Todd Ruecker

High-Stakes Testing and Latina/o Students: Creating a Hierarchy of College Readiness.

This article examines how high-stakes testing policies can constrain the way teachers at predominately Latina/o high schools teach literacy and subsequently influence the success of Latina/o students at college. It is based on a year and a half study of seven Latina/o students making transition from a high school to a community college or university on the U.S.–Mexico border.

The Politics of English Second Language Writing Assessment in Global Contexts

Large-scale, life-changing English as a foreign language (EFL) tests, often featuring a written component, have become firmly entrenched in today’s increasingly globalised world. As such, some influential authors have written about learners, teachers, and test-takers becoming progressively ensnared within powerful systems and cultures of assessment that are depersonalised, demoralising, and often dehumanising (McNamara & Roever, 2006; Shohamy, 2001; Spolsky, 1997). The Politics of English Second Language Writing Assessment in Global Contexts provides critical perspectives on the controversial intersection between politics and second language (L2) writing assessment.This chapter turns the spotlight on Vietnam, where English learning is booming due to globalization and is now further accelerated by the central government’s 2020 National Foreign Languages Project. Despite its significance, little is known about the project’s actual effects on EFL writing assessment. To bridge this gap, the current study tracks the professional life history of two Vietnamese instructors as they progressed through different positions and illustrates how the national strategies were adopted and adapted by their institutions and the teachers themselves.

Stranger in a Strange Land: Conducting Qualitative Literacy Research Across Contexts

This chapter focuses on exploring researcher positionality when working in different contexts that one may be disconnected from and/or otherwise unfamiliar with. The author begins by exploring existing work in community literacy studies and race studies that problematize researcher/community partnerships. After contextualizing his perspective through discussion of existing work, the author devotes the central part of the chapter to exploring two particular experiences of the researcher working in unfamiliar contexts: a study focused on Latina/o students transitioning from high school to community college or university on the U.S.–Mexico border and a study focused on literacy education in rural and small town high schools. These explorations discuss experiences such as being a white researcher in a school that is 99 % Latina/o, and being the big city, big institution researcher in towns with only a thousand people. In the concluding sections, the author discusses several strategies he has utilized to make contexts across these different environments, such as learning local languages, choosing theoretical frameworks carefully, and building collaborative relationships with participants.