This case reflects a yearlong project I, as the instructor of an Advanced Methods course, conducted with my students to help them plan and implement critical literacy units in their high school and middle school student teaching placements. To do so, I assigned student teachers to explore notions of critical literacy (including resistant reading,…

Student teachers often find themselves in a dilemma when leading classroom discussions about texts. These conflicts may not necessarily be a reflection of student behavior or classroom management. Instead, they may be a sign of active engagement and students taking the challenge beyond their current knowledge level. Two kinds of conflicts were…

How do teachers in diverse classrooms enact a transactional mode of literary response in their orchestration of classroom conversations about literature? This paper proposes that a theory of expressive language is central to answering this question and that the discourse genre of oral narratives may hold critical importance in accomplishing this…

Evolution of the "old page", or written hardcopy texts, to the "new" (Kress, 2003), or electronic page, means that today's learners have experience with reading a variety of texts. Image, music, and electronic inscription (font, style, flash, and so on) are features of multimodal texts that many learners prefer to read and create. With the screen…

Schooling, which is shared to the extent that Americans share no other cultural or institutional experience, is perhaps the single greatest influence on how people understand the world around them and their places in it. English instruction, required as it is throughout formal schooling, constitutes perhaps the most powerful vehicle for shaping…

In this paper the authors focus on one early-career teacher, co-author Natalie Gibson, whose initial teaching experiences were mediated by educational settings shaped by these different and often conflicting traditions. Their study of Natalie's early-career trajectory is concerned with understanding her effort to develop a conception of…