the theme of narrative inquiry and his two guest coeditors both former editors of English Education.
Living in, Learning from, Looking Back, Breaking through in the English Language Arts Methods Course: A Case Study of Two Preservice Teachers
Preservice teachers often enter English language arts teacher preparation courses with untapped fears of writing and teaching writing due to null or bad experiences as K-12 students. In this article I follow two preservice elementary teachers through a semester long methods course and reveal how they developed positive clear images of themselves as writing teachers through active reflection and engagement in the course.
Book Walk: Works That Move Our Teaching Forward: Invitations to Reflect: English Language Learners from Multiple Vantage Points
My goal of reading this particular young adult piece with a group of graduate students is to better understand the experience of what it means to be an immigrant and to explore how educators across diverse content areas should invite English language learning (ELL) students into their classrooms.
The Space Between
Over the last two years the work of the CEE-GS has included the establishment of the organization participation in the CEE leadership summit in May 2005 a panel discussion about PhD student issues at last year’s NCTE conference and the establishment of a CEE-GS executive committee. Potential future pursuits include the development of a CEE-GS strand or forum at the NCTE national convention representation on various NCTE and CEE committees web-based communication among all members across the country and publishing opportunities to discuss the organization and the issues it addresses.
Expressive Language and the Art of English Teaching: Theorizing the Relationship between Literature and Narrative
How do teachers in diverse classrooms enact a transactional mode of literary response in their orchestration of classroom conversations about literature? This paper proposes that a theory of expressive language is central to answering this question and that the discourse genre of oral narratives may hold critically importance in accomplishing this challenge.
The Editorial We: Stories and Storytelling
The English Education editor introduces the articles of this issue all of which explore the topic of oral and written narratives.
Book Walk: Works That Move Our Teaching Forward: Helping Students Understand Long-Rang Planning through an Integration of Texts
Between 2002 and 2005 we worked together in a teaching block of two combined methods and instructional strategies courses in our graduate level initial certification program in English education. Each year we continually revised the instructional experiences we planned for our students based on our ongoing formative and summative assessments of their growth as reflective educators.
Expanding Literacies: Teachers’ Inquiry Research and Multigenre Texts
This article describes the results of an inquiry/multigenre project undertaken by students in a literacy foundations course. The project’s initial pedagogical goal was to provide pre- and in-service teachers with multiple and engaging opportunities to read and write in areas of their interests.
On Being Unreasonable: NCTE, CEE, and Political Action
This article analyzes current positions related to political action and highlights the increasing need for public intellectual and political activism as an integral part of organizational policy.
The Editorial We: Discussing Our Political and Teaching Livesx
As the director of a brand new National Writing Project site I was apprehensive about what I could expect from myself the teachers the co-directors and from the work we would do together over an intensive five-week writing institute. It was a new venture for us all.While my purpose here is not to chronicle the evolution of our group over the five weeks we were together I do want to discuss one particular outcome of the Summer Institute because I believe it has implications for all of us who work with teachers. I have come to think of this as the evolution of the politics of voice in the lives of teachers. Through ongoing and sustained collaborative writing research and discussion the fifteen teachers of the Summer Institute called upon funds of knowledge reclaimed the voices of their teaching lives and disclaimed the common public sentiment which discredits the role of these very voices in developing an agenda for reforming education.
Changing the Way We Think in English Education: A Conversation in the Universal Barbershop
This essay extends Robert Yagelskiߣs discuss sustainability; in teacher education by examining how the processes of Cartesian-Newtonian thinking limit the ability of both standards reformers and English educators to think in genuinely new ways and to conceive of real change. The essay includes a discussion of how standards reform since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 has been based on arguments and ways of thinking similar to reform measures in the early twentieth century. The essay also discusses four areas of professional practice toward which English teacher educators might look for guidance in initiating real change. One key point of reference is the work of David Bohm a physicist and philosopher of science whose critique of scientific thinking represents a unique way of understanding how to understand and reconfigure approaches to educational reform in the twenty-first century.
Cultivating an Inquiry Stance in English Education: Rethinking the Student Teaching Seminar
We argue that the student teaching seminar a co-requisite to student teaching may best be construed as a introduction to a teacher learning community and to inquiry-oriented professional development. Using a qualitative case study design and discourse analysis we examine 60 Teaching Inquiries (TIs) occurring in student teaching seminars over a three semester period to better understand (a) the issues English teacher candidates raise in TIs and (b) how the field of English education manifests itself in the inquiry process. Our analysis finds that TIs reflect complex issues resting both in and out of traditional notions of The inquiry process enables seminar participants to develop the field’s knowledge-base and deepen their own pedagogical and ideological commitments. By complicating and situating English education discussions bring together the world of the classroom and the world of the university paving the way for mutual learning.
