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Engaged Reading as a Collaborative Transformative Practice
Abstract
The context of this study is a voluntary modification in teaching focus by four eighth-grade teachers who shifted their instructional focus toward student engagement. They abandoned assigned readings in favor of student-selected, self-paced reading within a collection of high interest materials—primarily young adult fiction that students found personally relevant. Over a 4 year period, among other things, this shift consistently resulted, for the students, in increased reading volume, a reduction in students failing the state test, and changes in peer relationships, self-regulation, and conceptions of self. Increasingly predictable shifts across classes in the nature of classroom activity systems along with increasingly predictable student-level outcomes have been accompanied by a parallel evolutionary shift in the activity of teaching (individually and collectively) among the four teachers, reflected in their relationships, their use of resources, and the objects of their activity. Using Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), we analyze this co-evolution of activity systems and the subjectivities and development of individuals acting within those systems. We examine the inseparable shifts in community and individual activity, and their evolution over three time scales—a 4 year history of change in practice among a small community of teachers, the evolution of their student communities over the course of a school year, and, at the microgenetic level, the moment-to-moment interactional processes that feed the evolution of individuals and the relational properties of their communities.
... The schools foster sharing of ideas among teachers as one of the assisted performance aspects that encourage teachers' e-learning integration. One study in developed countries such as America proposed the importance of peer support, affirming collaboration, and knowledge sharing as factors that led to successful e-learning implementation by teachers [42]. Another empirical study found that sharing ideas among school stakeholders is essential for reducing teachers' workload. ...
... Table 2 shows the theoretical frameworks that can be considered for future studies, namely: the School Improvement Perspectives, Constructivist Belief Framework, Digital Age Learning Matrix, Digital Native Theory, and Ecosystem Theory. Other than these theories, the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) was used to frame the analysis in previous studies [1], [24], [38], [42], [47]. The use of CHAT has been prominent for the past thirty decades, particularly with regard to sociocultural theory or sociohistorical theory [87] or activity theory [61]. ...
... There were five international studies on primary education focused on a sociocultural perspective towards understanding the process of integration of e-learning into teaching [1], [38], [42], [47]. Concluding from the sociocultural perspective, Luria [89] claimed that "man differs from animals in that he can make use of tools", and Vygotsky [56] claimed that "tool mediation" is human beings' use of "tools" to mediate their action within their social environments. ...
Radical changes across almost all areas, including education, due to the COVID-19 outbreak. One of the rapid transformations is digital learning, also known as e-learning. Digital learning transformation has been taking place for more than a decade. However, little comprehensive analysis of digital transformation in teaching in public schools. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no comprehensive analysis incorporates external and internal barriers and examines the prominent theories to study successful e-learning integration among teachers. The aim of this study was to provide a thematic and theoretical understanding of digital learning transformation among teachers in public schools. The data for the study was acquired from the Scopus databases. The study employed content and comparative analysis and advocated a grounded theory approach to inductively analyze and criticize the theme construction for answering two research questions. Based on a set of criteria to determine whether each derived study should be included or excluded, 42 articles were reviewed between 2010 and 2022. The analysis uncovered 10 themes of antecedents that were constructed as a framework based on the first-second-order barriers. Results also indicated that CHAT, TPACK, TAM, and UTAUT are the most prominent theories used to conduct digital transformation research. The findings offered significant implications for digital transformation and educational technology communities, especially for policymakers to strategize and reflect on the practice they implemented and improvised if necessary for future sustainable education and efficient teachers' performance in teaching.
... Readers are agentic beings who have reciprocal and transactional relationships with not only with the characters inside books, but also with themselves and with others (Ivey & Johnston, 2013); accordingly, social engagement in reading can be viewed as tools for the construction of selves with contextual elements. Thus, social engagement can be viewed as a "collaborative transformative practice" in which social and cultural tools and systems influence and are influenced by readers' development (Ivey & Johnston, 2015). ...
... When considering the methods employed across the studies, both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed, with four particular methods proving the most popular. The most popular technique involved observations and interviews that were analyzed qualitatively by coding for themes (e.g., Ivey & Johnston, 2015;Schaefer, 2017). About half (27) of the reviewed studies adopted that approach. ...
