Elizabeth Dutro

Comprised of seven intergenerational dialogues, this article brings together emerging and established scholars to query into the future of queer literacy research. Addressing generational shifts in queer method(ologie)s, these dialogues advance epistemological, ontological, and ethical research quandaries related to queer and trans studies today. Holding implications for literacy research broadly, this article presents queer futurity as a research approach for addressing some of our field's most pressing concerns.

Spurred by burgeoning racist and xenophobic immigration policy and rhetoric, we analyzed the writing of seven second-grade children about their experiences of living connections that span the United States–Mexico border. Informed by research on children’s testimonios in literacy classrooms and Anzaldúa’s concept of the border/lands, we drew on feminist and critical poststructuralist theories to examine how children’s writing rhetorically and aesthetically engaged with the affective, political, and ideological dimensions of borders and the rhetorical and material violence of hostile policies. Methodologically, we conducted close readings of children’s writing, tracing how they disrupted boundaries, including those constructed both physically and ideologically across nations and between concepts, identities, and feelings. This analysis underscores children’s keen insights into their political and personal worlds, the importance of writing pedagogies that invite children to engage with...

T HIS ISSUE OF Theory Into Practice is devoted to urban youths’ perspectives on the curricula, teachers, and policies they encounter in their schools. Collectively, the authors represent a commitment to listening to students and heeding their input on the issues that directly impact their school experiences. Why is it crucial to turn to youth’s voices in our research and teaching in urban schools? For one, urban students comprise a huge constituency within the P–12 school population in the United States, and these students represent an astonishing diversity of races, ethnicities, languages, and cultures. Yet, too often they are characterized as having a monolithic and limited relationship to formal schooling. For another, high school dropout (or push out) rates in many major urban settings have remained near 50% for better than three decades. Existing research with and about youth reveal that students frequently perceive school as a questionably relevant institution, but this graduation rate statistic does little to illustrate why students understand school in this way. Although numerous efforts have been made to counter this disengagement trend and promote urban students’ appreciation for and success in school, few have taken into consideration city youths’ perspectives on the causes of or the solutions to this crisis. U.S. urban schools have been the subject of—or been subjected to—a wide array of reforms in recent years. A number of large high schools have been reorganized into smaller learning communities where students might receive more personal attention. Some districts have turned to scripted lessons that teacher-proof the curriculum as a solution to concerns about student achievement and engagement, and many education researchers and activists have suggested that teachers of diverse students need to engage in culturally relevant teaching and view racial, cultural, and socioeconomic diversity as a pedagogical resource. Single gender schools, settings for at-risk youth, and charter and voucher-supported academies are changing the face of urban public schools and, in some cases, challenging their very existence. Finally, federal and state legislation have made standardized high-stakes assessments and graduation tests the primary criteria by which we judge city students’ learning and urban schools’ effectiveness. Even as these efforts promise improved school engagement and achievement among city youth, students’ points of view about their schools, teachers, and curricula frequently are ignored. Fortunately, the authors included in this issue are forging a different path. The authors’ work represents cutting-edge efforts to move consideration of students’ points of view beyond superficial mechanisms for including these perspectives in school organization, curricula, and teachers’ practices. Rather, the articles describe efforts using a range of research methods to make the

When first-year teacher, Mr. Prezbolewski calls names on his after school detention list and Michael, an eighth-grade student in an inner-city Baltimore school, is absent, we, the viewers of Michael’s story, understand why. We know that each day after school Michael walks directly to the neighborhood elementary school to pick up his little brother and walk him home. Michael does this everyday. When they get home, he gets his brother a snack and settles him in at the kitchen table to complete his homework. On the first day of school, we watch Michael and his brother walk down the steps of their row house, Michael pausing to wipe the breakfast crumbs off of his brother’s face and tie his shoes. By the time Michael skips detention, we have seen enough of his life to understand that staying after school is simply not an option for Michael. Michael’s friends Randy and Dukie stop by the detention classroom and Randy, noticing that Michael’s name is circled on the attendance list, says, ‘‘You know, Mr. P, Michael can’t make it to detention.’’ The teacher responds, ‘‘I know he didn’t and now it’s doubled.’’ Randy shakes his head, ‘‘Nah, I mean he can’t. He’s got to go pick up his little brother from school.’’ Prez (as he is known in the show) says, ‘‘he’ll just have to find somebody else to do that.’’ Dukie responds, ‘‘No, it ain’t like that. Michael would come if he could, but he wouldn’t have nobody else to pick up his little brother, Bug. You know, his mother, she’s on that stuff.’’ The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 33:132–160, 2011 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2011.569460

