Taking a functionalist small stories approach, we conceptualize and study teacher identity as the... more Taking a functionalist small stories approach, we conceptualize and study teacher identity as theatrical performance of self. From that perspective, we ask: What identity work do small stories do for teachers in literacy classrooms? How do interlocuters use available resources – including curricular resources, small-scale discursive resources, and circulating master narratives/storylines about “how the world is” – to accomplish that identity work through small stories? Analyzing a focal small story event in an urban U.S. middle school English classroom, we show how a teacher a) mobilized human and nonhuman story characters to perform being “owner” of the classroom “territory,” b) appropriated a micro-discursive routine in the classroom, the IRE sequence, to accomplish that performance of self, and c) construed a reality, a naturalized set of assumptions about the social order of the classroom, by recruiting assumptions available in more broadly circulating cultural “master narratives” about teachers, students and classroom discipline. Combining layers of small story analysis allows us to trace teacher identity through locally enacted, interactionally negotiated performances.
Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today... more Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.
Practices of Biblical reading and interpretation are central to the literacy lives of those who c... more Practices of Biblical reading and interpretation are central to the literacy lives of those who call themselves evangelical Christians. More than one third of the United States population identifies as evangelical Christians, making evangelical Biblicism a pervasive and influential—if under-the-radar—literacy practice in U.S. life. Scholars of American evangelicalism have traditionally understood belief in the Bible as authoritative as one defining characteristic of the evangelical subculture in the United States. However, scholars interested in language, interpretation, and textual practices are only beginning to map out the contours of the literacy practices and ideologies entailed by American evangelical Biblicism. Critically reviewing scholarship across history, anthropology, religious studies, and sociology, I characterize evangelical Biblicism as an interpretive tradition mediated by a complex set of sociocultural practices and textual ideologies. From this standpoint, Biblicism involves the unceasing work of establishing and sustaining a transitive relationship among biblical text, right beliefs, and righteous actions. This set of relations gives rise to an interpretive tension that evangelicals have historically navigated between the necessity of interpretive freedom, allowing the Bible to live anew for each generation of believers (presence in the world), and the unchanging Truth of God’s word (the purity of the Word). Evangelicals dialogically mediate the transitivity among text, belief, and action—and attendant tensions between the purity of the Biblical Word and its presence in the world—in textual communities. Bibles themselves function as mediating literacy artifacts and articles of commerce in a global evangelical print culture. This understanding American evangelical Biblicism as literate practice raises new questions and issues for literacy scholarship, related to how young people are hailed into evangelical Biblicist traditions and practices; how evangelical Biblicist traditions, practices, and ideologies travel around, across and beyond textual communities; and how evangelical Biblicism shapes teaching and learning in schools.
Our first issue illustrated how literacies travel and shift in value and meaning as they move int... more Our first issue illustrated how literacies travel and shift in value and meaning as they move into and across new settings. In that spirit, the research and scholarship in this issue happens at multiple disciplinary sites, around a range of materials and interventions, and across the lifespan. The articles touch upon several value-laden questions: In what ways might scripted curriculum be translated into meaningful literacy and learning practices through collaborative interactions between students and teachers? How do young readers engage graphics used in texts to mobilize meaning? To what extent can appreciation for linguistic diversity be learned through direct instruction? How can systems of mentoring and peerreview facilitate graduate students' learning to publish in the sciences? And how might critical literacy scholars in education tackle thorny questions related to their own children's educational opportunities? Across these articles, the teaching and learning of English is documented in PreK through university settings, in individuals' ongoing literacy development, in the work of sponsoring agents, and in school-based, disciplinary conventions.
Although mounting research evidence suggests that dialogic teaching correlates with student achie... more Although mounting research evidence suggests that dialogic teaching correlates with student achievement gains and with high levels of student engagement, little work in English education addresses the challenge of supporting new teachers in developing dialogically organized instructional practices. In a design-based study, we examine a curricular intervention designed to cultivate development of dialogically organized instructional practices, defined as instruction that provides students with frequent opportunities to engage with core disciplinary concepts through sustained, substantive dialogue. The curriculum invited secondary English teacher candidates to repeatedly enact dialogically organized instruction and to receive feedback from peers using video and Web 2.0-based technologies across a year-long student teaching internship. In English methods seminars, eighty-seven participants from two cohorts generated over 300 five-minute video clips, associated planning documents, transcripts, and reflections. We coded documents for student participation, evidence of planning for dialogic instruction, and classroom discourse variables associated in previous research with greater student engagement in substantive classroom interaction. We find that those who planned for dialogic instruction using dialogic tools were significantly more likely to have higher ratios of student utterances in relation to teacher utterances. The use of dialogic tools-conceptualized as those practical tools mobilized in teacher planning and practice with potential to mediate dialogically organized instruction in a given classroom situation-explained more of the variance in student participation than did any other factor. Attention to such tools may help English teacher candidates enact dialogically organized instructional practices.
