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This article explores how, in English classes in secondary schools, students can perfect moral concepts such as love, honesty, and happiness. As the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch explains, people can perfect, or refine, moral concepts by paying attention to reality and altering their concepts in line with what is real. For Murdoch, the reading of literature is a means by which people can attend to reality and perfect moral concepts. Drawing on Murdoch's ideas, this article presents a strategy for teaching students in English classes to perfect moral concepts through reading "Romeo and Juliet" and other works of literature.

This conceptual article critiques a popular account of education grounded in Bourdieu's social theories. Specifically, the article shows how Bourdieu overplays competition and underplays ethics, or people's diverse ways of imagining, debating, and living out the good. On a Bourdieusian view of education, it is difficult to see how educators and students sometimes seek not just to advance in social fields, but to discern and pursue the good. To address this problem in Bourdieusian theory, the article draws upon ideas developed recently in the anthropology of ethics. The article presents a way of accounting for ethical dynamics in education and illustrates the usefulness of this approach by using it to generate a more comprehensive analysis of the author's Bourdieusian study of high schools' career portfolio programmes.

This article explores how literary study engages readers' moral perception and imagination. Although some philosophers discuss reading as a largely solitary activity, this article explores social practices of reading common in English language arts classrooms in secondary schools. The article shows how reading with others can change the quality of moral perception and imagination in literary study. Reading with others, the article contends, can involve an ethic focused on the good of knowing one's ways of seeing make a difference to others. The article defends social practices of reading by arguing they can broaden and complicate students' moral perception and imagination by making students accountable to texts, one another, and the wider world.

To clarify the role of desire in discursive practice, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and Lacanian theories of the unconscious. The former, it is argued, might be refined to shed more light on actors' unconscious investments in and resistance to the desires maintained by genres. The latter, meanwhile, might be refined to address how desires are materialized in concrete situations. These refinements can be achieved when the two approaches are synthesized in a theory that figures genres as resources by which actors coordinate and materialize desires. This argument is developed through an extended investigation of students' desires to perform particular kinds of identities as they compose career portfolios.

This conceptual article addresses theories of ethics in literacy studies. Here, ethics means people's ways of defining, asking about, and living good lives. Although literacy researchers have paid some attention to ethics, they rarely theorize ethics overtly. To demonstrate the need for a clearer concept of the ethical dimension of literacy, this article shows how the author's earlier study of activists' literacies was limited by an underdeveloped theory of ethics. The article reviews ideas from recent work in the anthropology of ethics that can draw out and draw together literacy studies' largely implicit concepts of ethics. Through this discussion, the article presents a clearer theory of the ethical dimension of literacy. The article concludes by using this new theory to study the ethics in the literacy practices of an LGBTQIA activist.

Education critics such as Michael Apple, Diane Ravitch, and Valerie Strauss often observe how standardized testing takes over school calendars and curricula and thus turns teaching into an exercise in [...]

This article presents discourse analyses of two teachers' statements about the economic payoff of studying English in the United States' high schools. Specifically, the article examines how English teachers construe reading as an economic asset that can be developed in schools and used on the job. Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field and capital are mobilized to explore how teachers (a) construe and relate the fields of English and the economy and (b) define the resources operative in and across both fields. The present study uses methods of discourse analysis to develop detailed pictures of teachers' theories of the economic dimensions of English (as described in original interviews). The teachers' views are read against widely circulating arguments about the economic value of English. The teachers involved in the study construe basic skills reading as being of less economic value than practices of reading driven by curiosity and enjoyment.

This article examines a theory of "weak humanism" that says (1) secondary English classes should focus on personal development and culture and (2) English classes should deliver economic benefits indirectly, i.e. as knock-on effects of studying the personal and the cultural. Economic benefits are defined here as knowledge/skills students may use to improve their economic positions. This theory of weak humanism emerged as a popular idea among 140 professors of English education surveyed by the author and a colleague. Building out from previous analyses of the survey results, the present article reads weak humanism against a backdrop of shifting economic systems. Weak humanism is shown to take some of its current form in opposition to a regime of high-stakes standardised testing that integrates English education into a system of surveillance capitalism. The article concludes with a call for English teachers to resist surveillance capitalism by taking a revolutionary humanist tack to the work of English education.

