Kimberly Lenters

Resistance, Struggle, and the Adolescent Reader.

An important research paradigm applied to the study of adolescent resistance to reading—listening to student voice—has yielded rich information regarding adolescent literacy practices, adolescent agency, and adolescent identity as components of resistance to reading. Instructional perspectives of teachers and researchers also serve to shed light on the phenomenon and provide insight on better understanding the interplay between adolescent resistance to reading and struggle with literacy acquisition. For some teachers, the “problem” with adolescent readers and resistance to reading lies outside their sphere of responsibility or influence; however, adolescent and researcher voices provide a somewhat different perspective. Understanding and addressing the disjuncture becomes particularly important when addressing the instructional needs of struggling adolescent readers: Readers who resist reading risk becoming readers who struggle, and those who already struggle with reading miss important opportunities for improvement through interaction with text. Instructional implications aimed at addressing resistance to in-school reading are also presented.

No Half Measures: Reading Instruction for Young Second-Language Learners.

Consideration of literacy practices that ensure success for young second-language learners has become crucial for educators, given the growing linguistic diversity in an ever-increasing number of regions, the limited resources of school systems, and the swirling public debate on bilingual education. This article explores principles regarding bilingualism and the young child as a means of untangling the occasionally conflicting interpretations found in the research. The picture that emerges from the discussion is that children experience important cognitive (in addition to affective) gains through bilingualism. These gains, however, are experienced only when both languages are developed to a point of proficiency so that transfer can take place between the two. It is this dual proficiency that we must keep in mind when we consider reading instruction for young second-language learners. In general, the development of this proficiency dictates that throughout their primary school years, bilingual children should receive dual-language instruction, with no half measures in either language. These specific findings also provide some guidelines for undertaking second-language reading instruction with young children.

Measuring Situated Literacy Activity: Challenges and Promises

This report presents the results of the development of a methodological approach to provide empirical evidence that family literacy programs “work.” The assessment techniques were developed within the action research project Literacy for Life (LFL) that the authors designed and delivered for 12 months, working collaboratively with three different cohorts of immigrant and refugee families in western Canada. The goal was to develop valid and reliable measures and analyses to measure the impact on literacy skill and knowledge in a particular version of a literacy program that incorporated real-world literacy activities into instruction for low-English-literate adults and their prekindergarten children, ages 3 to 5. The authors offer this approach to assessment as a promising way to measure the impact of socially situated literacy activity that requires taking the social context of literacy activity into account. They offer this work not as the answer to the challenge of documenting the value of working with families and literacy, but as one way to think about focusing curriculum and assessment within programs that validate the real lives of the participants and build bridges between those lives and literacy work within family literacy programming.

Riding the Lines and Overwriting in the Margins Affect and Multimodal Literacy Practices

This case study examines the multimodal literacy practices of 11-year-old Nigel as he plays with assemblages of people, objects, and practices in his storywriting. The study asks “How does following the seemingly off-task multimodal literacy practices of one pre-adolescent youth across his home-community-school terrain provide insight into contemporary literacy learning and instruction?” Using assemblage theory, the article maps a period in time, the early months of his fifth-grade experience, when one boy approached the literacies privileged in his classroom with what appeared to be a certain amount of disregard, while engaging in personal literacy practices that were both rich and, at times, subversive. The analysis maps the people, signs, material objects, events, and places in the unfolding of Nigel’s play with two symbolic figures, the line rider and the stick man. Viewed across time and place, Nigel’s textual and embodied play with these figures demonstrate ways a young adolescent, fully immersed in and engaged with his digital and material world, “overwrites” official texts and produces rich stories that go unnoticed by the adults around him. This unfolding took place in unpredictable ways, and as it occurred, literacy practices that brought intellectual and visceral engagement, pleasure and pride, and agentive recourse to Nigel in his practice of literacy came into focus. The emergence of Nigel’s inscriptions across multiple terrains provides insight into ways in which a socio-material perspective, with its focus on the role of affect and the body, may assist us in re-thinking multimodal writing development.