Standards-based initiatives have been the centerpiece of educational reform in the United States for well over a decade. The term standards encompasses several elements of curricular reform, including content standards, performance standards, and opportunity-to-learn standards. This review focuses primarily on content standards, documents that define what students should know and be able to do in given subject areas. The story of content standards is a national story, a state story, a story of specific disciplines, and a story of philosophical and theoretical shifts and differences that have had an impact on views of teaching and learning across disciplines. Content standards represent ideas about what disciplinary content is most important for students to know and be able to do across years of schooling. However, content standards are also ideological, reflecting values and beliefs regarding the nature of teaching and learning and, more generally, the purposes of education. Tracing the interplay of ideas and values in standards and standards development—or, in other words, examining the intellectual roots of content standards and the debates that inform their development and use—reveals the complexities inherent in this aspect of standardsbased reform. Our analysis examines three areas of literature: first, the documents and reports that started U.S. educational policy down the path toward national standards; second, literature on the development and evaluation of specific content standards documents; and, third, literature that informed the debates that arose within the groups that developed standards and that followed their dissemination. We identify the tensions that have arisen among the policymakers, business leaders, educators, and public interest groups involved in the setting of standards. We also describe the factors that are operative in any specific standards development effort and how these factors influence decisions in areas such as organization of subject areas, desired level of specificity, processes used to achieve consensus, and effective evaluation of a given set of standards. We then provide a case study of how this has worked in English language arts

ABSTRACT A significant body of research articulates concerns about the current emphasis on high-stakes testing as the primary lever of education reform in the United States. However, relatively little research has focused on how children make sense of the assessment policies in which they are centrally located. In this article, we share analyses of interview data from 33 third graders in an urban elementary school collected as part of a larger qualitative study of children's experiences in literacy in high-poverty classroom. Our analysis of assessment-focused interviews focused on two research questions related to children's perspectives on high-stakes testing: What patterns arise in children's talk about high-stakes testing? What does children's talk about high-stakes testing reveal about their perceptions of the role of testing in their school experiences and how they are positioned within the system of accountability they encounter in school? Drawing on tools associated with inductive approaches to learning from qualitative data as well as critical discourse analysis, we discuss three issues that arose in children's responses: language related to the adults invested in their achievement; their sense of the stakes involved in testing; and links between their feelings about test taking, perceptions of scores, and assumptions of competence. We argue that children's perspectives on their experiences with high-stakes testing provide crucial insights into how children construct relationships to schooling, relationships that have consequences for their continued engagement in school.

Drawing on the combined theoretical lenses of positioning theory and academic literacies, this article presents case studies of four children from one urban classroom, two of whom scored at or above proficient on the large-scale writing assessments required by their district and state and two of whom scored below. Using criteria from state rubrics, we closely analyzed the writing products children produced for high-stakes assessments and classroom writing projects as well as drew on a range of qualitative data to contextualize children’s writing within the complex relationships with writing observed across the school year. Our findings suggest test scores may be inaccurate or highly malleable based on relations between the features of the writing children produced, students’ identities as writers and preferred practices, quirks of the testing context, and arbitrary features of the test itself. Indeed, our analyses found that some children’s test scores misrepresented their capabilit...