This article presents a discourse analysis of Kylene Beers' presidential address to the 2009 conference of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE-USA). The address, titled "Sailing over the Edge: Navigating the Uncharted Waters of a World Gone Flat," calls teachers to reject the standardized education of the industrial order and to harness the creativity at the heart of the "flat world" (i.e. global, knowledge-based capitalism). The discourse analysis focuses on the figure of the "flat world"--an increasingly common image in education research--and asks how the speech uses the figure of the "flat world" to reimagine the role of education under global capitalism. Mobilizing the ideas of Fredric Jameson, the Marxist literary critic, the article asks how the speech's story of education in the "flat world" offers "an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction" between industrial and knowledge-based capitalisms.

This article presents discourse analyses of two lesson plans designed for secondary school history classes. Although the plans focus on the same topic, they rely on different models of content area literacy: disciplinary literacy, or reading and writing like experts in a given domain, and critical literacy, or reading and writing to address injustice. The discourse analyses focus on how each plan (a) reimagines the field of secondary school history and (b) places students in reading and writing positions in the rebuilt field. Each plan, the article concludes, remakes secondary school history in relation to four other fields: the university, the professional workplace, everyday life and the public sphere. Secondary school history is reimagined as standing closer or farther away from each of these four fields. Moreover, each plan rebuilds secondary school history as a moral environment where certain kinds of moral knowledge, but not others, should be mobilized when reading, writing, speaking, thinking and listening.

This article presents a discourse analysis of President Ronald Reagan's 1983 State of the Union Address. Focusing on questions of scale, the article considers how and with what effects Reagan reconstructs education as a local, state, national and global endeavour. It is argued that by situating education in a competitive global economy, Reagan justifies his project of rolling back social/educational programmes and placing the USA's institutions more squarely in service to capitalist growth. Furthermore, it is argued that Reagan's efforts to rescale education and society contribute to a New Right project of re-establishing a white-dominated racial order in the USA and around the world. Although Reagan did not prioritise education in his domestic agenda, his statements on education advanced the New Right's project of rescaling society and set the terms of debate in education for subsequent presidents.

This article examines two approaches to teaching content area literacy: a strategies approach focused on general practices of reading and writing and a disciplinary approach attuned to the particular discourses of particular domains. Basil Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device is used to critique both approaches' assumptions about content area literacy. Neither approach, it is argued, accounts for the ways content areas bring together discourses from multiple fields. The strategies approach, for instance, does not account for the ways literacies in different content areas are bound up with different discourses. The disciplinary approach, on the other hand, conflates content area discourses with university and professional discourses. At the same time, the disciplinary approach minimizes content area discourses' connections to the discourses of domains such as the public sphere and everyday life. At the end of the article, Bernstein's ideas are used to formulate questions content area teachers might consider when teaching different ways of reading, writing, speaking, thinking, and listening.

In this exchange, Street and Collin debate the merits of the interaction model of literacy that Collin outlined in a recent issue of Reading Research Quarterly. Built as a complement and a counter to Street's ideological model of literacy, Collin's interaction model defines literacies as technologies that coevolve with sociocultural processes. This model of literacy draws on and adapts some of Goody's arguments about literacy's technological dimensions. Building on his critique of Goody's work, Street argues that the interaction model repackages the technicist model of literacy that he and other socioculturalists refuted years ago. To make his case, Street explains why massive open online courses and other Web 2.0 initiatives cannot change student literacy through technology alone. In his response, Collin acknowledges the continued importance of sociocultural processes but warns against viewing the latter as the drivers of technological processes or any other processes. Collin works out his argument by revisiting Street's examples and calling for analyses that investigate digital literacies as complex technologies that interact with a range of sociocultural and material processes. Although the interaction and ideological models differ in important ways, they are not incompatible. In the final section of the article, Street and Collin synthesize their approaches to create a model of literacy that (a) accounts for the multiple processes that constitute literacy, (b) denies inherent priority to any one process, and (c) foregrounds sociocultural processes not as an ontological claim but as a political maneuver to forestall technicist views of literacy that are still common in the field.

