Peter Smagorinsky

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• B.A. Kenyon ; MAT/PhD U. of Chicago
• Professor emeritus at University of Georgia

This essay concerns the ways in which qualitative social science research characters are constructed, and in turn read, by others. The persuasiveness of narratives is based as much on the reader’s response to the character—similar to the ways in which readers respond to literary characters—in emotional ways as it is on the rational presentation of...

In this essay I reflect on James P. Lantolf’s contributions to cultural-historical theory and second language learning. I begin with my personal subjectivity and experiences as a limited learner of additional languages beyond English. This anecdotal opening introduces the tension between formal learning in school and everyday immersion in a languag...

This eight-year longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher from her practicum and student teaching through three subsequent job sites, with one year off due to prohibitive job stress. To study the developmental path of Caitlin, the teacher, we rely on the metaphor of the twisting path, which comes from Vygotsky’s attention to s...

Purpose This study aims to consider the role of emotions, especially those related to empathy, in promoting a more humane education that enables students to reach out across kinship chasms to promote the development of communities predicated on a shared value on mutual respect. This attention to empathy includes a review of the rational basis for m...

This article draws on Toulmin’s model of argumentation to propose a way of engaging with controversial topics in ways that require not only the assertion of a point of view, but attentive listening to contrasting beliefs. Given the paucity of models of respectful listening in public discourse, school becomes a place where teachers can provide oppor...

To highlight the importance of civil discourse, an English education scholar worked with teachers to develop strategies for teaching argument that promote respectful engagement with controversial topics.

This study analyzes a series of three discussions of C. J. Heuer's BUG: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution (Bug) in a university service-learning course for teacher candidates (TCs). Bug provides a collection of short pieces written from a deaf perspective to convey the way the author has experienced life in the insensitive, dismissive social wo...

This essay compares and contrasts the educational movements of three nations—the United States, Mexico, and the Soviet Union—established according to Eurocentric cultural values. In each country, mass education was undertaken to help produce an assimilative national culture during formative periods characterized by instability. In two of these nati...

La presente obra denominada Literacidad crítica, formación e inclusión permite obtener un panorama general desde diversas perspectivas en las que se puede incidir en el ámbito educativo desde la Literacidad, considerando, la gran oportunidad que las TIC ofrecen para el desarrollo de obras como la presente, en la que se van entretejiendo diversos pa...

This article contrasts two beliefs about the relation between the emotions and the intellect. Each sees emotional responses as fundamental and primary sources of thinking. Each sees a different role for the intellect following emotional responses to worldly phenomena. L. S. Vygotsky, articulating a belief common at his time, sees the intellect as a...

This study investigates the emergence of empathic framing in a small group of university students’ discussions of equity-oriented concepts in a service-learning course. Empathic framing refers to the making of emotional connections that enable one to experience the world from another’s perspective, particularly when they are from different cultures...

In this article, we critique the science of reading when it is positioned within the reading wars as settling disagreements about reading and how it should be taught. We frame our argument in terms of troublesome binaries, specifically between nature and nurture. We interpret that binary in relation to Overton’s distinction between split and relati...

This entry focuses on a population of students who have come to be called long-term English learners (LTELs). LTEL is a term that appeared in the early 2000s (e.g., Freeman et al., Closing the achievement gap: How to reach limited-formal-schooling and long-term English learners, Heinemann, 2002), although similar terms have been used by practitione...

This volume explores the literacy education master’s degree program developed at Universidad de Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, with the aim of addressing the nation’s emerging social, economic, technological, and political needs. Developing the program required taking into account the cultural diversity, historical economic disparities, indigenous...

This volume explores the literacy education master’s degree program developed at Universidad de Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, with the aim of addressing the nation’s emerging social, economic, technological, and political needs. Developing the program required taking into account the cultural diversity, historical economic disparities, indigenous...

This volume explores the literacy education master’s degree program developed at Universidad de Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, with the aim of addressing the nation’s emerging social, economic, technological, and political needs. Developing the program required taking into account the cultural diversity, historical economic disparities, indigenous...