Abstract Researcher-practitioner collaborations often stop short of engaging researchers and teachers in collectively negotiating the moment-to-moment improvizational decision-making of instructional practice when students are present. We consider the potential for learning at one boundary that often exists between researchers and practitioners as they collaborate on instructional practice: the boundary between performing-teaching and observing-teaching. We draw on performance studies to conceptualize this boundary as a fourth wall. Our analysis examines researcher-practitioner collaboration across four sites in which participants were learning together about the complex work of facilitating student discussion. We analyze how one boundary crossing routine provided opportunities for researchers and practitioners to interact at the boundary of the fourth wall during enactment of discussion-based instruction with students. To analyze episodes of this routine, we draw on conceptualizations of potential learning mechanisms of boundary crossing in research-practice partnerships. Our findings identify and describe the mechanisms for researcher/practitioner learning that arose when our participants crossed the boundary of the fourth wall: perspective taking, boundary spanning, and recognition of shared problem spaces. We argue that these learning mechanisms create potential for researchers and practitioners to wrestle with and learn about the challenges and opportunities within facilitation of student discussions.

This article discusses theoretical lenses drawn from scholars in the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies to consider students’ positioning in relation to emotional-cognitive, private-public dichotomies that permeate normative notions of what can and should count as successful engagement with school. Specifically, we explicate Caruth’s metaphor of the speaking wound, in conversation with other trauma studies scholarship, to consider the representations of lived experiences carried into classrooms and the consequences of interpreting and representing students’ lives. To provide context for our conceptual argument, we discuss qualitative data of two students’ experiences across a school year. We argue that trauma theory illuminates two overlapping, yet distinguishable, ways trauma can be productively conceptualized in schools and marshaled as a context for analyzing structural inequities: first, to consider the trauma individuals carry into classrooms as a potential source for de...

This interactive poster session highlights findings from the first two years of the Teachers as Learners initiative, sponsored by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. In 2018, ten research teams were funded to explore cognitive, sociocultural, and systemic dimensions of teachers learning to implement challenging instruction and classroom discourse in service of promoting students’ engagement and agency in the intellectual work of subject matter learning. The quintessential question these projects address is how teachers learn what they need to know and be able to do to create such contexts. Cross-cutting themes address contexts of professional learning, reflective practice, and iterative cycles of design, enactment, and re-design. ICLS 2020 Proceedings 2151 © ISLS

In this article, we share findings from our process of reading the past, writing the future of elementary research in NCTE's journals. Our analysis focused on major domains of the field, including literature, writing, reading, language, and multimodal literacies, and spanned Elementary English Review, which first appeared in 1924, was renamed Elementary English in 1947, and became Language Arts in 1975; Primary Voices, which ran from 1993 to 2002; and Research in the Teaching of English (RTE), which began in 1967. Findings revealed both surprising continuities across decades as well as clear and important social and cultural shifts that influenced theory, methods, and practice in the field, emphasizing the importance of 1) recognizing the level of historical and political influences in elementary literacy research, 2) pay ing explicit attention to how the cultural-historical Zeitgeist shapes our work as scholars, and 3) interrogating how our representations of research problems ...

Among the lessons that emerged after the recent presidential election is a recognition that teachers are generally not prepared to address the intersections of healing, politics, and emotion in classrooms. Now, more than ever, English educators must address trauma in classrooms, while also recognizing how individuals and groups are positioned differently in the material and emotional stakes of this election. Drawing on research, the voices of teachers, and our experiences over this past year, we call for more expansive conversations among English educators across perspectives concerned with creating safe, relational, anti-oppressive classrooms.

In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of third graders’ experiences with a unit from their district-mandated commercial reading curriculum in which the children made strong connections between a fictional account of a Depression-era farm family’s economic hardships and their own 21st century lives in a city with one of the highest childhood poverty rates in the United States. The language of the curriculum revealed class-privileged assumptions and an instrumental, competency-based approach to literacy that provided no official space for resonance between reader and text around the issue of poverty. Employing depth hermeneutics, a form of critical discourse analysis, I discuss analyses of three texts: the literature selection, the children’s written responses, and the teacher’s edition for that unit. My findings reveal that (1) the curriculum portrays economic struggle as a temporary condition, located only in historical or national disaster contexts, even as the children...

