Melody Zoch

“It’s Important for Them to Know Who They Are”: Teachers’ Efforts to Sustain Students’ Cultural Competence in an Age of High-Stakes Testing:

This article examines how four urban elementary teachers designed their literacy instruction in ways that sought to sustain students’ cultural competence—maintaining their language and cultural practices while also gaining access to more dominant ones—amid expectations to prepare students for high-stakes testing. A large part of their teaching involved taking their students’ backgrounds into account and selecting classroom texts to provide examples of the contributions made by successful culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse people with space for dialogue about inequity.

Growing the Good Stuff: One Literacy Coach's Approach to Support Teachers with High-Stakes Testing.

This ethnographic study reports on one elementary literacy coach’s response to high-stakes testing and her approach to support third- through fifth-grade teachers in a Title I school in Texas. Sources of data included field notes and observations of classes and meetings, audio/video recordings, and transcribed interviews. The findings illustrate how the literacy coach used her knowledge and beliefs about teaching reading along with her position of leadership to craft alternative responses to an environment that endorsed a skills-based approach to teaching reading and placed a strong emphasis on test preparation. Specifically, the literacy coach enriched the skills-based reading curriculum with reading workshop, supported teachers’ learning and growth with teacher-centered inquiry groups, and focused on language and authentic literature as a way of preparing students for the test. These findings suggest that the literacy coach played an important role in supporting teachers with negotiating the demands of a high-stakes testing environment and in ways that did not necessarily compromise the literacy coach’s beliefs. These findings also suggest the importance of a supportive school environment where teachers have a sense of community for support and professional growth.

Creating digital authors

Elementary students find themselves engaged and learning at a digital writing camp. The authors find that such elementary students usually have limited access to technology at home and school, and posit that teachers should do all they can to give them more access to and experience in digital composing. Students were motivated and learned to use technology through experimentation and collaboration, the authors said, adding that technology had a positive effect on the students’ writing process and final products.

Opening Your Door to Research.

“Research says…“ a lot. But how does research come to say anything? One way is by having teachers open their classroom doors to a researcher. In this article, we share the stories of two teachers who opened their doors to the authors’ research and were glad they did. The teachers contrast this experience to other research experiences in which they felt coerced to participate and whose objectives were unclear. When teachers understand their rights, their students’ rights, and the kind of data researchers intend to collect, they will be far more comfortable with the process and far more willing to invite researchers into their classrooms.

Textured Dialogues: A Community Project about Immigrants' Multimodal Perspectives on the Meaning of Education

With greater diversification of American society comes a need to forge intercultural connections that will promote and support effective education services for immigrant families. The intercultural approach taken in this community project goes beyond a paradigm of coexistence. Rather, the term “intercultural” implies an integrated society of diverse members who participate in skilled dialogues that promote shared goals and understandings (Barrera, Corso, & Macpherson, 2003; Kimmel & Volet, 2012) and build on the “funds of knowledge” (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) of all involved. Exploring intersections of this dynamic was central to understanding immigrant perspectives on the meaning of education. The result was the creation and display of a tapestry and book created by immigrant community members. This article provides a brief description of how this community project came about and, then, describes community members’ (hereafter referred to as “artists”) tapestry squares and narratives. The perspectives gleaned from this project can be used to inform educators, students, and others about the beliefs, practices, experiences, and aspirations of immigrant families around the meaning of education. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to demonstrate how an arts-based project can encourage dialogue on an educational topic, and second, to illuminate the immigrant artists’ beliefs, practices, experiences, and aspirations related to education.