Trevor Thomas Stewart

Content Area Reading and Disciplinary Literacy: A Case for The Radical Center

Within the past few years literacy scholars have begun voicing serious doubts on theoretical and practical grounds about the efficacy of the longstanding notion that every teacher is a teacher of reading. In this commentary, we add our voices to the conversation around content area literacy as well as offer our perspectives on the recent calls for alternative practices grounded in disciplinary literacy. We conclude by advocating compromise based on honest, intelligent dialogue between literacy specialists and content area teachers.

Critical Digital Literacies and the Struggle over What’s Common

It is tempting and even useful to imagine stable camps in a warlike contest over common interests in school reform, and it is an ingrained national tradition to portray meaningful struggle between camps, with Jimmy Stewart or Sidney Poitier playing the good guy in the movie version. Web 2.0 activism, a type of critical literacy, challenges that view as teachers and parents, long positioned in the backseat in national education reform, are increasingly able to drive, organize, and disagree with self-selected protagonists of positive change. In this chapter, we examine the connections among Critical Digital Literacies (CDL) and the struggle over what is “common” among stakeholders in American education.

Dialogue, Inquiry, Changing Roles, and the Dialogical Self

This chapter draws upon Dialogical Self theory and Bakhtin’s theory of language to highlight the importance of dialogue, inquiry, and collaboration in teacher education courses. Teacher preparation is considered against the backdrop of contemporary U.S. school reforms, which favor standardized instructional practices and curriculum directives that grind against student-centered philosophies of teaching. Data from a qualitative study of problem-posing seminars in a graduate English Education program are used to illuminate the contributions that Dialogical Self theory can make to the field of teacher education. The study indexes the ways that scaffolded, collaborative dialogue can support teacher candidates’ formation of professional identities by creating conditions for novice teachers to explore the multiple I-positions they occupy as they make the transition from student to teacher. By examining the struggles, negotiations, and exchanges that occur as teacher candidates work to support one another during their student teaching experiences, this chapter discusses how Dialogical Self theory can inform teacher educators and inspire revisions to education methods courses.

The "Simple View," Instructional Level, and the Plight of Struggling Fifth-Sixth Grade Readers

ABSTRACT This study explored print-processing and vocabulary differences among a group of 5th- and 6th-grade students who had scored below the 50th percentile on a standardized reading test. Guided by the simple view of reading, we applied cut scores (low/high) to the students’ performance on print-processing and vocabulary tasks. The design allowed for the placement of students in 1 of 4 reader profiles: (a) high print processing/low vocabulary (25%), (b) high print processing/high vocabulary (14%), (c) low print processing/high vocabulary (14%), or (d) low print processing/low vocabulary (48%). An important finding was that 62% of the students could not read grade-level text with adequate accuracy and rate. In fact, many could not read comfortably a full level below their grade placement. We consider instructional implications.