Background/Context: This paper theorizes and describes a program-wide pedagogical design for teac... more Background/Context: This paper theorizes and describes a program-wide pedagogical design for teacher preparation that addresses central problems related to supporting beginning teacher candidates in designing engaging classroom interactions in and across diverse contexts.
Five questions guided a case study exploring the relationship between oral narrative and discussi... more Five questions guided a case study exploring the relationship between oral narrative and discussion in middle school literature study: (a) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how can overall literature instruction be characterized? (b) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how well do students achieve in the focal classroom? (c) What, if any, are the links between oral narrative and discussion? (d) If discussion and narrative co-occur, what sorts of oral narratives do narrators tell in discussions? and (e) If discussion and narrative co-occur, how can we characterize the overlap in terms of interaction? In the frequent conversational narrative discussions, where oral narrative and discussion discourse overlapped, teacher and students used various kinds of oral narrative genres to prime, sustain, ratify, and amplify discussion.
This essay responds to the problem that sociocultural literacy research has failed to adequately ... more This essay responds to the problem that sociocultural literacy research has failed to adequately theorize individual literacy learners as moral agents with the capacity to produce harm or good to themselves and others. Building from the rhetorical construct of dialogism, this inquiry explores how the early ethical thought of Mikhail Bakhtin can contribute an "ethics of answerability" to sociocultural literacy studies. Explicating and extending a more established perspective in classroom literacy study-what I call an "ethics of difference"-my reading of Bakhtin's early work offers a shift in focus from linguistic difference to the self who responds, or answers, to difference. An ethics of answerability highlights the unique and heavy responsibilities that individuals face as they respond to others in everyday interaction and in textual production. Proposed in light of this theoretical orientation are questions to guide inquiry in classroom-based sociocultural literacy research. akhtinian dialogism has served as an influential conceptual tool in recent sociocultural studies of literacy, allowing researchers to understand the "ethical" in social and rhetorical terms. However, the status of individuated selves as moral agents within dialogic contexts remains unelaborated in sociocul-tural literacy theory. I will argue that Mikhail Bakhtin's theme of answerability-as explained in his earliest writings, which have been largely ignored by literacy researchers-affords the very insight into moral personhood missing from current sociocultural perspectives on language and literacy. Answerability, as I interpret it, has much to contribute to researchers' and educators' understandings of individual students as responsive and responsible moral agents in the social contexts of literacy classrooms. Thus I articulate how a turn toward the ethical might be conceptualized in sociocultural literacy research and theory.
This paper sets out to (a) Theorize teacher identity as fluid, dynamic, interactionally emergent ... more This paper sets out to (a) Theorize teacher identity as fluid, dynamic, interactionally emergent in situ, (b) Operationalize a dialogic narrative approach for the study of teacher identity on these terms, and (c) Account for the locally unfolding process of teacher identity, over short periods of time, in relation to curricular content. We pursue the inquiry through multi-layered small story analysis of a narrative, "My Worst Mistake, " told by a veteran English language arts teacher in the Midwestern United States. This paper begins with the premise that teachers' identities are accomplished through the various interactions that constitute their working lives: in classrooms with students; in the halls with other teachers and administrators; in meetings and conversations with parents; and at conferences interacting with a broader community of professionals -to give but a few examples. Since most time in teachers' working lives is spent in face-to-face interactions with students, we believe that classroom interaction offers a promising site (though by no means the only site) for scrutinizing how teacher identity is interactionally shaped. Much previous work in teacher education makes claims about teacher identity based on a range of data, including elicited and observed narratives, and drafts accounts (often themselves narratives) which set out to represent teacher identity. While this work valuably Requests for further information should be directed to
This article presents the results of three separate studies of literacy teaching and learning in ... more This article presents the results of three separate studies of literacy teaching and learning in the U.S. that explore the social functions of language, specifically focused on the identity development of literacy learners and teachers. Each study offers a detailed account of how literate identities are constructed and enacted and the positive and negative consequences that occur for teachers and students when they are enacted. Taken together, these three studies demonstrate how teachers" and students" understandings of identity can promote or inhibit literacy teaching and learning.
