Abstract
The four studies presented in this issue move us away from reductive and transmission-based models of literacy teaching and learning and instead produce a compelling vision toward a pedagogy of participation and possibility, where discursive spaces are opened up, and students’ and teachers’ voices and experiences are recognized, extended, and used as bridges to new learning.
For example, Clark, Blackburn, and Nemeth highlight possibilities for themes of “queering” to be discussed in a Midwestern U.S. out-of-school book discussion group where lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQQ) literature—and the specific ideological and literary elements of these books—were examined, problematized, and reconsidered for discussion in classrooms. This project opened up discursive spaces for LGBT-inclusive and queer discourses that offer to blur and challenge traditional views of gender, family, and sexual orientation, thus making “human” space available for youth doing their own identity work.
Janine Certo describes a rich classroom writing context in which young poets perform their own poetry, drawing on the work of their peers and contemporary visiting poets. These young poets in a Midwestern U.S. classroom also actively draw on other interdiscursive and intertextual resources ranging from popular culture, their peers’ work, family responses, the poetry canon, and the performance styles of the visiting poets in their classroom—even in the work of a single poem. This study illustrates the power of performative aspects of literacy to engage young writers and develop their sense of genre and audience as key social aspects of literacy practices, and reminds us that literacy learning is part of a larger goal of engaging children more fully with the range of human experience.
Athanases, Bennett, and Wahleithner’s valuable addition to the literature on inquiry and teacher preparation draws on an extensive data set to deeply examine the possibilities for fostering adaptive practices among pre-service English Language Arts teachers in California. Their carefully crafted study illustrates the power of providing opportunities for practicing teachers to participate in a community of researchers who analyze data from classrooms to develop new routines, materials, strategies, and activities to flexibly serve a diverse student population. Athanases and his colleagues note the possibilities of adaptive expertise and a flexible disposition in the face of ever-more confining school cultures and reform initiatives.
Last, Maren Aukerman’s examination of two discursively contrasting settings (monologically and dialogically organized bilingual classrooms) describes the ways these different modes of classroom discourse affected students’ self-perceptions as competent readers. This research indicates that dialogically oriented classrooms, where students were permitted to exercise agency with respect to their own learning, afforded students subjectivities as competent readers and active participants as meaning-makers.
Collectively, these articles position literacy teaching and learning as situated processes of participation in particular discourse communities. As such, they make salient the tight-knit interrelationships among discourse, text, and identity within the educational and social worlds. In addition, they make visible the fact that classrooms are discursive spaces where learners construct identities according to the subjectivities that are made available. These authors argue for the need to disrupt traditional conceptions of “text,” to reassert student and teacher agency, to challenge participation patterns of discourse, and to open up inclusive spaces in the classroom wherein diverse students’ identities and voices can be cultivated, recognized, and engaged.