... Twenty-three studies (38%) were coded as Implicit. Of these, three studies defined engaged readers instead of reading engagement itself (Baer, 2005;Ivey & Johnston, 2015;Rosenzweig et al., 2018). Ten studies described the characteristics of engaged readers (Bryan et al., 2003;Vipond et al., 1987). ...
Motivation and engagement play a crucial role in literacy development and achievement. However, the construct of reading engagement has become blurred and ambiguous, both in research and in discussions of practice. In order to guide future research and to extend our existing understanding of reading engagement into classroom practice, this study presents an extensive survey and systematic analysis of prior studies of reading engagement. Selection criteria resulted in the identification of 60 data-based articles published in 12 peer-reviewed journals through 2019. Over the period examined, there was a steady increase in the number of studies reported, especially since 2011. The early adolescent group was studied the most frequently, and the most popular technique involved observations and interviews. In terms of the definition of reading engagement, only 42% of the studies explicitly defined the term. Many studies have focused on the behavioral dimensions and antecedents for reading engagement, while others explored reading engagement as an aptitude. Although this review did not support a single interpretation of reading engagement as either an aptitude or an event, the resulting discussion broadens perspectives for reading engagement research.
... Specifcally, we are interested in adolescent reading habits, since engaged and independent reading is key to self-directed increased reading practice (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998;Sullivan & Brown, 2015). In this information-saturated global context, engaged reading is a crucial disposition for the acquisition of lifelong learning (Loh, 2013;Wallace, 2003;Ivey & Johnston, 2015). Individuals who are engaged readers strive to understand their reading, gain pleasure from their reading, and are confdent in their reading ability (Afferbach & Harrison, 2017). ...
... Rather than focusing solely on the cognitive aspects of reading, recognizing the affective elements of identifying as a reader can contribute to a student's positive attitude toward read-ing. Providing students with opportunities to explore their areas of interest and have conversations about books or reading materials they are interested in, being non-judgmental about their choice of reading, and providing book recommendations are some ways to encourage reading engagement (Ivey & Johnston, 2015). Technology can also be used more intentionally to support students' use of digital resources for reading (Loh & Sun, 2019). ...
In this article, Chin Ee Loh, Baoqi Sun, and Chan-Hoong Leong utilize a critical spatial perspective to examine how students from different socioeconomic statuses access reading resources at home, in school, and in the community. Using Geographic Information System (GIS) data, they evaluate the distribution of reading resources in Singapore by mapping out students’ physical distances to libraries and bookstores. They juxtapose the data against case studies of students and survey data from more than six thousand participants from six secondary schools in Singapore to understand their use of resources for reading. Findings show that while students may have equal access to reading resources in terms of access to public resources for books, home backgrounds significantly affect students’ actual access. The critical spatial approach of this study provides a new way to evaluate the efficacy and equity of resource distribution and access for twenty-first-century learning.
... Engaged readers are 'motivated to read, strategic in their approaches to comprehending what they read, knowledgeable in their construction of meaning from text, and socially interactive while reading' (Guthrie, Wigfield & You, 2012, p. 602). As book discussion can enhance social interaction as well as positioning and valuing of books and reading, it can play a valuable role in fostering reading engagement in young people (Ivey & Johnston, 2015). However, recent actualities of this role in contemporary Australian schools. ...
... This paper suggests that teacher librarians in Australia stimulate book discussion to foster reading for pleasure in a variety of ways, and for diverse reasons, with overarching goals being promoting reading for pleasure, enhancing the social position of books, and communicating the ongoing importance of reading as both a beneficial and enjoyable practice. Promotion of book discussion in the library recognises the role of social factors that can shape reading engagement (Ivey & Johnston, 2015), and promotes understanding of the continued importance of regular reading beyond the early years of schooling (Merga & Mat Roni, 2018). ...