Aesthetic Flow Exerience in the Teaching of Preservice Language Arts Teachers
This interview study with 19 preservice teachers who were enrolled in a teacher apprenticeship program at a major southeastern U.S. university uses Dewey’s (1938/1988) concept of an experience and Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) concept of flow to investigate how participants identify and describe aesthetic flow experiences both inside and outside school settings. The researchers two instructors of English education suggest that recognizing aesthetic flow experience in the classroom sets the stage for pre-service teachers to have enriched notions of what counts as learning and knowledge. Further we posit that these enriched notions of knowledge and learning will point to ways of appreciating the diverse settings activities and experiences that secondary students bring with them to school.
Book Walk: Works That Move Our Teaching Forward: Reading the Topography of the Flat World
So what have you been reading lately? Such a casual question“when asked of colleagues in English education”often gives way to some very interesting responses. Though this inquiry often yields one or two titles which evoke nods of instant recognition the depth of the professional conversation is enhanced when at least one of the titles startles the inquirer. John Harmon past president of the New York State English Council provides just such a startling response with his discussion of a book that many readers would consider a text about business and commerce. He calls upon his thirty years in English education both as a teacher and a curriculum coordinator linking his main text to a constellation of works which provide ready recognition to professionals in the field.
Achieving Balance in Graduate Progreams: Negotiating Best Practices
Dealing with this recurrent nearly archetypal issue of finding balance between the practical and the theoretical in graduate programs is the task of English language arts educators and the requisite activity of graduate students in our field. The relevance of best practices in instruction is clear but that is not the end goal of graduate school. Instead graduate schools must help practitioners rediscover their curiosity and their professional imagination. English educators must create the time and space for inservice teachers who are our graduate students to discern the value and relevance of tying best practices to theory and theory to effective practice.
Reconstructing English Education for the 21st Century: A Report on the CEE Summit
The coeditors of the special Summit issue of English Education provide the context for the ’crucial moment’ that prompted the Conference on English Education (CEE) to take up the task of rethinking issues related to the preparation and continuing professional development of English language arts teachers and teacher educators. The process of developing and enacting the collaborative inquiries before during and after this historic event are detailed as well as an initial analysis of the significance of the Summit undertaking and products.
Real Teaching for Real Diversity: Preparing English Language Arts Teachers for the 21st-Century Classrooms
Attempting to address the following central question How might literacy educators learn to recognize promote and capitalize upon the rich cultural resources of students in diverse classrooms in the United States? the authors provide a list of belief statements to serve as the foundation for positive changes in the ways in which the literacy needs of diverse learners could be met. The conclusion is that we had better support the learning of all of our peoples if they are to participate meaningfully in our place. The future truly is all Accuse.
Extending the Conversation: New Technologies, New Literacies, and English Education
The authors contend that new technologies have developed new literacies and new ways of thinking that are reshaping our lives. In the rapidly changing world they argue these new literacies and their practices must become central to effective English education programs. To frame their argument they introduce the notion of technological pedagogical content knowledge to bridge the perceived binary of technology and English education. Throughout they analyze how reflection on new technologies and integration of them into coursework for specific purposes is an educational political and even a moral imperative.
Candidate and Program Assessment in English Education: A Framework for Discussion and Debate
This article is a summary of our working group’s continued discourse from the CEE Summit where our discussions focused on English teacher candidate competencies program assessment the Standards and Guidelines and NCTE’s roles and responsibilities. For the purpose of this special issue of English Education our group chose to focus more specifically on issues related to candidate and program assessment and NCTE’s responsibilities in guiding our field in these areas.
Understanding the Relationship between Research and Teaching
This piece was guided by the framing question “How can CEE help its constituencies the broader public and policymakers understand the relationship between research and teaching?” The authors consider the usefulness of a range of empirical traditions; explore how expert language arts teachers read conduct and use research; and reflect on the role of preservice teacher education in fostering understandings of published research and providing preparation and practice in the conduct of teacher research.