This article focuses on knowledge economy discourse and considers the appeal of this discourse to English educators. Knowledge economy discourse is defined as a mode of thought and expression that assumes a broad-based economy driven by innovation will soon emerge in the USA. This discourse, it is argued, offers English teachers solutions to some of the problems they face in an age of testing and economic turmoil. Specifically, the discourse offers ways of imagining and justifying lessons that reject standardisation in favour of innovation and inquiry. Because the economy anticipated in the discourse is unlikely to arrive, however, teachers might abandon knowledge economy discourse in favour of discourses that offer more practical and more effective ways of addressing socio-economic contradictions.

This article begins with a review of the forms of writing promoted in the Common Core State Standards. Across content areas, Common Core encourages teachers to attune students' writing to rhetorical concerns of audience, purpose, task, and disciplinary thinking. To address these concerns, teachers might take a rhetorical approach to the study of genres. In this view, genres are seen as resources writers use to build and act in particular situations. That is, genres help writers shape their writing to fit particular audiences, purposes, tasks, and forms of disciplinary thought. This article explains the rhetorical approach to genre studies by describing how particular genres (e.g. lab reports) are used by people to negotiate particular situations (e.g. labs in chemistry classes). Examples are offered throughout the article of how genre studies can be carried out in classrooms.

This article examines the literacy practices of three school-based student activist groups: a Gay-Straight Alliance, a high school chapter of Amnesty International, and a human rights club unaffiliated with Amnesty. Specifically, this article investigates how members of the different groups advanced their projects by repurposing school genres such as hallway bulletin boards and office memos. By articulating movement messages in school genres, it is argued, activists tightened their schools' connections to social movements and circulated movement discourses through school space. After findings on each group are presented, the concept "genre as discourse conduit" is induced from the data and is used to reevaluate the nuances and implications of students' efforts to articulate movement discourses in school genres. Equipped with this new concept, researchers may better analyze activist groups' efforts to perform movement work in schools.

This article revisits Goody's arguments about literacy's influence on social arrangements, culture, cognition, economics, and other domains of existence. Whereas some of his arguments tend toward technological determinism (i.e., literacy causes change in the world), other of his arguments construe literacy as a force that shapes and is shaped by disparate social processes. This article also reviews the critiques of Goody's work developed in the subfield of sociocultural literacy studies. Although the critics are right to object to the elements of technological determinism in his work, their rejection of his larger project leads them to miss ideas that can help clarify literacy's role in the transformation of society. Moreover, their misreading of Goody's work contributes to the field's underestimation of the distinct force of literacy and overestimation of the force of local cultures. In other words, how they misread Goody's work limits the depth of the answers that they provide to questions about literacy and its relations to culture, economics, politics, and other social spheres. These relations can be better understood when Goody's work is reread with an interaction model of literacy that figures changes in literacy as conditions of and conditional upon changes in other domains. Equipped with this model, researchers may rectify the supposed technological determinism of Goody's approach and the cultural determinism of some sociocultural accounts of literacy. Researchers may then synthesize these ideas to develop approaches that clarify literacy's evolving relations with other aspects of the world. This article concludes by explaining how a revised understanding of genre may bring into view the interplay between literacy and different social processes. (Contains 2 notes.)

Background: Education researchers are paying increasing attention to student activism and to the social production of school spaces. Few studies, however, have brought these two concerns together to examine how student activists work to rebuild school spaces in line with their political commitments. In the present study, I address this gap at the intersection of two important research trends. Purpose: I examine how a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) endeavored to build its school as an inclusive environment open to students of different sexual orientations. Focusing on the semiotic dimension of spatial production, I investigate how a conflict over a sign on the GSA's bulletin board functioned as one front in an ongoing struggle to produce the school's main hallway as a particular kind of space. As signs and constructions of space may be interpreted in different manners, I provide alternate ways of reading the conflict. Setting: The setting for this study is a school serving a racially diverse, working class neighborhood in a major city in the Northeastern United States. Participants: The participants were members of their school's GSA. Research Design: This is a qualitative site-based investigation. I collected data by using ethnographic tools including observation, interviewing, and document collection. Specifically, I sought to gather data on different actors' different understandings of the conflict over the bulletin board. I analyzed data by using methods of naturalistic qualitative analysis and semiotics-focused discourse analysis. Findings: Study participants read the conflict over the bulletin board in different manners. Each reading construed the conflict as (re)building school spaces in particular ways. Crucially, each construction either validated or invalidated LGBTIQ identities in the space of the school. Conclusions: No one reading of the conflict and no one construction of the space of the school were necessarily "conclusive" or "correct." Rather, the meaning of the conflict and the features of school space were struggled over and negotiated by actors at the school. These struggles highlight how conflicts over meaning are often disagreements over the construction and inhabitance of social spaces. In light of these findings, researchers should expand their analyses of student activism to consider how, through semiotic activity, activists work to rebuild and act in school spaces. Furthermore, researchers should produce studies helpful to activists working to build schools as more just and inclusive environments.

