Elizabeth Birr Moje

Working toward third space in content area literacy: An examination of everyday funds of knowledge and Discourse

In this article we analyze the intersections and disjunctures between everyday (home, community, peer group) and school funds of knowledge and Discourse (Gee, 1996) that frame the school-based, content area literacy practices of middle school-aged youth in a predominantly Latino/a, urban community of Detroit, Michigan, in the United States. Using data collected across five years of an on-going community ethnography, we present findings on the strength of various funds that shape the texts available to a sample of 30 young people in the community and school we studied. We then present the patterns that we analyzed across each of the different documented funds. We use our findings on the funds that youth have available to them outside of school to suggest possibilities for working toward third space (Bhabha, 1994; Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, Alvarez, & Chiu, 1999; Soja, 1996) around literacy and content learning in the seventh- and eighth-grade, public school science classrooms of these youth, and we draw implications for literacy teaching and research in other content areas. EN ESTE articulo analizamos las intersecciones y fracturas entre las fuentes cotidianas (hogar, comunidad, grupo de pares) y escolares de conocimientos y tipos discursivos (Gee, 1996). Estas constituyen el marco de las practicas escolares de alfabetizacion en las areas de contenido para jovenes de escuela media en una comunidad urbana predominantemente latina de Detroit, Michigan, USA. Utilizando datos recogidos durante cinco anos en un estudio etnografico en curso, presentamos hallazgos acerca de la fuerza de varias fuentes que conforman los textos de los que disponen 30 jovenes de la comunidad y la escuela estudiadas. Usamos los hallazgos sobre los recursos a los que los jovenes tienen acceso fuera de la escuela para sugerir posibilidades de trabajo sobre el tercer espacio (Bhabha, 1994; Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, Alvarez, & Chiu, 1999; Soja, 1996) en alfabetizacion y aprendizaje de contenidos para aulas de ciencia de septimo y octavo grado en escuelas publicas. Asimismo formulamos implicancias para la ensenanza y la investigacion en otras areas de contenido. IN DIESEM Artikel analysieren wir Verbindungen und Trennungen zwischen dem Alltag (dem Zuhause, in der Gemeinschaft, bei Gleichaltrigen untereinander) und gegenuber schulischen Wissensgrundlagen und Diskurs (Gee, 1996), welche die schulfacher-basierenden Schreib- und Lesepraktiken von jugendlichen Mitschulern in einer uberwiegend latein-amerikanischen Stadtgemeinde in Detroit, Michigan, in den Vereinigten Staaten einrahmen. Unter Benutzung von uber funf Jahren gesammelter Daten einer fortlaufenden ethnischen Gemeinschaftserhebung prasentieren wir Ermittlungen aufgrund der Uberzeugungskraft verschiedener Grundlagen, welche die vorhandenen Texte gestalten, die wir anhand einer Auswahl von 30 Jugendlichen in der Gemeinde und Schule studierten. Danach prasentieren wir Musterbeispiele, die wir quer durch die unterschiedlich dokumentierten Grundlagen weiter analysierten. Wir wandten unsere Erkenntnisse auf jene Grundlagen an, die den Jugendlichen auserhalb der Schule zur Verfugung stehen, um Entwicklungsmoglichkeiten des Einwirkens zum dritten Raum (Bhabha, 1994; Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, Alvarez, & Chiu, 1999; Soja, 1996) im Schreib- und Leseumfeld und facherbezogenen Lernen dieser jugendlichen Schuler aus den siebten und achten wissenschaftlichen Fachklassen (Science) in offentlichen Schulen aufzuzeigen, und wir ziehen daraus Implikationen zum Unterrichten im Schreiben und Lesen und der Erforschung in anderen Fachunterrichtsbereichen.

To Be Part of the Story: The Literacy Practices of Gangsta Adolescents

Despite a recent emphasis on conceptualizing literacy as a tool for changing thought and experience, when people—whether the popular media, school personnel, or educational scholars—speak of the literacy practices of marginalized adolescents, they rarely talk about such literacies as tools. Instead, the literacy practices of marginalized adolescents are often referred to in terms of deviance or resistance. Gangconnected youth, in particular, are routinely represented as engaging in acts of villainy or resistance, but are rarely represented as meaning makers, people who are expressing their beliefs, values, and interests. If literacy theorists want to claim that literacy is a tool for transforming thought and experience, however, then we need to extend that theoretical claim to all literacy practices by asking what unsanctioned literacy practices do for adolescents. Are these simply acts of resistance? Or do adolescent gang members, who are often placed outside the possibility of school success on the basis of physical characteristics and social affiliations, also use literacy as a way of exploring possible worlds, claiming space, and making their voices heard? This study uses data from three years of research with five gang-connected youth to illustrate how they used their literacy practices as meaning-making, expressive, and communicative tools. The data show how these youth used literacy practices “to be part of the story,” or to claim a space, construct an identity, and take a social position in their worlds. The paper concludes by arguing that literacy theorists, researchers, and practitioners need to acknowledge the power of unsanctioned literacy tools in the lives of marginalized youth and develop pedagogies that draw from, but also challenge and extend, these practices.