Although teacher librarians play a role as literacy and literature educators in schools, little research attention is given to this role. In addition, the use of book discussion in school libraries to enhance reading engagement is not often closely considered as an educative practice. This paper draws on qualitative research findings from interviews with teacher librarians in 30 Australian schools to explore how these educators stimulate book discussion to foster reading for pleasure as part of their professional practice. This paper finds teacher librarians stimulate book discussion to foster reading for pleasure in a variety of ways, and for diverse reasons, with an overarching goal being the promotion of reading for pleasure. A range of approaches to discussion around books emerge from the data, including peer to peer, teacher to student, and other diverse interplays. Teacher librarians actively promote reading as a social practice and encourage students to value reading for pleasure.
... Among the qualitative studies, researchers used a variety of data collection tools to examine agency across contexts. For example, scholars used multiple tools ranging from observational (Arias, 2008;Dagenais, Day, & Toohey, 2006;Goodwyn & Findlay, 2003;Gorzelsky, 2009;Ivey & Johnston, 2015); a combination of interviewing, observational data of students and teachers, and focus groups (Kornfeld & Prothro, 2005;Kuby & Vaughn, 2015;McKay & Romm, 2015;Paris & Lung, 2008;Rogers & Wetzel, 2013;Vaughn & Faircloth 2011); to artifacts and multimodal representations (Garcia, Mirra, Morrell, Martinez, & Scorza, 2015;Lamping, 2012). ...
... 2003);Fischer (2017);Goodwyn and Findlay (2003);Ivey and Johnston (2015);Kornfeld and Prothro (2005);Rogers and Wetzel (2013); Wang and Gilles(2017) Finding 4: Barriers of agency. Inside structures Abodeeb-Gentile & Zawilinski ( 2013); Akos (2004); Anderson and Kaye (2017); Arias (2008); Carter and Gallegos (2017); Charteris & Thomas (2017); Goodwyn and Findlay (2003); Fischer (2017); Ivey and Johnston (2013); Ivey and Johnston (2015); Johnston et al. (2016); Kornfeld & Prothro (2005); Kuby and Vaughn (2015); Lamping (2012); Lopez (2011); Ollerhead (2010); Paris and Lung (2008); Pasqua (2017); Rogers and Wetzel (2013); Rowe and Neitzel (2010); Simpson (2017); Vaughn (2014); Vaughn and Faircloth (2011) Knowledge Dagenais et al. (2006); DeBlase (2003); Dyson (1983); Dyson (1984); Gorzelsky (2009); Hawisher et al. (2006); Heron-Hruby et al. (2008); Heron (2003); Hill (2015); Moore and Cunningham (2006); Wang and Gilles (2017) Outside structures Ahearn (2004); Akello, Lutwama-Rukundo, & Musiimenta (2017); Balgopal, Wallace, & Dahlberg (2017); Chang (2013); Griffin et al. (2017); Kell (2008); Lin (2013); McKay and Romm (2015); Naidoo (2017); Powell et al. (2017); Stolle (2010); Wilf (2013); Finding 5: Effects of agency Construction of identities Dagenais et al. (2006); Chang (2013); Dyson (1986); Griffin et al. (2017); Hawisher et al. (2006); Heron (2003); Hawisher et al. (2006); Klenk (2017); Kuby and Vaughn (2015); Lamping (2012); MacCleod (2004); Moore and Cunningham (2006); Ollerhead (2010); Paris and Lung (2008); Rowe and Neitzel (2010); Simpson (2017); Vaughn and Faircloth (2011); Wang and Gilles (2017); Wilf (2013) Development of dispositions Akello, Lutwama-Rukundo, & Musiimenta (2017); Akos (2004); Anderson and Kaye (2017); Arias (2008); Balgopal, Wallace, & Dahlberg (2017); Calder on L opez (2017); Dyson (1983); Dyson (1984); Goodwyn and Findlay (2003); Gorzelsky (2009); Johnston et al. (2016); Kell (2008); Lin (2013); McKay and Romm (2015); Vaughn,(2014) Critical engagement Abodeeb-Gentile and Zawilinski (2013); Carter and Gallegos (2017); Charteris & Thomas (2017); DeBlase (2003); Fischer (2017); Garcia et al. (2015); Heron-Hruby et al. (2008); Kornfield & Prothro (2005); Lopez (2011); Naidoo (2017); Pasqua (2017); Powell et al. (2017); Rogers and Wetzel (2013); Stolle (2010) Literacy achievement Ahearn (2004); Ivey and Johnston (2013); Ivey and Johnston (2015) ...
