Prompted by calls for research on technology-focused professional development, this ethnographic case study investigates how teachers' participation in learning communities may influence technology integration within the secondary English curriculum. In this article, I draw on educational psychology, cognitive anthropology, and…

This study draws from a number of researchers who push for critical literacy and a critical stance to question power, inequality, and the status quo; to understand scholars' own participation in power structures; and to reframe and retheorize scholars' beliefs and understandings. In this article, the author uses the critical stance framework to…

This retrospective cross-case analysis compares two fourth-grade language arts teachers' beliefs and practices as they respond to an influx of high-stakes tests, including district-mandated benchmark testing systems. One teacher works in a suburban school, the other in an urban school. Results from the study show that the teachers' beliefs about…

This paper begins with the assumption that the interpretive practices people acquire in social worlds often transfer to their stances toward and interpretations of worlds encountered in literature (Beach, Thein, & Parks, 2007). The goal of this paper is to identify the history and logic behind one student's negative, ambivalent, and positive…

In this study, social constructionism provided a theoretical framework for investigating how students' struggles with reading are socially constructed in school literacy contexts, curriculum, and relationships. The study also sought to discover how "struggling reader" is a socially constructed subjectivity or identity that begins in the early…

This study examined kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade teachers' intended and reported classroom use, as well as perceptions and knowledge of reading strategies and methods, before and after their participation in a 120-hour professional development workshop. A cluster analysis was conducted on the teachers' (N = 33) responses to a…

This study examined the opinions of more than 300 primary teachers. The first purpose of the study was to investigate the reported frequency with which teachers used various beginning reading materials (e.g., literature, basals, workbooks, predictable text, leveled text, decodable text, and vocabulary-controlled text). The second purpose of the…

Early success in reading is predicated on a child's ability to accurately and effectively master core literacy constructs (e.g., phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, concept of word, and grapheme-phoneme correspondence) and to exercise these understandings in a comfortable sociocultural context. In recent years, educators, legislators, and…

This paper reports the results of a two-year project designed to reorganize basal reading instruction to stress fluent reading and automatic word recognition. The reorganized reading program had three components: a redesigned basal reading lesson that included repeated reading and partner reading, a choice reading period during the day, and a home…

Contends that a focus on social interaction in classrooms provides important perspectives on how teachers' and students' actions and the characteristics of the learning environment shape classroom interactions and outcomes. Identifies features of the classroom context that shape students' participation in the classroom literacy community. Explains…

Outlines how nine content-area textbooks dealt with reading and writing instruction. Explains that the texts were read to be coded and to identify categories of literacy messages. Notes that content-area textbooks contain negative discussions about traditional teaching methods, and that the authors seem to care about content-area literacy but do…

Examines how experienced high school English teachers defined and gauged effective literature instruction. Finds teachers used differing models for literature instruction against which they gauged their effectiveness. Notes the kinds of models the teachers used determined whether or not they were willing to listen to feedback from students and to…

Examines use of the term "whole language" by the mass media, scholarly journals, and interested parties in a college town. Argues disputes about "whole language" have as much to do with cultural, political, and economic issues confronting the United States, and in particular the Southwest, as they do with any conversation about the "best way" to…

Considers the stance of literacy educators and researchers toward technology, and where technology is with respect to other concerns about reading and writing processes, learning, multiculturalism, texts, assessment, and socio-cultural contexts. Concludes that technologies do not oppose, replace, enhance, or otherwise stand apart from literacy,…

Examines K-2 teachers' perceptions and evaluations of how students (who spoke marginalized or stigmatized varieties of English) in a low-income, multiethnic, inner-city school answer classroom questions. Finds ambiguity in teacher questions which created problems for students accustomed to different discourse practices. Works with the teachers to…