In usual understandings of learning, youths' development in classrooms is portrayed as a move from being a novice to an expert. However, findings of the present anthropologically framed study support us to argue that learning, rather, can be characterized as youths' simultaneous occupation of novice and expert roles. We refer to this simultaneous…

This case study focuses on one beginning English teacher's work toward eupraxia, i.e., good practice informed by reflection in a setting in which a degree of free choice is available. The study uses a Vygotskian framework for studying concept development that focuses on the settings of human activity and how ambiguous social concepts are developed…

This article looks across two ethnographic case studies on immigrant youth literacy practices in order to understand how two 10th-grade, Caribbean immigrant, high-school students use discourses of academic writing to mediate selfhood. Drawing on the concept of writing as ecology and Black Diaspora theory, the study asked the question: How do…

Based on a 2-year ethnographic study in an urban secondary school in Toronto, the article presents how a teacher and a researcher teach Grade 11 students through a design-based approach to teaching and learning in English class. Built on research and pedagogy on design, the authors designed a programme of study as an alternative to more…

An ethnographic study of youth creating media was conducted to examine new literacies at an urban high school in northern California. The school primarily served students from low-income, non-dominant racial and ethnic backgrounds. This article reports on a 9th-grade social studies multimedia project about migration and immigration--called…