This article reports on the activities undertaken in a U. S. high school through which students produced video texts designed to address key social problems. The authors argue against conventional “writing process” models that assert a single set of stages for all writing and that position “publication” as the final stage of “the writing process.”...

This article reports on the activities undertaken in a U. S. high school through which students produced video texts designed to address key social problems. The authors argue against conventional "writing pro-cess" models that assert a single set of stages for all writing and that position "publication" as the final stage of "the writing process."...

This article emphasizes the importance of understanding local contexts to provide appropriate education for teachers about literacy instruction. The author reviews general problems that follow from extrapolating from unrepresentative research samples and the errors and deficit conceptions that follow from assuming that all cognition takes place wit...

This chapter explores the complex processes involved in a project undertaken by a middle-school student in an Expeditionary Learning school. This case study critiques the overwhelming responsibility of coordinating people to plan and pull off a school event, along with parental interference, limited faculty supervision, and lack of participation by...

Character education has been around for millennia. It predates the founding of the United States, even as the continent hosted indigenous people with longstanding values on character. Character education has traditionally served as a means of assimilating immigrants to American culture, primarily through didactic means derived from Christian values...

This article reports on the activities undertaken in a U. S. high school through which students produced video texts designed to address key social problems. The authors argue against conventional "writing pro-cess" models that assert a single set of stages for all writing and that position "publication" as the final stage of "the writing process."...

Purpose This paper aims to describe a letter written to undergraduate students before their enrollment in a required foundations course, Service-Learning in English Education, taken before admission to the English education program at [the university]. The course, offered in the spring of 2017, came on the heels of Donald Trump’s election to the U...

This article provides a reconception of what is known as Vygotsky's “zone of proximal development,” particularly its improper conflation with the notion of “instructional scaffolding.” The article introduces the essay's purpose and motivation; reviews and critiques Vygotsky's description of the ZPD and explains how it has come to be misinterpreted;...

Ethnomethodology (EM) is an approach through which researchers consider the meaning making behind everyday activities. Related to EM, Conversation Analysis (CA) uses specific transcription conventions to examine social interaction in talk. Through an EM-informed CA approach, this chapter applies CA conventions to interviews with novice language/lit...

In this chapter we present a case study of a young woman, Chloe,1 whose disruptive conduct at home led to a set of related diagnoses for chronic depression and anxiety, Asperger’s syndrome, Tourette’s syndrome, oppositional-defiance, and obsessive-compulsiveness, each presented to her and her family as a set of disabilities and disorders. Considere...

In this chapter, I take the family memoir of journalist Ron Suskind (2014a) and reexamine it through the theoretical foundation provided in Part 1 of this volume. Suskind and his wife, Cornelia, raised two sons, Walt and Owen.1 Owen’s development appeared to be on the typical track until the age of two and a half when, suddenly and without apparent...

My goal in this chapter is to contest the deficit views of people who are discursively constructed as being mentally ill or disordered. In the following sections I review related work on how difference becomes pathologized, and draw on Vygotsky’s (1993) work in the field of defectology—an unfortunately named effort to integrate blind, deaf, and peo...

My interest in human adaptation follows from my efforts to understand neurodiversity. This topic has occupied my attention informally for nearly 30 years and has become, within the last decade, a focus of inquiry for me across a series of autobiographical, theoretical, and empirical papers. I was forced to take on this topic during the youth of my...

In discussing how theater humanizes societies, Woodruff (2010) notes that theater requires rules for behaviors—when to be quiet, when to applaud, when to arrive, when to leave, and how to listen—that establish societal norms. Woodruff cautions that without these public events, individuals become isolated and societies become non-cohesive. In essenc...

The author reviews controversies surrounding the teaching of Huck Finn in the context of racial turmoil in the United States, then presents a revised text that substitutes a misogynist term, c*** , for n***** , and makes the character Jim a female, Kim, asking readers to consider the need for empathy in reading.

This study investigates the learning reported by a set of volunteer participants from three university teacher education programs: from one Southwestern U.S. University, the program in secondary English/Language Arts Education and the program in Elementary Education; and from one Southeastern U.S. University, the program in secondary English/Langua...