Fracturing Writing Spaces

In this paper, we explore the affordances of literature-based, arts-infused and digital media processes for students, as multimodal practices take centre stage in an English Language Arts unit on fractured fairy tales. The study takes up the challenge of addressing multimodal literacy instruction and research in ways that utilize a range of modalities. Incorporating the perspectives and multimodal texts of five students, Alvin, Adamma, Emmett, Layla and Yacoub, we highlight the highly supportive writing environment made possible for these fifth grade learners. The oral, embodied, visual, and written group explorations of the language of fairy tales, story and parody, found in fractured fairy tales, afforded the students numerous, rich opportunities to explore and experiment with language, which ultimately led to the production of individual fractured fairy tales written with a level of sophistication their teacher had not previously seen in their writing.

From Storybooks to Games, Comics, Bands, and Chapter Books: A Young Boy's Appropriation of Literacy Practices.

This case study addresses a middle class family ʹ s role in their son ʹ s literacy development through an investigation of the socio ‐ cultural practices that support his literacy acquisition. Rogoff ʹ s socio ‐ cultural framework, which proposes three planes of analysis for observation of human development, is used for the analysis. The literacy practices of Max (age 8) are the central focus. The analysis explores how community, interpersonal, and personal literacy activities connect to form holistic literacy practices for him. Insights into the nature of peer interactions around literacy, gender considerations in family literacy, and boys ʹ out ‐ of ‐ school literacy practices emerge from this analysis. Key words: socio ‐ cultural perspectives on literacy; multiliteracies; family literacy; gender and literacy L’etude de cas presentee ici porte sur le role de parents de classe moyenne dans le developpement de la litteratie de leur fils. Le cadre socioculturel de Rogoff, qui propose trois axes d’analyse pour l’observation du developpement de l’etre humain, est utilise dans l’analyse des pratiques socioculturelles qui favorisent la litteratie. L’article porte essentiellement sur les pratiques de litteratie de Max (8 ans). L’auteur analyse le lien entre diverses activites communautaires, interpersonnelles et personnelles en matiere de litteratie et l’apparition subsequente de pratiques de litteratie holistiques chez Max. L’analyse fournit des points de repere sur la litteratie et les interactions entre des pairs, les differences entre les sexes et la litteratie familiale ainsi que les pratiques de litteratie chez les garcons en dehors du milieu scolaire. Mots cles : perspectives socioculturelles sur la litteratie, multilitteraties, litteratie familiale, litteratie et sexes

Telling "a Story of Somebody" through Digital Scrapbooking: A Fourth Grade Multiliteracies Project Takes an Affective Turn.

ABSTRACT Multiliteracies pedagogy has played an important role in the way classrooms worldwide conceptualize literacy learning. And yet, some argue, its orientation toward literacy by design, with an ultimate focus on the production of transformed texts, may narrow the very possibility of opening students’ social futures that it seeks to promote. Recent scholarship calls for a re-orientation in pedagogical practices to move away from literacy by design and toward literacy as emergence. Drawing on a case study of a fourth grade classroom, this study focuses on how affect, in particular the visceral forces that propel or diminish capacities for learning, might assist with this re-orientation. Findings suggest that when multiliteracies instruction makes space for affect, new trajectories for literacy learning are enabled.

Just Doing Our Jobs: A Case Study of Literacy-in-Action in a Fifth Grade Literature Circle

This case study examines the use of literature circles in a fifth grade classroom. Using the concept of literacy-in-action, it examines the question of why, in spite of critique, the use of defined student roles continues to dominate literature circle pedagogy. The study’s examination of the interaction of people, objects, practices and meanings associated with this particular classroom’s literature circles, demonstrates the way in which reliance on one particular literacy object, the role sheet, worked to radically alter the intended pedagogical purpose and meanings set out by those who first popularized literature circles. Through its travels to and from the fifth grade classroom, the role sheet accumulated an increasing status or power, along with a peculiar resistance to critique. The examination sheds light on the tensions and contradictions that arise when an instructional routine is transplanted from one context to another, a phenomenon occurring daily in classrooms worldwide. The findings illustrate the unintended consequences that arise when a literacy object is used as a proxy for the human mediation traditionally, and necessarily, associated with meaningful literacy pedagogies.

Reassembling the Literacy Event in Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words

Shirley Brice Heath’s work in the Carolina Piedmonts resulted in an ethnographic study covering a span of ten years from 1969 to 1978, in which she chronicled language use in three communities, Roadville, Trackton and Maintown. Her rich accounting of the literate practices of three culturally diverse groups living in close proximity to one another was groundbreaking in redefining literacy.