Search

Contents: B. Street, Foreword. Preface and Acknowledgements. C. Lewis, P. Enciso, E. Moje, Introduction: Reframing Sociocultural Research on Literacy. Part I: Rethinking Conceptual Frameworks. E.B. Moje, C. Lewis, Examining Opportunities to Learn Literacy: The Role of Critical Sociocultural Literacy Research. P. Enciso, Narrations of History and Transformation in Sociocultural Theories. R. Rogers, C. Fuller, 'As If You Heard It From Your Momma': Reconstructing Histories of Participation With Literacy Education in an Adult Education Class. K.D. Gutierrez, Commentary. Part II: Rethinking Knowledge and Representation. M.F. Orellana, Moving Words and Moving Worlds: The Challenges of Being "In the Middle". J. Guerra, Out of the Valley: Transcultural Repositioning as Rhetorical Practice in Research. B. Fecho, S. Meacham, Research Sites as Transactional Spaces. L. Moll, E. Rubenstein-Avila, Commentary.

This chapter illustrates, through the analysis of one small bit of classroom transcript, that critical sociocultural perspectives may be the only available tools for demonstrating how children’s opportunities to learn are both supported and constrained by the role of power in everyday interactions of students and teachers and by the systems and structures that shape the institution of schooling. It begins with a theoretical discussion of some central constructs in work: learning, identity, agency, and power. Learning is motivated, as G. Kress argued, by a need to understand something, whether an act, a word, a sensory experience. Learning, however, also leaves a residue; it makes a mark on the participant. Power is a complicated and challenging construct, precisely because the working of power in people’s learning lives is often neglected or is relegated to a position of outside agent acting on the subject.

This research is an ethnographic case study of a book group focusing on the reading and teaching of multicultural literature in a rural, predominately white, middle school setting. We examine how participants co-constructed teacher identities through the parallel narratives they created about themselves and their students. We discovered that the socio-historical models of teaching circulating in the group were taken up, recontextualized, and contested according to local notions of the ideal female teacher, particularly as inculcators of middle-class values. Despite efforts to challenge limiting identity constructions of teacher and student through creating more liberatory narratives, participants struggled to imagine a pedagogy that interrupted their stable notions of teaching and selfhood. We found that the choices about what literature to read with students and how to engage with them in critical conversations about that literature were implicated in the possible teacher selves one could enact in the cl...

In studies of learning, emotion is understood as an expression of affect separate from the mind and in need of discipline rather than constructed through language, culture, and power. This study focuses on emotion in a diverse urban classroom and explores, instead, how emotive interactions in a race-related discussion were mediated by texts, talk, and histories of participation. We theorize emotion as action linked to language and identity, and argue that emotion, when viewed as mediated action, offers a broader critical literacy. This critical literacy is deeply related to how students and teachers, as social actors, mobilize emotion to transform texts and signs, acts that are widely understood to be central to sociocultural and social semiotic concepts of learning, but are otherwise veiled in English classrooms.

This article focuses on representations of youth identity and culture that circulated in a long-term teacher and researcher study group. These representations are important to examine because the way that teachers of adolescents envision their students' identities and cultures relative to that of other adolescents is fundamental to how they interact with their students, choose texts to share with them, and raise issues relevant to them. Related to youth identity and culture, two patterns emerged from the data: participants universalized adolescence, and participants constructed adolescents as “Other.” Over time, however, participants began to examine the ways that they encoded youth identities. This involved disrupting normalizing discourses and challenging established ways of reading. Both were important to understanding how language works to encode or normalize particular representations of youth and how language can be used to revise these codes.

In this chapter, the authors theorize emotion as action mediated by language and other signs and argue that emotion has consequences for learners as it constrains and enables identity production and opportunities to learn. In particular, Lewis and Crampton apply the theories and methods of mediated discourse—discourse in action—to explain how they can be methodologically useful in the study of emotions in learning. This work foregrounds action in social spaces and provides a lens through which to understand the meaning of signs/tools in practice. Particularly important is the concept of linkage across space-time scales that include the histories of participation and practices within and outside the context where the mediated action occurs. Examples from a secondary English/Language Arts class focused on media production and analysis are used to illustrate the methodological implications of the theory of emotion developed in the chapter.

This is an ethnographic case study examining how discussions of multicultural young adult literature among a group of white, rural teachers and researchers were shaped by sociopolitical contexts and participants' constructions of racial identity. Focusing on the interactions of three teachers and ourselves, we used performance theory to help us understand how our ways of performing the self were shaped at the macro level by institutional and societal ideologies and the micro level by professional affiliations and identities. In analyzing data, we used qualitative coding procedures to arrive at key and illustrative events. These events were then analyzed using the tools of discourse analysis, which helped us to focus on the ideological underpinnings of the discourse. Our analyses revealed that as participants attempted to engage with the literature and bond with one another, we enacted personal, professional and group affiliations that served to sustain particular norms of whiteness even as we attempted to...

Socially situated identities-We use this term as defined by Gee (1999) to mean the different social positions that people enact or perform in particular settings. Identity is usually associated with a stable, internal state of being. Adding socially situated to the term foregrounds the fluid, socially constructed notion of identity that informs our study. Interdiscursivity-This term refers to the presence or trace of one discourse within another. Interdiscursive language rearticulates already existing discourses. Often in our research interdiscursivity occurs when one participant appropriates and reconstructs discourses associated with other participants. This process involves a generative reconstruction of a discourse rather than a recapitulation or imitation. It is a process that we associate with learning. Dialogic discourse-Based on the work of Bakhtin, we use this term to represent the ways in which speakers are always in the process of addressing and answering previous and future utterances across time and space. As Bakhtin (1981) put it, “The word in language is half someone else’s” (p.