Multimodal and Community-Based Literacies

2022 ◽  
pp. 394-415
Author(s):  
Ruth Harman ◽  
Dong-shin Shin

In recent decades, high-stakes school reforms and draconian budget cuts have constrained the autonomy of public school teachers in developing multi literacy approaches with emergent bilingual learners (e.g., English-only laws, high stakes testing). This chapter describes the community and multimodal instructional practices of two urban elementary school teachers/ researchers, developed in the context of a professional development initiative. Using critical, sociocultural conceptions of literacy and qualitative methods of investigation, the paper investigates different aspects of the teachers' writing instruction (i.e., community involvement; genre-based instruction; digital literacy; and multimodality); it also explores how the writing processes of focal bilingual students incorporated these practices. Findings show that this approach positioned bilingual learners as agentive text makers. In addition, the second-grade students developed a heightened awareness of audience and context. Implications are discussed, including the pressing need for teacher collaboration, robust school-university partnerships, and innovative multimodal approaches to literacy.

Author(s):  
Ruth Harman ◽  
Dong-shin Shin

In recent decades, high-stakes school reforms and draconian budget cuts have constrained the autonomy of public school teachers in developing multi literacy approaches with emergent bilingual learners (e.g., English-only laws, high stakes testing). This chapter describes the community and multimodal instructional practices of two urban elementary school teachers/ researchers, developed in the context of a professional development initiative. Using critical, sociocultural conceptions of literacy and qualitative methods of investigation, the paper investigates different aspects of the teachers' writing instruction (i.e., community involvement; genre-based instruction; digital literacy; and multimodality); it also explores how the writing processes of focal bilingual students incorporated these practices. Findings show that this approach positioned bilingual learners as agentive text makers. In addition, the second-grade students developed a heightened awareness of audience and context. Implications are discussed, including the pressing need for teacher collaboration, robust school-university partnerships, and innovative multimodal approaches to literacy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH BYRNE BAUSELL ◽  
JOCELYN A. GLAZIER

Given the well-documented pervasiveness of high-stakes assessment in preK–12 schools, many researchers have investigated how testing affects students. In this article, Sarah Byrne Bausell and Jocelyn A. Glazier explore the ways that high-stakes testing influences beginning teacher socialization and the ways that teacher colleagues shape one another's responses to these policies. The authors use discourse analysis to examine six years of transcripts collected from a series of quarterly teacher discussion groups, during which elementary school teachers talked about their work within the testing landscape. Their findings indicate that high-stakes testing deeply affects teacher beliefs, practices, and socialization behaviors, thus revealing a troubling tendency to position students as numbers and a sharp decline in talk about teaching philosophies and practices develops alongside the testing policy landscape. Bausell and Glazier recommend that teacher educators prepare future teachers with an understanding of the ways teacher socialization unfolds so that new teachers can be mindful of the factors that may shape their practice.


Author(s):  
Glenda M. Flores

Chapter 6 offers an analysis of how California’s structural policies regarding high-stakes testing and the academic labels applied to language-minority children fuel interracial conflicts between Latina teachers and their African American and Asian co-workers. While Latina teachers explained that race relations with their co-workers were ostensibly civil on a daily basis, they use language labels to discuss racial/ethnic conflict between teachers and students on school grounds. The language labels (EO=English Only, ELL=English Language Learner) applied to students in schools result in a differential racialization process of children, with the children of Latino immigrants (ELLs) being preferred at Compton Elementary. Asian children and exceptional children of Latino immigrants are preferred at Goodwill Elementary. Latina cultural guardians resist this structural inequality.


PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 51 (20) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce B. Henderson

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