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In this article we examine the socialization of respect in a racially integrated science classroom in Northern California that employed a character education program called Tribes. We focus on the ways scripts derived from this program are enacted during Community Circle activities and how breaches to these scripts and the norms of respectful behavior they espouse create productive opportunities for explicit socialization in the classroom. We find that respect in this classroom consisted predominantly of controlling both bodily comportment and discursive production. Our analysis sheds light on the ways curricular initiatives, such as the one utilized in the Tribes approach, while purporting to democratize classroom learning, may in fact function as vehicles for reproducing institutional hierarchies of power. (Contains 2 tables, 2 figures, and 5 excerpts.)

In this article, we propose a theory for understanding the processes of adaptation in classroom learning and interaction. Adaptation processes are the emergent, improvisational, and recursive relationships between tensions and how they subsequently reorder learning activities. Through the analysis of a representative example of classroom interaction, we illustrate that shifts and tensions in the course of ongoing learning activity (adaptations) lead to the creation of new knowledge and the actualization of curricula. This theoretical framework arises from research conducted as part of a 3-year longitudinal study of third and fourth grade science elementary school classrooms.

This article examines the implementation of educational policy in a religious education program at a Los Angeles Catholic parish. It charts the elimination of Spanish-based classes ("doctrina") for Mexican immigrant children in favor of "English-only" instruction. The article offers insights into the politics of language use in everyday practice and examines the resulting educational policy decisions. (Contains 3 notes.)

A qualitative study examined how three urban California school districts and teachers in three case study classrooms interpreted and implemented Proposition 227. School district implementation varied according to district language ideology. Nevertheless, English only policy and accompanying highly scripted reading reforms stripped teachers of their expertise and institutionalized conditions for underachievement and failure by English learners. (Contains 21 references.) (TD)

Describes a group of participants in a highly productive, nonformal learning environment that exemplifies the practices of a collaborative community. Diverse elementary students and university undergraduates participate in entertaining educational activities within an after-school computer club. The club focuses on hybrid literacy practices and uses electronic-mail exchanges with a fictional cyberspace entity to make learning fun. (SM)

Describes narrative activity in Spanish in a children's religious education class composed of Mexican immigrants at a Catholic parish in Los Angeles. Describes how students and their teacher collaborate in constructing a multiplicity of identities in an ongoing narrative within an oppressive colonial past in Mexico. (31 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses language and literacy learning, and some current language arts practices that warrant reconsideration. Describes and offers examples of the move away from oppositional discourses (set up by pedagogical debates) and to the "radical middle." Notes a move toward a third place where two normative patterns of interaction intersect, creating the potential for authentic interaction and learning to occur. (SR)

Proposition 227 has the potential to significantly affect how students learn English in California public schools. School districts have implemented these provisions through classrooms using English immersion, alternative bilingual, and structured immersion approaches.

A new instructional space can be created with language placed consciously at the center and indicating group membership as well as offering communication rules. Students need to be able to develop a range of literacy behaviors and skills in order for them to make meaning across communities and interactions. We are always going through a translation process becasue we are members of different communities and have to able able to negotiate sociocultural and liguistic community borders. The communities can offer classroom resources.

Focuses on the use of hybridity as a method for organizing learning and for understanding diversity in an elementary classroom in the United States. Efficacy of mediational tools in promoting zones of development; Significance of Third Spaces in expanding learning abilities; Influence of discourse and literacy practices on the development of productive learning.