In this article, I examine the literacy practices of a high school-based human rights club. I investigate how the group engages in certain kinds of textual production to sponsor and arrange advisory sessions (school-wide meetings between teachers and small groups of students). More specifically, I consider how the club adapts school genres to mediate advisory sessions and to advance its visions of human rights and international relations. I describe how students collaborate both to develop a strategy for negotiating the school bureaucracy and to produce texts that will elicit institutional action. Also, I present a discourse analysis of one student-authored text crucial to the mediation of advisory meetings. I argue that students' knowledge of situations (e.g. advisory sessions) shapes how they adapt institutional genres and advance their visions of the world.

Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee's theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have an easier time than others in producing generic texts and getting their texts deemed "legitimate" by recognized authorities. Gee's theory, meanwhile, does not explain precisely how and where (i.e., at which conceptual level) communicants come to match Discourse to situation. This article contends that these limitations may be surpassed if the two theories are brought together in a particular way. In this new approach, genres and Discourses are viewed as mutually constitutive forms: Genres exist within Discourses and Discourses exist within genres. In adopting this approach, it is argued, researchers may study how particular genres are made to elicit performances of Discourses connected to particular social groups. (Contains 3 notes.)

In this article, I consider how subjectivities are composed and assessed within the boundaries of a career-focused portfolio program. First, by examining how portfolio composition is taught in senior English courses, I identify the qualities of the subject position students are called to occupy. Next, I present discourse analyses of portfolio materials composed by two students of different class backgrounds. More specifically, I explore how these students draw upon and adapt different resources to promote themselves as different kinds of subjects-in-worlds. As these disparate performances are assessed according to their coherence with certain class values, I argue, the program rates certain lives more favorably than others. (Contains 3 notes.)

This article presents a discourse analysis of President Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union Address. Fredric Jameson's concepts of cognitive mapping, cultural revolution, and the unconscious are employed to examine the president's vision of educational and economic transformation. Ultimately, it is argued this vision evokes a world in which individual citizens direct their deepest aspirations into channels of capitalist development. Prominent among these channels are reconfigured structures of education. (Contains 1 note.)

In this article, I examine two students' experiences with their schools' career portfolio programs. These initiatives call students to assemble papers, projects, and nonacademic items and to present them in ways that chart their personal trajectories into paid work. Shortly before graduation, students present their portfolios to exit interview panels and discuss how their portfolios reveal who they are, where they are going, and how they plan to get there. In this study, I investigate how two students of different class backgrounds engage in portfolio work. Through conducting discourse analyses of exit interviews, I examine how these students build particular kinds of trajectories into particular kinds of futures. I argue that students and their interviewers work together during their conversations to mobilize class models of personal development. In activating different theories for differently classed students, I contend, they place students on paths toward higher- or lower-status futures.

The author conducted a two-year study of the career portfolio programs in place at high schools in two Midwestern communities. By pursuing this research project, the author was able to develop answers to his questions about career portfolios and student differences. More generally, this project allowed him to reflect on the ways all writing assignments--not just those connected to career portfolio programs--invite students to present themselves and view the world in certain ways. Moreover, it enabled him to consider how particular ways of presenting the self and viewing the world are often more familiar to some students than they are to others. Thus, the author contends, the arguments offered in this paper speak to larger dynamics of identity and power that work through English classrooms from middle schools to universities. (Contains 1 figure and 1 note.)

This article examines how career portfolio programs at two secondary schools establish corporeal regimes. Both programs require students to compose portfolios that plot their trajectories through school and into paid work. Prior to graduation, students defend their portfolios before panels of educators and businesspeople. Employing the Bourdieusian concepts of capital and habitus, this article investigates how these programs set up systems that value certain kinds of bodies. Further, it examines how students negotiate these systems and display different kinds of bodies in different kinds of ways. Ultimately, it is argued these disparate bodily performances are read by authorities as indicators of the types of paths students are travelling or should travel into the future. (Contains 2 notes.)

