Wendy J. Glenn

Real Writers as Aware Readers: Writing Creatively as a Means to Develop Reading Skills.

Increased attention on written response to literature has tended to eliminate other forms of student writing in literature classrooms. However, when we allow students to write fiction unrelated to a particular text, their commitment to and understanding of texts are enhanced. This can serve as a means of engaging students with reading. Eight preservice teachers volunteered to participate in a writing workshop, meeting to share their fiction and provide written and oral feedback to others in the group. Each week, participants drafted reflections about the works read for class in relation to their own work as authors. These were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Two case studies provide representative examples of how participants demonstrated behaviors associated with good readers as a direct result of their commitment to their writing. They were motivated to improve their stories, and this motivation translated into their use of effective reading strategies.

Understanding Unfamiliar Literary Aesthetics: White Preservice Teachers Examine Race through Story.

Reading and reflecting upon ethnically unfamiliar literature can provide opportunities for teacher candidates to critically examine assumptions of self and other relative to racial, cultural, and linguistic identities. However, ethnically unfamiliar literatures can be difficult for readers to understand and appreciate due to the aesthetics they embody. This study addresses the struggles White preservice English teachers’ experience in making sense of unfamiliar ethnicities in narrative forms and how this frustration might be mediated through explicit attention to and study of the aesthetic elements of ethnically unfamiliar texts. Findings reveal a keen interest in understanding and engaging with multicultural literature among participants coupled with a persistent hesitation to include it and related conversations of race in their instruction. Participants opened themselves to learning more about others but struggled to implicate themselves in the transfer of new knowledge to teaching practice. The study’s findings contribute to the conversations of scholars in teacher education, multicultural studies, and young adult literature by offering an approach to teaching multicultural literature to preservice teachers that encourages complex, racially informed responses to ethnically unfamiliar texts and revealing potential tensions that may emerge in the process.

Omdefinerer En Norsk Norge 1 : The Influence of Changing Demographics on Norwegian Schooling for Social Democracy

This article describes how Norwegian compulsory education, both philosophically and practically, reflects the institutionalized democratic values of the larger social and political community of Norway. It examines, through the application of collective and structural lenses of analysis, how shifting demographics in this social and political community are challenging institutionalized values and changing schools. The article draws upon the authors professional and personal experiences as an American Fulbright Scholar in Norway to consider how Norwegian attempts at democratic schooling are becoming increasingly complicated with the arrival of significant numbers of recent immigrants who bring cultural values and norms that do not mirror the beliefs and systems that define the traditional Norwegian national identity.

Journal of Literacy Research: Editorial

We have been preparing this issue of JLR for nearly a year. It is our first issue as new editors, so there was much to learn. Not surprisingly, the steepest learning curve has been juggling it all, all at once, all the time—while striving for quality at every turn. The most rewarding part of the juggle has been learning about the important research that you and others are doing. The slope of this curve has been like no other. While our learning continues, the plan we proposed for our term as editors has remained largely intact. In the paragraphs that follow, we outline this plan, as well as our editorial policy. First, however, we begin with a few words about us as an editorial team.

Resisting and Persisting: Identity Stability Among Adolescent Readers Labeled as Struggling:

This phenomenological case study explores the persistence of high school readers labeled as struggling as they described their responses to recurring, consistent, externally originating challenges to positive reading identities growing from their experiences in a Young Adult Literature (YAL) course. Through application of Weinreich’s identity theory, the article examines three challenges that emerged: the home environment, friend influence, and school norms and practices. Findings drawn from student-generated oral reflections gathered through Seidman’s interview protocol suggest that participants possessed the power to dissociate from perceived negative reading identities and enact agency over identities that conflicted with their desired reading identities. However, participants were particularly vulnerable to the influence of school-ascribed reading identities they defined as negative. Given the perceived validity of these ascribed labels, readers were challenged more significantly in their attempts to persist in the self-construal of their desired identity conceptions in response to in-school, rather than out-of-school, challenges.