Taking a functionalist small stories approach, we conceptualize and study teacher identity as the... more Taking a functionalist small stories approach, we conceptualize and study teacher identity as theatrical performance of self. From that perspective, we ask: What identity work do small stories do for teachers in literacy classrooms? How do interlocuters use available resources – including curricular resources, small-scale discursive resources, and circulating master narratives/storylines about “how the world is” – to accomplish that identity work through small stories? Analyzing a focal small story event in an urban U.S. middle school English classroom, we show how a teacher a) mobilized human and nonhuman story characters to perform being “owner” of the classroom “territory,” b) appropriated a micro-discursive routine in the classroom, the IRE sequence, to accomplish that performance of self, and c) construed a reality, a naturalized set of assumptions about the social order of the classroom, by recruiting assumptions available in more broadly circulating cultural “master narratives” about teachers, students and classroom discipline. Combining layers of small story analysis allows us to trace teacher identity through locally enacted, interactionally negotiated performances.
Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today... more Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.
Practices of Biblical reading and interpretation are central to the literacy lives of those who c... more Practices of Biblical reading and interpretation are central to the literacy lives of those who call themselves evangelical Christians. More than one third of the United States population identifies as evangelical Christians, making evangelical Biblicism a pervasive and influential—if under-the-radar—literacy practice in U.S. life. Scholars of American evangelicalism have traditionally understood belief in the Bible as authoritative as one defining characteristic of the evangelical subculture in the United States. However, scholars interested in language, interpretation, and textual practices are only beginning to map out the contours of the literacy practices and ideologies entailed by American evangelical Biblicism. Critically reviewing scholarship across history, anthropology, religious studies, and sociology, I characterize evangelical Biblicism as an interpretive tradition mediated by a complex set of sociocultural practices and textual ideologies. From this standpoint, Biblicism involves the unceasing work of establishing and sustaining a transitive relationship among biblical text, right beliefs, and righteous actions. This set of relations gives rise to an interpretive tension that evangelicals have historically navigated between the necessity of interpretive freedom, allowing the Bible to live anew for each generation of believers (presence in the world), and the unchanging Truth of God’s word (the purity of the Word). Evangelicals dialogically mediate the transitivity among text, belief, and action—and attendant tensions between the purity of the Biblical Word and its presence in the world—in textual communities. Bibles themselves function as mediating literacy artifacts and articles of commerce in a global evangelical print culture. This understanding American evangelical Biblicism as literate practice raises new questions and issues for literacy scholarship, related to how young people are hailed into evangelical Biblicist traditions and practices; how evangelical Biblicist traditions, practices, and ideologies travel around, across and beyond textual communities; and how evangelical Biblicism shapes teaching and learning in schools.
Our first issue illustrated how literacies travel and shift in value and meaning as they move int... more Our first issue illustrated how literacies travel and shift in value and meaning as they move into and across new settings. In that spirit, the research and scholarship in this issue happens at multiple disciplinary sites, around a range of materials and interventions, and across the lifespan. The articles touch upon several value-laden questions: In what ways might scripted curriculum be translated into meaningful literacy and learning practices through collaborative interactions between students and teachers? How do young readers engage graphics used in texts to mobilize meaning? To what extent can appreciation for linguistic diversity be learned through direct instruction? How can systems of mentoring and peerreview facilitate graduate students' learning to publish in the sciences? And how might critical literacy scholars in education tackle thorny questions related to their own children's educational opportunities? Across these articles, the teaching and learning of English is documented in PreK through university settings, in individuals' ongoing literacy development, in the work of sponsoring agents, and in school-based, disciplinary conventions.
Although mounting research evidence suggests that dialogic teaching correlates with student achie... more Although mounting research evidence suggests that dialogic teaching correlates with student achievement gains and with high levels of student engagement, little work in English education addresses the challenge of supporting new teachers in developing dialogically organized instructional practices. In a design-based study, we examine a curricular intervention designed to cultivate development of dialogically organized instructional practices, defined as instruction that provides students with frequent opportunities to engage with core disciplinary concepts through sustained, substantive dialogue. The curriculum invited secondary English teacher candidates to repeatedly enact dialogically organized instruction and to receive feedback from peers using video and Web 2.0-based technologies across a year-long student teaching internship. In English methods seminars, eighty-seven participants from two cohorts generated over 300 five-minute video clips, associated planning documents, transcripts, and reflections. We coded documents for student participation, evidence of planning for dialogic instruction, and classroom discourse variables associated in previous research with greater student engagement in substantive classroom interaction. We find that those who planned for dialogic instruction using dialogic tools were significantly more likely to have higher ratios of student utterances in relation to teacher utterances. The use of dialogic tools-conceptualized as those practical tools mobilized in teacher planning and practice with potential to mediate dialogically organized instruction in a given classroom situation-explained more of the variance in student participation than did any other factor. Attention to such tools may help English teacher candidates enact dialogically organized instructional practices.