Both of the quotes with which I open this chapter speak about the potential of autistic1 people to live lives that are personally fulfilling and that contribute to the well-being of society. Unfortunately, however, those on the spectrum tend to be viewed negatively as weird, sick, disabled, disordered, abnormal, and laden with deficits. This book i...

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices...

Three commentaries center around the theme of teacher performance assessment. First, Peter Smagorinsky discusses growth through language arts and the conundrum of teacher assessment. Then Sean Kottke, Paula McPhee, Arlene Lents, and Meredith Dodson discuss the importance of community in teacher preparation. Finally, Peter Leonard, Claudinette (Didi...

This article explores the complexity of learning the literacy practices and conventions in the discipline of English language arts. Literacies are explored in the areas of writing/composition, reading/literature, and language/grammar, with attention to the situated nature of proper expression and understanding with respect to each. The author illus...

This case study focuses on one beginning English teacher’s work toward eupraxia, i.e., good practice informed by reflection in a setting in which a degree of free choice is available. The study uses a Vygotskian framework for studying concept development that focuses on the settings of human activity and how ambiguous social concepts are developed...

This article argues that the instructional scaffolding metaphor may be reconceived as distributed scaffolding when multiple means of influence are provided in a service-learning setting. In the service-learning course described here, the professor's role is largely as designer of activity settings for preservice teacher candidates, through which th...

Most teachers I've met since entering the profession in the mid-1970s have said that they decided to teach because they want to make a difference in kids' lives. Teaching is their identity; it's their work and passion. It con-sumes their day and their think-ing throughout the year, and leaves little time for much else. With teaching their primary o...

Among the defining features of an advanced modern society is widespread literacy in a print medium. And yet human beings invented writing systems only about 5,500 years ago, well after the human mind had fully evolved, suggesting that the human cognitive architecture could not have evolved specifically to enable reading and writing. Instead, the ab...

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This study investigates the collaborative composing processes of a group of five high school seniors who constructed interpretations of each of the five acts of Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the medium of spoken word performances. The group composing processes were analyzed to identify how the students drew on conventions from the spoken word tradit...

Peter Smagorinsky presents a new proposal for teacher evaluation in his article. His suggestion is quite appropriate for our times: “Assessing teachers according to what effective teachers do, rather than according to which assessment means are most cost-effective and most amenable to reduction to single scores, seems appropriate.”

This conceptual paper interrogates, considers, and expands on Vygotsky's notion of concept development. I first review Vygotsky's account of concept development, including his distinction between scientific and spontaneous concepts. I next summarize his pattern of concept development from complexes to pseudoconcepts to concepts, and in the process...

This case study describes the creation of a digital multimodal poem by Mara, a preservice English Education teacher at a large state namesake university located in the Southeastern United States. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives broadly and New Literacies Studies specifically (Gee, 2012; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003; The New London Group, 1996), t...

This case study follows a teacher candidate through her semester of student teaching English in a suburban high school in the U.S. Southeast. The study is part of a line of inquiry that investigates the factors that contribute to teachers’ development of concepts to guide their instruction. In particular, this research focuses on the mediational ro...

L. S. Vygotsky, the psychologist and teacher from Byelorussia who became a central figure in Soviet psychological and educational circles in the 1920s and 1930s, has become a frequent citation in 21st-century scholarship. He is most-often invoked to support some form of instructional scaffolding, based on his idea of the zone of proximal developmen...

In Volume 2 of the Collected Works, Vygotsky argues for more inclusive treatment of people who depart from the developmental norm. In this essay I review facets of his approach and discuss how they may inform current attention to extranormative mental health makeups, e.g., tendencies toward depression, anxiety, bipolarity, and related neurological...

This article reviews Vygotsky's writings on arts (particularly logocentric art including the theater) and emotions, drawing on his initial exploration in The Psychology of Art and his final considerations set forth in a set of essays, treatises, and lectures produced in the last years of his life. The review of The Psychology of Art includes attent...

NCTE was central to the author’s career journey.