Scholars contend that agency is at the heart of cultivating equitable learning spaces for all learners. While it is intuitive that literacy educators support agency during instruction, there is diverse terminology surrounding the concept of agency in the field. As a result, aligning the construct to instructional practices and developing a conceptual understanding of agency in practice has been challenging. Our research team completed a systematic literature review of agency during literacy instruction. In this article, we describe findings of this review of empirical research on agency in literacy spanning from 1975–2017. Findings highlight the complexities associated with defining agency as well as the need for diverse methodological approaches to examining agency in literacy contexts.
... The important empirical contributions of scholars in this tradition continue to inform teacher preparation and professional development, as well as policy and products (tests, textbooks, online materials, etc.). Newer scholars in this vein are continuing to extend and enrich this tradition, often by operationalizing the social factors that socioculturalists have placed on the academic map (e.g., Allington et al., 2010;Cantrell et al., 2016;Guthrie, Wigfield, & You, 2012;Hoffman, 2009;Ivey & Johnston, 2015;Taboada et al., 2013;Thompson, Madhuri, & Taylor, 2008). Much like the early experimental psychologists and administrative progressives at the dawn of the 20th century, scholars in this current have been notably elaborative of best practice within the context of today's policies and programs. ...
... By contrast, the sociocultural current relies on contingent or intentional assumptions and often deliberately challenges the presumed goals, methods, and organization of today's school systems on behalf of transformational and potentially open-ended objectives. Sociocultural scholarship has been more qualitative and often more theoretical in comparison with sociocognitive work, and thus its effective operationalization is less certain, although clearly possible (e.g., Allington & McGill-Franzen, in press;Ivey & Johnston, 2015;Johnston & Ivey, 2013;Zenkov, Harmon, Bell, Ewaida, & Lynch, 2011). Current sociocultural scholarship transcends earlier sociocultural traditions (e.g., Frankfurt School rhetoric, paradigm wars)-possibly due to radical shifts in the nature of global production and distribution of goods, labor markets, and development of information and communicative technologiesand is seemingly more inspired by current popular movements on behalf of equity and justice (e.g., Black Lives Matter, LGBT and feminist equity, Occupy Wall Street; Kinloch, 2010;Larson & Marsh, 2004;Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007). ...
In this review of literacy education research in North America over the past century, the authors examined the historical succession of theoretical frameworks on students’ active participation in their own literacy learning, and in particular the metatheoretical assumptions that justify those frameworks. The authors used motivation and engagement as focal topics by which to trace this history because of their conceptual proximity to active literacy participation. They mapped the uses of motivation and engagement in the major literacy journals and handbooks over the past century, constructed a grounded typology of theoretical assumptions about literate agency and its development to code those uses, and reviewed similar histories of theoretical frameworks in educational, psychological, philosophical, and literary scholarship to draft a narrative history of the emergence of engaged literacies.
... There is a celebrated tradition of young adult (YA) literature portraying characters dealing with mental health challenges, including the iconic works I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg (1964) and Susanna Kaysen's (1994) Girl, Interrupted. The genre of YA literature is increasingly being recognised for its capacity to educate, foster empathy and help young people navigate challenging life experiences (Hébert and Kent 2000;Santoli and Wagner 2004;Groenke et al. 2010;Ivey and Johnston 2015). Aware of these benefits, some researchers have highlighted the need to further explore how YA literature can contribute to young people's engagement with mental health (Richmond 2014;de Leon 2017). ...