Background/Context: This paper theorizes and describes a program-wide pedagogical design for teac... more Background/Context: This paper theorizes and describes a program-wide pedagogical design for teacher preparation that addresses central problems related to supporting beginning teacher candidates in designing engaging classroom interactions in and across diverse contexts.
Five questions guided a case study exploring the relationship between oral narrative and discussi... more Five questions guided a case study exploring the relationship between oral narrative and discussion in middle school literature study: (a) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how can overall literature instruction be characterized? (b) Relative to similar classrooms in a large-scale study, how well do students achieve in the focal classroom? (c) What, if any, are the links between oral narrative and discussion? (d) If discussion and narrative co-occur, what sorts of oral narratives do narrators tell in discussions? and (e) If discussion and narrative co-occur, how can we characterize the overlap in terms of interaction? In the frequent conversational narrative discussions, where oral narrative and discussion discourse overlapped, teacher and students used various kinds of oral narrative genres to prime, sustain, ratify, and amplify discussion.
This essay responds to the problem that sociocultural literacy research has failed to adequately ... more This essay responds to the problem that sociocultural literacy research has failed to adequately theorize individual literacy learners as moral agents with the capacity to produce harm or good to themselves and others. Building from the rhetorical construct of dialogism, this inquiry explores how the early ethical thought of Mikhail Bakhtin can contribute an "ethics of answerability" to sociocultural literacy studies. Explicating and extending a more established perspective in classroom literacy study-what I call an "ethics of difference"-my reading of Bakhtin's early work offers a shift in focus from linguistic difference to the self who responds, or answers, to difference. An ethics of answerability highlights the unique and heavy responsibilities that individuals face as they respond to others in everyday interaction and in textual production. Proposed in light of this theoretical orientation are questions to guide inquiry in classroom-based sociocultural literacy research. akhtinian dialogism has served as an influential conceptual tool in recent sociocultural studies of literacy, allowing researchers to understand the "ethical" in social and rhetorical terms. However, the status of individuated selves as moral agents within dialogic contexts remains unelaborated in sociocul-tural literacy theory. I will argue that Mikhail Bakhtin's theme of answerability-as explained in his earliest writings, which have been largely ignored by literacy researchers-affords the very insight into moral personhood missing from current sociocultural perspectives on language and literacy. Answerability, as I interpret it, has much to contribute to researchers' and educators' understandings of individual students as responsive and responsible moral agents in the social contexts of literacy classrooms. Thus I articulate how a turn toward the ethical might be conceptualized in sociocultural literacy research and theory.
This paper sets out to (a) Theorize teacher identity as fluid, dynamic, interactionally emergent ... more This paper sets out to (a) Theorize teacher identity as fluid, dynamic, interactionally emergent in situ, (b) Operationalize a dialogic narrative approach for the study of teacher identity on these terms, and (c) Account for the locally unfolding process of teacher identity, over short periods of time, in relation to curricular content. We pursue the inquiry through multi-layered small story analysis of a narrative, "My Worst Mistake, " told by a veteran English language arts teacher in the Midwestern United States. This paper begins with the premise that teachers' identities are accomplished through the various interactions that constitute their working lives: in classrooms with students; in the halls with other teachers and administrators; in meetings and conversations with parents; and at conferences interacting with a broader community of professionals -to give but a few examples. Since most time in teachers' working lives is spent in face-to-face interactions with students, we believe that classroom interaction offers a promising site (though by no means the only site) for scrutinizing how teacher identity is interactionally shaped. Much previous work in teacher education makes claims about teacher identity based on a range of data, including elicited and observed narratives, and drafts accounts (often themselves narratives) which set out to represent teacher identity. While this work valuably Requests for further information should be directed to
This article presents the results of three separate studies of literacy teaching and learning in ... more This article presents the results of three separate studies of literacy teaching and learning in the U.S. that explore the social functions of language, specifically focused on the identity development of literacy learners and teachers. Each study offers a detailed account of how literate identities are constructed and enacted and the positive and negative consequences that occur for teachers and students when they are enacted. Taken together, these three studies demonstrate how teachers" and students" understandings of identity can promote or inhibit literacy teaching and learning.
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