Chapter 1 Developing Socially Just Subject-Matter Instruction: A Review of the Literature on Disciplinary Literacy Teaching

In a 1996 American Educational Research Journal (AERJ) article, Deborah Ball and Suzanne Wilson (Ball & Wilson, 1996) made an argument for “integrity in teaching,” in which they framed integrity as the commitment to “fusing” the moral aspects of teaching with the intellectual. The central question they explored was how to deal with conflicts between the intellectual work of teaching content concepts and the moral work of teaching those content concepts to human beings, that is, to people with varying perspectives on the value of the content, varying skill sets and ways of knowing that they brought to their learning, and rich and full lives that might or might not intersect with the content under study. Ball and Wilson argued that these tensions produced constant dilemmas for teachers who must negotiate a desire to meet content learning objectives with their respect for students’ backgrounds and beliefs, which sometimes contradict or dismiss targeted content. Ten years later, I would like to draw from and spin that argument by suggesting that a corollary of Ball and Wilson’s teaching with integrity is the concept of teaching with and for social justice. Teaching in socially just ways and in ways that produce social justice requires the recognition that learners need access to the knowledge deemed valuable by the content domains, even as the knowledge they bring to their learning must not only be recognized but valued. In this review, I revisit that notion of teaching as the fusion of the intellectual and the moral and ask a slightly different question: What does current research tell us about attempts to fuse the moral and intellectual in a way that produces socially just subject-matter instruction at the secondary and postsecondary levels? Furthermore, what would it look like to fuse the moral and intellectual to produce a subject-matter instruction that is not only socially just but also produces social justice?

Literacy and Science: Each in the Service of the Other

We use conceptual and empirical lenses to examine synergies between inquiry science and literacy teaching and learning of K-12 (kindergarten through high school) curriculum. We address two questions: (i) how can reading and writing be used as tools to support inquiry-based science, and (ii) how do reading and writing benefit when embedded in an inquiry-based science setting? After elaborating the theoretical and empirical support for integrated approaches, we discuss how to support their implementation in today’s complicated curricular landscape.

Reexamining Roles of Learner, Text, and Context in Secondary Literacy

(2000). Reexamining Roles of Learner, Text, and Context in Secondary Literacy. The Journal of Educational Research: Vol. 93, New Discoveries in Literacy for The 21st Century, pp. 165-180.

Re‐framing adolescent literacy research for new times: Studying youth as a resource

Abstract In this paper I analyze various perspectives on adolescence, adolescent literacy, and youth culture to argue that the field of education has not attended adequately to the literacy learning and development of adolescents. Moreover, when researchers and policy makers do attend to adolescent or secondary school literacy, the focus of research or policy is typically on adolescents who struggle with mainstream literacy processes. Drawing from this analysis, 1 contend that if the field would turn its attention to youth and study how they learn increasingly complex literacy practices required in disciplinary discourse communities, how they reinvent literacies for unique contexts, and how they use literacy as a tool to navigate complex technologies and fragmented social worlds, then all literacy could be expanded. Adolescent literacy researchers cannot stop there, however. We must also continue to examine the contexts of secondary schooling, with a focus on the literacy demands made by different content areas, so that we can support students as they navigate the different discourse practices of their everyday lives, secondary schools, and life beyond formal schooling. The future of adolescent and secondary literacy research, I argue, is in research that examines the connections between the everyday discourses of adolescents and the academic discourses they navigate each day in school.

The role of anomalous data in restructuring fourth graders' frameworks for understanding electric circuits

This is a case study of the nature of fourth grade childrens understandings of electric circuits and how their understandings provided them with frameworks for interpreting data derived from the observation and manipulation of electric circuits. The findings suggest that (a) childrens interpretive frameworks of electric circuits are reflected in the specificity of details, consistency and coherence of their understandings; (b) the detail, consistency and coherence of childrens understandings influenced their ability to view data as anomalous, supportive or irrelevant; (c) children whose interpretive frameworks enabled them to view the electric circuit data as anomalous were challenged to change their understandings of electric circuits; (d) children whose interpretive frameworks enabled them to view the electric circuit data as supportive evidence weakly restructured their existing understandings of electric circuits and (e)children whose interpretive frameworks enabled them to view the electric circui...

Critical Issues: Circles of Kinship, Friendship, Position, and Power: Examining the Community in Community-Based Literacy Research1

Literacy research conducted in communities of practice outside classrooms and schools has proliferated in the last decade with little attention given to what it means to talk about literacy in “the community.” This article explores issues surrounding community-based literacy research and suggests that, although well intentioned, literacy researchers risk overdetermining, essentializing, and romanticizing what it means to engage in community-based literacy if we do not define and question what is meant by community. The need to define and complicate community as a construct is important, because communities are becoming more complex, and sometimes less communal, with the diversity and rapid change of new times and fast capitalism (Hall, 1995; Lankshear, 1997; Luke & Luke, 1999, in press). This piece examines various definitions of community that have framed community-based literacy studies to date and argues for concerted efforts to define and complicate perspectives on community in future research.

Locating the Social and Political in Secondary School Literacy

The authors suggest a number of possible futures for research on adolescent literacy issues. They emphasize the importance of the social and political with respect to the teaching and learning of older students, and pose numerous questions for those working in this shifting field.

What Will Classrooms and Schools Look Like in the New Millennium

In this “RRQ Snippet,” four literacy researchers discuss the influences of diversity, changing expectations, technology, and teacher professional development on literacy teaching and learning.