This paper explores the role that sensitively portrayed literary representations of hallucinations and dissociation may have in counteracting stigma associated with these experiences. In it, we focus on narratives of young people experiencing hallucinatory and dissociative phenomena in two award-winning, young adult novels: How It Feels to Float by Helena Fox and A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. We identify and discuss three literary devices in these two novels that promote empathy for the characters and their experiences. The narrative accounts in both novels challenge conceptions of hallucinations and dissociation as unknowable and unrelatable experiences with their empathic portrayals of relatable characters that create comprehensible accounts of adolescents grappling with their sense of reality. Importantly, they highlight the potential role that literature can play in stigma reduction by positively shaping young peoples’ understandings of unfamiliar mental health experiences.
... Reading will help the readers to have a dynamic mind, progress in job conditions, good life, success in social, personal, cultural, economic and political affairs and a man who can compete with others. Johnston (2013, 2015) found that that secondary classroom structures and activities that support engaged reading as part of social practices had transformative effects for both teachers and students (Ivey & Johnston, 2015), with students reporting a range of positive outcomes related to reading (e.g., talk about books, knowledge about books), as well as outcomes related to their social, cultural, and emotional lives (Ivey & Johnston, 2013). The nature of, and relationship between, motivation and engagement changes as readers move through school. ...
Reading is an intellectual process that everyone for doing it, need to motivation, so that they can interrelate with the concepts of the texts that they read. Reading is the agent of wisdom and knowledge. Today is the age of information. Information is power. People who have internal motivation for reading information resources, are those who have information and change it to knowledge and knowledge is the power of readers who have internal motivation. The aim of present research is to analyze world scientific studies on reading motivation based on Scientometric and benchmarks of centrality in articles of web of science website from 1983 to 2018. This study is a descriptive, analytical, cross-sectional and Scientometric research. The statistical population under study are 267 published articles on the motivations of reading in web of science website from 1983 to 2018. In the present study, the 267 articles are divided into 6 clusters based on reading motivation studies. The USA, Germany, England and Australia have the most numerous articles on reading motivation. People like Guther, Moeller, Schefle, Gutherie and Wigfield have been the most effective in producing articles on reading motivation in youth. Regarding the Scientometric content analysis, the published articles in web of science data center were divided into 6 clusters. Numerous factors have played a role in reading motivation. Regarding the accomplished studies, these factors include external motivation like education, brain electromagnetic induction, teaching students to read accurately and voluntarily during primary school, the role of youth in promotion of reading, competition, sponsoring; and internal motivation like child psychology, having a purpose, personal and intrinsic behaviors, self-regulation, comprehension and articulation.
... Research on student agency suggests that agency may be an integral dimension of classroom literacy learning (Ivey & Johnston, 2015;Johnston, 2004Johnston, , 2012. However, researchers explain that methodologically, defining and examining student agency during classroom practice is a challenge (Authors, 2017;Van Lier, 2008). ...
... Finally, students need choice. Decades of research on motivation to read confirms that students are motivated by choices (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2017;Ivey & Johnston, 2015). Choice ideally includes opportunities for students to experience a variety of modalities (e.g., visual, written, audio, and performance). ...
In this essay, we discuss how teachers and students can use children's literature and literature‐based activities to intentionally foster hope. The previous years have proved to be challenging on many fronts. Teachers of all levels are focusing on ways to support academic development in an oft‐shifting context. Drawing on research using bibliotherapy and other literature‐based interventions, we propose a literature‐rooted framework for teachers and students to create environments that foster hope.
... This research with middle school students learning both literacy and history suggested that these curricular and instructional foci can lead to greater student dedication to engaged reading, which involves time, effort, and perseverance, in a reading activity. Ivey and Johnston (2015) explained that engagement is a transformative and collaborative practice, encompassing one's interest in learning (through choice, relevance, and enjoyment), as well as one's engagement in the classroom learning community through discussing the text or content. Thus, engagement exists and is reinforced at both the individual student level and the classroom level. ...