Are Methods Enough? Situating English Education Programs within the Multiple Settings of Learning to Teach
In this piece the authors argue that we should reconsider several critical programmatic issues including the need for greater program coherence the continuing dilemma of the gulf between schools and universities and both the promise and the problems of student cohorts. In addition the authors offer a brief review of the current political climate that questions the value of pedagogical coursework. They urge us to reconsider the value of course work and field experiences and to look more closely at the observational component in an effort to make it more meaningful. They also call for more investigations into the nature and effects of teacher preparation “research that can help us and our students articulate the ways our work has import especially in these new and challenging times.
Reconstructing English Education in the 21st Century: The Action Agenda
CEE Chair Suzanne M. Miller provides an overview of the CEE Leadership and Policy Summit articles that focuses on next steps. She asks CEE members individually and collectively to take up the calls for action across the pieces’ for research pedagogical scholarship program excellence and activist participation in policy and politics.
The State of English Education and a Vision for Its Future: A Call to Arms
Elaborating three major dimensions of our profession the authors argue the need for critically literate citizens and the urgent need for English teacher educators to prepare teachers who envision that as their key professional responsibility. The authors contextualize this task within the current political and social climate in which distortion of language in civic discourse threatens to undermine not only our profession but also American public life and democracy.
Becoming Centered: CEE Membership and Program Development
The authors argue that if CEE is to nurture and grow its membership in the coming years we will need a more focused purpose related to the central mission of the organization: ’the effective education and development of students and professionals in English language arts education.’ To that end the authors offer several specific recommendations for CEE which could serve primarily the ’inner circle’ or heart of CEE membership.
The Editorial We: Discussing Teaching Concepts
The editor and this issue’s coeditor preview the articles in the April issue.
What Kind of Teacher Will I Be? Creating Spaces for Beginning Teachers’ Imagined Roles
This qualitative study focuses on ten graduate students in an English education master;’s program who were enrolled in a course that I taught on teaching literature in the secondary school.
Teacher Quality: The Perspectives of NCTE Members
In the often contentious debate over the state of American education there is considerable agreement supported by research that teacher quality is a critical factor in student learning.
A High School English Teacher’s Developing Multicultural Pedagogy
Literature often has been considered a quick and easy way to bring multicultural perspectives into the ELA classroom. Yet for effectual change significant shifts in pedagogy prove more powerful than surface additions. In this article we focus on how a college of education’s multicultural mission statement intersects with one teacher’s life story.
Book Walk: Works That Move Our Teaching Forward: Exploring Texts That Engage Students and Teachers in Poetry
Book Walk: Works That Move Our Teaching Forward: Exploring Texts That Engage Students and Teachers in Poetry English Education Vol. 38 No. 3 April 2006 Five preservice teachers each review a book on teaching poetry a book they had previously presented to their peers as part of a literature circle.
Imagining the Possibilities in Multimodal Curriculum Design
Evolution of the “old page” or written hardcopy texts to the “new” (Kress 2003) or electronic page means that today’s learners have experience with reading a variety of texts.
Forging Pedagogical Paths to Multiple Ways of Knowing
The literacy beliefs teachers hold influence the kinds of experiences they make available to their students (Myers 1996). As visual modes become increasingly central to communication (Kress 2004; New London Group 1996) it is essential to provide preservice teachers opportunities to expose and challenge beliefs that privilege only alphabetic texts.
Bowling Together: Cultivating Communities of Practice in English and Social Studies Teacher Education
In his sociological study Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) Robert Putnam argues that Americans need to “reconnect to one another” and both metaphorically and literally go bowling together (p. 28).
Negotiating Points of Divergence in the Literacy Classroom: The Role of Narrative and Authorial Readings in Students’ Talking and Thinking about Literature
By examining a class discussion between an eighth grade student and her teacher around the reading of a literary text my intent in this paper is to further the discussion around one of the central issues in English education today – the inquiry around whether it is more productive to teach literature by first connecting students’ cultural narratives with the text and so provide them with opportunities to resist what teachers and others might see as the “right”; reading or whether to begin with an authorial reading which requires students to recognize the codes and conventions the author used in creating the text providing a fuller more complete engagement with literature.
Tensions between Traditions: The Role of Contexts in Learning to Teach
In this article we report a study of a teacher Jimmy making the transition from his university teacher education program to his first job. We explore what we characterize as tensions between traditions in his effort to develop a conception to inform his teaching of high school English.