Sarah Warshauer Freedman

Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning

Part I. Ideologies in Dialogue: Theoretical Considerations: 1. Ideological becoming: Bahktinian concepts to guide the study of language, literacy and learning Sarah Warshauer Freedman and Arnetha F. Ball 2. Dewey and Bakhtin in dialogue: from Rosenblatt to a pedagogy of literature as a social, aesthetic practice Mark Dressman 3. Intertextualities: Volosinov, Bakhtin, literacy theory, and literacy studies Charles Bazerman 4. Voices in the dialogue: the teaching of academic language to minority second-language learners Guadalupe Valdes Voices in dialogue - dialoguing about dialogism: form and content in a Bahktinian dialogue Allison Weiss Brettschneider Part II. Voiced, Double Voiced, and Multi-voiced Discourses in our Schools: 5. Performance as the foundation for a secondary school of literacy program: a Bakhtinian perspective Eileen Landay 6. Double voiced discourse: African American vernacular English as resource in cultural modeling classrooms Carol D. Lee 7. Narratives of rethinking: the inner dialogue of classroom discourse and student writing Christian Knoeller 8. Authoring pedagogical change in secondary subject-area classrooms: ever newer ways of meaning Cynthia Greenleaf and Mira-Lisa Katz Voices in dialogue: multi-voiced discourses in ideological becoming Verda Delp Part III. Heteroglossia in a Changing World: 9. New teachers for new times: the dialogical principle in teaching and learning electronically Jabari Mahiri 10. Is contradiction contrary? Melanie Sperling 11. A Bakhtinian perspective on learning to read and write late in life Judy Kalman 12. New times and new literacies: themes for a changing world Voices in dialogue: hybridity as literacy, literacy as hybridity dialogic responses to a heteroglossic world James Paul Gee Voices in dialogue: hybridity as literacy, literacy as hybridity: dialogic responses to a heteroglossic world Alice A. Milano Part IV. A Closing Thought on Bakhtinian Perspectives: 13. The process of ideological becoming Gary Saul Morson Author index Subject index.

In It for the Long Haul: How Teacher Education Can Contribute to Teacher Retention in High-Poverty, Urban Schools

This study explores a constellation of factors that contribute to the retention of teachers in high-poverty, urban schools. It focuses on one cohort of the University of California at Berkeleys Multicultural Urban Secondary English Credential and MA Program, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data to track the careers of 26 novice teachers through their 5th year after receiving their credential. The authors reconsider the categories traditionally used to determine whether teachers stay or leave and offer ways to track those who stay or leave high-poverty, urban schools, including the use of a category of “movers” to describe teachers who leave urban classroom teaching yet remain active in urban education. They conclude with a discussion of factors that seem to contribute to teachers staying in high-poverty, urban schools and educational settings. Besides a state scholarship program, these include (a) a sense of mission, which was reinforced and developed by the teacher education program; (b) a disposition for hard work and persistence, which was reinforced and developed by the teacher education program; (c) substantive preparation that included both the practical and the academic and harmony between the two; (d) training in assuming the reflective stance of a teacher researcher; (e) the opportunity, given the high demand for teachers in high-poverty schools, to be able to change schools or districts yet still remain in their chosen profession; and (f) ongoing support from members of the cohort as well as other supportive professional networks across the years.

Teaching History after Identity‐Based Conflicts: The Rwanda Experience

[Hutu extremist] organizers of the [Rwandan] genocide, who had themselves grown up with . . . distortions of history, skillfully exploited misconceptions about who the Tutsi were, where they had come from, and what they had done in the past. From these elements, they fueled the fear and hatred that made genocide imaginable. (Des Forges 1999, 31) A country’s history is often a central concern after violent, identity-based conflicts, regardless of where they occur. Why does history take on such significance? As expressed in Alison Des Forges’s explanation of Rwanda in the epigraph, all sides tend to blame cross-group hatred and ensuing conflicts, at least in part, on past injustice. Citizens of countries that have experienced such devastation can often see how political leaders distorted and then exploited national history to incite violence. As countries seek social repair, many believe that a new and more truthful history must be transmitted to the next generation through revised history curricula in schools. In such disparate places as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Germany, Guatemala, Japan, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda, the reteaching of history has been expected to lay the foundation for social reconstruction, a better future, and a lasting peace (Cole and Barsalou 2006; Hodgkin 2006; Cole 2007a, 2007b). In response to the educational challenges countries face after violent conflict, we explored the links between larger political processes and decisions about teaching history. We focus on secondary schools in Rwanda, where we have been working on educational issues since 2001, and ask the questions: How can material for a history curriculum be developed to avoid propaganda? What tensions surface when teachers negotiate an increasingly repressive