This article examines the ideological dimensions of the career portfolio. This genre, an increasingly common part of high school and post-secondary school curricula, invites students to collect items from multiple domains and to reflect upon what these items say about who they are and where they are going. Through a critical analysis of the primary instructional form used in one school's career portfolio program, this article describes how the genre calls students to present themselves as certain kinds of people inhabiting certain kinds of worlds. More specifically, it is argued the genre prompts students to individualize themselves and endorse in their portfolios a middle-class ideology of self-cultivation and self-promotion. (Contains 1 figure and 2 notes.)

In the elections of 2006 and 2008, progressive and liberal groups in the United States broke through key bulwarks of the Right to capture some of the highest hills on the political landscape. Although progressives and liberals now control key positions, the Right still holds wide swaths of terrain and still exercises considerable power in shaping public opinion. This fact is not lost on Kevin Kumashiro, who examines the enduring influence of conservative thought in his important new book "The Seduction of Common Sense: How the Right Has Framed the Debate on America's Schools." In this article, the authors recap Kumashiro's analysis and highlight some of his most compelling proposals for bringing about progressive change in education. Next, they review his theory of common sense and framing and suggest ways to build out from this conception. They conclude the article by thinking through how progressives might reframe education debates in accordance with principles of social justice. Since "The Seduction of Common Sense" raises a number of theoretical and political issues, their article will need to engage with, build on, and also at times go beyond what they believe are some of the limitations of Kumashiro's otherwise very thoughtful book.

This article examines the social and political struggles out of which emerged the proposal to expand the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC). Situating the proposal in the contexts of the 1992 presidential campaign and the aftermath of the Los Angeles Uprising, the article discusses how particular struggles and debates structured the policy field in such ways as to make possible the program's expansion. The article also examines how arguments in favor of JROTC expansion functioned to win popular support for conservative analyses of public problems, unite diverse groups under Republican leadership, and (re)articulate conservative constructions of government-citizen relationships. (Contains 17 notes.)

This article examines how particular dynamics of globalization, including pressures to restructure economies for informational labor, shape and are shaped by processes of public schooling and the development of diverse literacies (understood here as the control of certain forms of life). More specifically, this article analyzes how, in an era of globalization and high-stakes "biopolitics", both workplace and school-based literacies and the literacy sponsorship offered by employers and state-run schools change, compete, increase and decrease in value, and interact with differential power relations in society. Such analysis, it is argued, is a requisite part of the development of powerful literacies necessary both for securing productive, rewarding labor in global informational economies and for reshaping socio-economic orders in accordance with principles of justice and strong democracy. (Contains 10 notes.)

In recent years, scholars, journalists, and citizens have turned to Hannah Arendt's writings to make sense of human plurality and resist right-wing nationalist movements around the globe. This article discusses feminist readings of Arendt's ideas of plurality, narratives, and politics and describes how these ideas can help critical literacy theory focus on both social groups and unique persons. For Arendt, the human world is a world of plurality because it includes not only diverse social groups, but also human selves living unique versions of group lives. This latter kind of plurality is difficult to see in some approaches to critical literacy. Arendt argues the plurality of unique persons becomes visible when people tell life narratives in particular ways. Given this view of plurality and narratives, the political question of who counts as members of a public is, in part, a question of whose stories are told. Arendt insists this question is not only a matter of a person telling her own story; it is also a matter of a person hearing her story told by others. These arguments can add new dimensions to critical literacy's view of diversity and the politics of reading, writing, speaking, thinking, and listening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article integrates into critical discourse analysis (CDA) concepts developed by the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson. These concepts include Jameson's theories of contradiction, mode of production, and social formation. By taking up Jameson's ideas, it is argued, researchers can strengthen CDA's underdeveloped theories of contradiction and historical change. Furthermore, this article shows how Jameson's theories can sharpen CDA's methods of studying texts. By taking a Jamesonian tack and viewing each text as offering ‘an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction', researchers can track how antagonisms in the social order shape and are shaped by processes of textual production. Additionally, by foregrounding contradictions and resolutions, researchers can see how texts participate in processes of historical change. To demonstrate a Jamesonian version of CDA, this article concludes with an analysis of a text that charts a course through neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]