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This paper focuses on the relationship between policy creation and policy enactment through the use of an innovative qualitative research methodology, photo elicitation. Teachers applying Common Core State Standards were studied in two states through indepth interviews, photographs captured by the participants, and other artifacts. Findings indicated the influence of bi-partisan politics on policy implementation as well as teachers' tendencies to map previous practices onto the new standards. Additionally, data demonstrated the influence of state mandated assessment on teachers' perceptions of the standards. This study provides new insights on teachers' interpretations, evaluations, and self-reflections of the CCSS and the related practical experiences through a rigorous microanalysis of their professional conversations with teacher educators/university researchers.

This article presents five main challenges refugee children experience in their learning and living in host countries, revealing an urgent need for reexamining their strengths and needs in education. It further reports an asset-based participatory research project with 18 preservice teachers (PTs) and 85 refugee children (K-5) engaged in an after-school English language-learning program in the United States. This research has two purposes. First, this study explores alternative perspectives on refugee children as multilingual learners (MLs). Doing so aims to offer novel counter-narratives to prevalent deficit thinking about young refugees, instead highlighting their assets, contributions, and learning potential. Second, it examines educational strategies that can enhance refugee children's learning experiences and opportunities. Qualitative analysis and discourse analysis were combined to examine the researcher's field notes, the PTs' reflection logs, interviews with the children, inquiry papers about effective ML teaching strategies, and the children's artifacts. The first part of the findings demonstrates how alternative perspectives of refugee children as multilingual learners may spark a fresh dialogue around their overlooked learning competence and potential. The second part discusses five evidence-based pedagogical strategies found in this study to be effective educational practices in working with refugee children.

Research competencies can empower teachers to inquire into their work and innovate in the field. In particular, conceptual competencies in consuming empirical research (CCER) are expected of K-12 teachers, but little is known about how teachers develop CCER. To address this gap, the authors conducted a case study with 12 teachers enrolled in a hybrid graduate course on educational research at a public, comprehensive university in the USA. Data generated from the 15-week course activities and assignments were analyzed. Findings show that teachers' CCER improved through a three-stage process. In each stage, teachers achieved success but encountered challenges. The varied performance among teachers could be explained by three factors: extensiveness of literature review, conceptual understanding of research topic, and specificity of research focus. This study contributes to the literature by generating detailed evidence of how K--12 teachers develop CCER. Implications for course design and future studies are discussed.

Effective ELL teaching and learning is profoundly influenced by the teachers' personal experiences and personalities (Farrell, 2016), their experience as language learners as well as language teachers (Farrell, 2007), and their beliefs about learning and teaching a second language (Farrell, 2015; Farrell & Ives, 2015). This study honored and examined in-depth the often-discounted stories/reflective narratives of our teachers. This paper reports a qualitative cases study that explores three veteran teachers' reflection on their personal and professional experiences with ELLs for self-discovery over years (Cirocki & Farrell, 2017) so that they can further reflect for their future actions with ELLs (Burns & Bulman, 2000; Farrell, 2007; Farrell & Vos, 2018). Data analysis revealed the teachers' different strengths and needs in working with ELLs. Four major dimensions (language, culture, culturally and linguistically sensitive pedagogy, and collaborative community) were identified as critical to effective teaching of ELLs and preparation of second language teachers.

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.

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]

This article probes into the social and discursive construction of intertextualities in young ELL children's poetry writing process. It aims to explore the role of intertextuality in promoting young ELL children's writing and academic learning through analysing naturally occurring classroom discourses. The research participants were 19 kindergarteners from six different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and their teacher. Primary data sources included participant observation, video recording, interviews and students' artefacts over time. Microethnographic discourse analysis is conducted to examine the teacher-student moment-to-moment classroom interactive discourses in the chosen key literacy event of writing a poem about their stapler. Data analysis showed that the ELL children's poem writing event was a robust learning process promoted by the teacher-student dynamic social and discursive construction of different intertextualities across different times and contexts. Based on the complex learning and intertextualities constructed in their writing process, the researcher advocates intertextuality as a powerful heuristic to transform the children's experiences into meaningful learning and actions.

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]

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]

Drawing on Bakhtinian dialogism and interactional sociolinguistics, the author explored how young English language learners become writers over time. With a focus on the children's dialogic writing processes rather than their products, the author aimed to trace the children's journey in becoming writers and make evident the evolvement of their identity as writers. In this light, their interactive discourses within and across particular but connected literacy events were studied. Discourse analysis was undertaken on the video segments and transcripts of three literacy events selected from different writing units across an academic year. It was found that the young writers evolved from "others as authors," to "self as an author," and to "self as a reflective writer" and the process of becoming a writer was ongoing and actively engaged multiple voices of the children, their teacher, and others. Further, the findings suggested that the dialogic becoming processes opened possibilities for young writers to discover and bring their different voices and selves to their writing and enhanced motivation relative to learning to write and writing to learn.

The article proposes that direct instruction in applying knowledge of onsets and rimes, as part of a balance contextualised literacy program, can play a key role in fostering substantial growth in reading achievement. Topics include the approach for teaching children to enhance their decoding competencies by learning sound-to-symbol relationships, basic principles of phonics instruction, and directions for producing the word builder kit.

Readers' theater, with the addition of puppetry, can provide an enjoyable and strategically sound foundation for students to become physically, emotionally, and academically involved in learning to read more competently. The addition of student produced stick puppets adds an exciting and enjoyable dimension to readers' theater presentations. Aesop fables and more contemporary children's literature provide bountiful resources for developing the activities presented [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the effectiveness of multisensory literacy as an approach to improve the visual memory of students. Information regarding the process of visual auditory kinesthetic and tactile (VAKT) learning strategies, the difficulties faced by student in spelling and vocabulary, and learning strategies for struggling readers, are mentioned.