Recent innovations in professional development are rife with a wide array of efforts focused on teacher collaboration. In this essay, we address some of the unexamined assumptions about the nature and significance of interactions in teacher professional collaboration, drawing on the concept of the “fourth wall” from theater and film studies. The fourth wall is a term used to describe the invisible wall that separates actors from their audience. We use this metaphor to interrogate the function of the fourth wall in professional learning and argue that it reflects a culture of professional learning that, despite innovations that tout teacher collaboration, upholds isolation in teaching and teacher learning and deep embedded norms of noninterference in one another’s practice. We also attend to the possibilities for supporting teacher learning that breaching the fourth wall affords when shared enactments of practice are used as a context for teachers’ sensemaking and collaboration.

... Instead, trauma studies 'operates on the level of theory, and of exegesis in the service of insights about human functioning' (Hartman 199515. Hartman, G. 1995. ... Chrissie, Tara, Ashley, Brianna and I sat together at a round table in the back of the classroom. ...

The children in Ruth's fourth/fifth-grade classroom had been engaged for weeks in a literacy project in which they researched and shared an aspect of their cultural background. The chil-dren interviewed their parents, ... The Aftermath of “You're Only Half”:

This article presents a case study of a fourth grade boy's experiences in writing, preceding and following a story he wrote about a boy whose struggles in writing led directly to his death. We explore how Max's writing experiences related to his identity, specifically his sense of himself as a writer, his struggle to communicate his ideas, and his discomfort with expressing private thoughts and emotions in print. Drawing on a range of qualitative data, we examine Max's experiences with writing workshop, journal writing, responding to literature, and a state writing assessment. Max's story argues for the importance of considering issues of identity in the writing classroom to help students build on the successes that often hide behind the surface struggles of their writing.

... "But that's a girls' book!" Exploring gender boundaries in children's reading practices 377 ... I monitored literature circle discussions, worked with individual children on their role sheets or response logs, and responded to written work in addition to participating in book club. ...

In this article, we share findings from our process of “reading the past, writing the future” of elementary research in NCTE’s journals. Our analysis focused on major domains of the field, including literature, writing, reading, language, and multimodal literacies, and spanned Elementary English Review, which first appeared in 1924, was renamed Elementary English in 1947, and became Language Arts in 1975; Primary Voices, which ran from 1993 to 2002; and Research in the Teaching of English (RTE), which began in 1967. Findings revealed both surprising continuities across decades as well as clear and important social and cultural shifts that influenced theory, methods, and practice in the field, emphasizing the importance of 1) recognizing the level of historical and political influences in elementary literacy research, 2) paying explicit attention to how the cultural-historical zeitgeist shapes our work as scholars, and 3) interrogating how our representations of research problems may contribute to the continuance of social and cultural inequities.

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore questions about what it means to carry, live and invite traumatic stories into the space of a literacy classroom. Weaving illustrative moments from the classroom with trauma theory and research, I ask, What does it mean to embrace the incomprehensible in literacy classrooms? How might the incomprehensible be viewed as a productive and connected space in students’ academic and social experiences in schools? To delve into these questions, I turn to scholars who conceptualize trauma and its relationship with what we can access through and at the limits of articulation and to two young children’s writing and talk. In particular, I situate children’s experiences in trauma studies scholar Caruth’s ideas about the inadequacy of language in the face of trauma and cultural theorist Massumi’s arguments about affect as that which escapes our efforts to structure experience. I argue that incomprehensibility invokes an important metaphorical space of not knowing that demands reciprocal approaches testimony and critical witness responses that can serve to collapse the binaries so often employed in efforts to make sense of children’s lives and literacies.

AND POVERTY The view of class I bring to my analysis is grounded in a critical tradition arguing that eco-nomic inequities are built and sustained through systems, such as capitalism, in which those with access to wealth and the power that it affords will attempt to maintain structures ...