school voices challenges facing education systems after identity-based conflicts

We describe our research on the role of education in the social reconstruction of countries after mass conflict. Our studies focus on the voices of those least heard in the discourse - teachers, students, administrators and parents. We examine schools in four societies that experienced profound violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide during the 1990s - Croatia, the UN-administered province of Kosovo in Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda. We question the assumptions that underlie current practice such as a narrow focus on emergency interventions, conflict resolution, peace education and textbook reform. Societal repair must involve a comprehensive set of interventions that recognizes the integrated nature of a society’s institutions. Schools are a unique component of building a long-term future.

A Good Girl Writes Like a Good Girl Written Response to Student Writing

This article discusses one students persistence in misunderstanding her teachers written comments on her papers, even when these comments are accompanied by other response channels that serve, in part, to clarify the written comments. It presents the idea that student and teacher each bring to the written response episode a set of information, skills, and values that may or may not be shared between them, and it is the interplay of these three elements that feeds the students reading and processing of teacher written comments and that leads to misunderstandings. This happened even for a high-achieving student in an otherwise successful classroom. An in-depth look at one student and the classroom context in which she learns to write, focusing on her grappling with her teachers written comments, reveals the complexity of the teaching-learning process in the high school writing class.

Linking classroom discourse and classroom content: Following the trail of intellectual work in a writing lesson

This article presents an approach to analyzing classroom talk that sheds light on the intellectual work of the classroom. The analysis system extends the theoretical construct of preference organization from conversational analysis to the study of a whole‐class, teaching‐learning interaction in a ninth‐grade English classroom, during which an expert teacher helps his students prepare to write a character sketch. The analysis reveals the underlying intellectual structure of the interaction, including the teachers pedagogical goals, the cognitive skills required for successful student participation in the activity, and the strategies students apply to the task. By using conversational structure as a cue to the content of the lesson, the analysis reveals what students stand to learn.

Inside city schools : investigating literacy in multicultural classrooms

This text synthesizes and co-ordinates the work of teacher researchers who address the issues of race and ethnicity in the classroom. It deals with issues of teaching within a culturally responsive framework, featuring stories by teachers trying to bring their students multicultural literacies.

Understanding and Comprehending.

Schools should be instructing students in formal thought and expression—what we call “comprehending”—rather than in everyday or “home” thought and language—what we call “understanding.” In this essay we suggest general changes in the standard reading and writing curricula. Finally, we examine the language of writing instruction, in college-level individual writing conferences, to take a close look at issues involved in implementing the curricula for higher and lower achieving students.

Crossing the Bridge to Practice Rethinking the Theories of Vygotsky and Bakhtin

Vygotskys and Bakhtins theories of social interaction are so general that they are not always useful guides for classroom practice. This study of secondary school classrooms in Great Britain and the United States reveals that when teachers apply similar theories to everyday practice, important pedagogical contrasts remain—both in terms of the ways in which instruction is organized and in terms of what students produce. The theories need elaborating. In everyday practice, social interaction is not binary, that is, either there is interaction or there is not. Rather, participants position themselves along a continuum of involvement—from highly involved to relatively uninvolved. Learners occupy different points within classrooms, from one classroom to another, and for the same student at different times. Also, the social space within the classroom affects student involvement and the teachers ability to track it. This study found that in classrooms with the most highly involved interactions, students participated in curriculum making and belonged to a close-knit community.

Language Minority Education in Great Britain: A Challenge to Current U.S. Policy

British educational policies advocate placing language minority students in mainstream classes where their regular teacher receives ongoing support from a TESOL specialist. By contrast, in the United States, the policies favor placing nonnative speakers in separate programs such as ESL pull-out classes, sheltered English, or bilingual education, where they are taught solely by the TESOL or bilingual education specialist. The same rationale—protecting equality of opportunity—is offered for both approaches. This article compares the events that led to the contrasting solutions and the institutional structures that support those solutions; it gives an example of the British mainstream system at work and shows how the different approaches to educating nonnative speakers reflect different assumptions about language development and definitions of equality of opportunity. The article concludes by asking language teachers three questions about programs for language minorities that are raised by the contrastive examination: (a) What are the consequences of social segregation in educational programs? (b) What are the effects of varied instructional contexts on language learning? (c) What are the most helpful roles ESL teachers can play with respect to teaching subject matter and linguistic competency?