The burgeoning work of translanguaging and bilingualism has much to offer adolescent learning spaces in order to provide bi/multilingual students more equitable opportunities to engage in disciplinary literacy at the high school level, particularly where there are many low‐incidence languages. Drawing from critical theories in both literacy and language research, we conducted this three‐year study in two U.S. high schools (grades 9–12) in order to promote language equity and literacy engagement for emergent bilinguals and heritage speakers. We provided an intensive year of graduate courses on language, literacy, and equity for 27 teachers from various disciplines and school roles. Through analyzing their coursework, observations of their classes, and follow‐up surveys, we documented how their heteroglossic language ideologies were nurtured, how they enacted translingual disciplinary literacies, and what benefits they perceived from this instructional approach. The findings illustrate how schools might overcome previously unquestioned monoglossic standards and linguistically oppressive systems through a whole‐school translingual disciplinary literacies approach. Providing nuanced descriptions of how teachers engaged in translingual disciplinary literacy in various disciplines, we make a case for constructivist disciplinary literacy teacher education grounded in heteroglossic ideologies. We also draw connections from language equity to literacy engagement, suggesting that a translingual disciplinary literacies approach is a necessary instructional innovation to effect change in high school learning spaces for bi/multilingual learners. Finally, as our field pursues language equity and literacy engagement, like the teachers in this study, we must also critically evaluate our own ideologies toward literacy and language.
... Scholars have suggested that to have merit with learners, school-based literacy engagement needs to be perceived as authentic (Behizadeh, 2014a), as connected to real world examples, and as supportive (Josephs & Jolivette, 2016;Scheffel, 2017;Thompson et al., 2008). If such conditions are in place, the research shows that adolescents are more likely to take an interest in literacy tasks (Ivey & Johnston, 2015;Nystrand, 2006;Pittman & Honchell, 2014). In knowing this, student-centred pedagogies (Behizadeh, 2014a(Behizadeh, , 2014b, out-of-school literacies (Corbett, 2005;Skerrett & Bomer, 2011) and relevant young adult texts (Fogarty et al., 2017;Lesley, 2008;Moje et al., 2008) become significant when thinking about ways to nurture student willingness, particularly those who struggle, to persist with learning. ...
The focus of this qualitative study is upon 15 Grade 12 students situated in an English Communications (ECM) classroom in rural Nova Scotia and the impact a daily classroom circle had upon their academic engagement. ECM is intended for students who may require further support to develop their skills as readers, writers, and language users as they enter the job market or community colleges. There is no formal curriculum for ECM, and often the demographics of such classrooms are comprised of some of the province's most vulnerable populations. In this paper, we demonstrate the impact the daily classroom circle had upon late adolescents' understanding of themselves as thinkers with ideas to share. Overall, we see this study as significant for teachers in high-poverty contexts, particularly the importance of using a classroom circle as a consistent space to communicate elevated expectations for students who have experienced academic struggles.
... Through social construction of knowledge, students learn together as they work with their peers to accomplish a shared goal, resulting in improved student reading engagement and interest (Day & Kroon, 2010;Polleck, 2010), as well as a deeper understanding of themselves, their peers, and their society. Several studies show the link between social interaction and intrinsic motivation, reporting increased amounts of time reading and higher levels of reading achievement when reading in a collaborative space (Guthrie, Wigfield, & You, 2012;Ivey & Johnston, 2015). Gambrell, Hughes, Calvert, Malloy, and Igo (2011) studied the effect of pen pal writing on reading motivation. ...
This article describes findings related to changes in the reading motivation of 12th grade language arts students who participated in an online book club partnership with college students. The study investigated the motivational impact of self-selected young adult novels, social interaction with college students and peers, and the online context of the club. Analysis suggests having text choice and interacting with college students promotes greater engagement and motivation in high school readers. An unexpected finding was the influence of teacher-determined expectations on student participation.
... These understandings reflect central tenets of literacy theory, research, and practice (cf. Anderson & Pearson, 1984;Ivey & Johnston, 2015;Lee, 1995;Rosenblatt, 1994). However, not all youths' understandings of reading were so robust. ...
The authors featured in this department column share instructional practices that support transformative literacy teaching and disrupt “struggling reader” and “struggling writer” labels.
