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Argumentation is a fundamental communicative ability that children develop over time through formal schooling and daily practice with peers and family members. Literature on children's argumentation appears to have focused on their social interactions out of school, clinical environment, or informal pedagogic contexts. Even though there are research inquiries into children's argumentation in formal academic learning, many have been focused on argumentative writing in math or science classes. Much less is known about teacher-led argumentation and the youngest children's emerging argumentation in language art classes, where argumentation is formally and systematically introduced and learned. This paper reports a year-long ethnographic study on argumentation in a first-grade English language art classroom in the United States. Ethnographic discourse analysis was conducted to analyze two key literacy events from the daily reader's and writer's workshop. It is supplemented with qualitative analysis of the researchers' field notes and the students' artifacts. Our findings highlight the inherent intertextual nature of children's argumentation and a critical role the teacher played in eliciting and steering the children's argumentation construction through strategic instructional conversations (especially accountable talk). Our findings also revealed teacher-led children's intertextual argumentation as a powerful heuristic process and tool to enrich students' learning. The paper concludes some classroom argumentation teaching practices based on the research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the U.S. government's recent harsh restrictions on immigrants and refugees and the ramped-up anti-immigrant sentiments. The strict borderlands politics, the militarized police at the border zones, family separations and other tactics of fear, silencing, and oppression reinforced within public spheres and institutions (e.g., racialized policies of control, the constant threat of deportation) have greatly impacted the lives of immigrant and refugee families and children (Gándara & Ee, 2018 ; Zayas et al., 2015). Providing sociopolitical, educational, and emotional support for immigrant/refugee students and their families has never become so urgent during this extraordinary time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an asset-based participatory research study with 18 pre-service teachers and 85 refugee multilingual learners in an after-school program housed in an urban public elementary school. The research illuminates how the refugee multilingual learners (RMLs)' backgrounds, assets, and challenges can be understood and transformed to maximize their learning opportunities. The findings provide a renewed perspective on RML students and alternative pedagogical approaches with the hope of improving their learning experiences and outcomes. The findings also call for continuous teachers' professional training concerning RMLs' diverse backgrounds, knowledge, and experiences. This paper concludes with a promising concept, cultural humility, in urban education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a unique lens for understanding young children's poetry writing. It focuses on defamiliarization as a cultural tool and practice to engage students' imagination, playfulness, creativity and aesthetic experience into their poetry writing and to experience the world differently and aesthetically. The research aims of this article are (a) to examine how familiar things were defamiliarized in children's poetry writing process and poems and (b) to explore what and how aesthetic experiences could result from the defamiliarization process. More specifically, three key literacy events were selected from different writing units during one academic year. Ethnographic discourse analysis was adopted to examine the teacher–student interactive conversations in poetry writing when they defamiliarized their familiar things, places and situation. The data analysis showed that the defamiliarization process made an important contribution to the young writers' development of language, literacy and their sense of self as a writer. The results exemplified defamiliarization processes as a way to promote the teaching and learning of writing for aesthetic experience beyond linguistic text production. Furthermore, the article provides critical indicators that link children's writing and multilayered aesthetic experience, and it highlights the critical role of an adult/teacher in channelling children's affinity with play, imagination, creativity and aesthetic experience into their poetry writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]