... The realization that instructional shifts had not fully accounted for the substantial changes in teaching, learning, and relating in the eighth-grade engaged reading classrooms we studied prompted Peter Johnston and me to study in earnest the evolution of these spaces. Using third-generation cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström & Glȃveanu, 2012;Sannino, Daniels, & Gutiérrez, 2009;Stetsenko, 2008), we studied (Ivey & Johnston, 2015) the coevolution of three overlapping activity systems over a 4-year period in these same classrooms: (a) activity system among teachers, (b) classroom activity, and (c) the microgenetics of activity in the classroom. ...
Can we teach children and young adults about reading while simultaneously and inseparably teaching them how to take control of their own lives and relationships, a possibility that has been just barely touched by research and even less so by educational policies and practice? This address highlights research findings that suggest the promise of literacy engagement for clarifying and expanding how we think about reading assessment, achievement, comprehension, socio-emotional growth, and equity in literacy instruction. Using my own evolution as a researcher studying, primarily, the classroom-based reading experiences of middle school students, I show how my own questions and theoretical perspectives shifted based on what the children taught me as I studied their experiences and how that led me to champion engagement as a promising way forward. I rely heavily on what students themselves have shared with me, as their perspectives have fueled the shifts in my thinking and in the research questions I have pursued. I then share what I believe is the potential of an engagement-focused perspective on our field’s knowledge about reading development and practices. Finally, I comment on what we might need to do to make this line of research influence real classrooms and policies in positive ways. I argue that in order to influence, through an engagement perspective, the transformation of reading-related policies—and more importantly the agentive transformation of individuals and communities—we must renew our commitment to research conducted in classrooms and in partnership with teachers and families.
... In terms of fostering insight into human nature, the research literature is ambiguous. Case studies suggest that this insight may be fostered by adolescents' self-selected reading (e.g., Ivey & Johnston, 2015;Richardson & Eccles, 2007;Rothbauer, 2011); on the other hand, in the review study that informs the text selection principle, similar results were found while students were hardly offered any freedom of choice (Schrijvers et al., 2018). ...
This quasi-experimental study assessed the effects of the newly developed Transformative Dialogic Literature Teaching (TDLT) intervention on 15-year-old students' insight into human nature, eudaimonic reasons for reading, use of reading strategies, and motivation for literature education. Six TDLT units centered around short stories about "justice and injustice". Students were stimulated to engage in internal dialogues with stories and in external dialogues with peers about stories and reading experiences. TDLT students (n = 166) were compared to students who received regular literature teaching (RLT) focused on analysis of literary texts (n = 166). Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data indicated that TDLT fostered students' insight into human nature, eudaimonic reasons for reading, reported use of strategies to deal with difficulties in literary texts, and motivation for literature education, whereas RLT did not. Strategy use and one motivational factor mediated effects of TDLT to a small extent. Limitations and implications are discussed.
... The third generation of AT has assisted researchers to analyse the "historical relationships among multiple activities by identifying how the results from a past activity affect new activities" (Yamagata-Lynch, 2010, p. 1-2). Various studies refer to activity theory as activity theory (AT) (see Goodnough, 2016;Gregorcic, Etkina, & Planinsic, 2017;Lim & Hang, 2003), while other studies refer to it as cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (see Daniels & Warmington, 2007;Ho, Victor Chen, & Ng, 2016;Ivey & Johnston, 2015). This study used the third generation of AT to examine historical, object-oriented activities, mediations, systemic contradictions, and the relationships between components within and among the different activity systems for successful ICT-integrated teaching. ...
This multiple-case study drew upon Engeström's (1987) activity theory (AT) to understand the conditions and explain the systematic contradictions that facilitate successful Information and Communication Technology (ICT) integration in schools. The data were collected through in-depth interviews and document analysis from one primary and one secondary public school in Malaysia. In-depth interviews were carried out with nine participants, including principals, ICT coordinators, and teachers. Findings revealed three conditions that led to successful ICT integration: 1) types of ICT tools in the school, 2) rules and regulations in the school that shape the ICT culture, and 3) division of labour within the school community. The findings indicate that school stake-holders must work together to resolve tensions introduced by systemic contradictions in different activity systems, which shape school ICT culture. The study aims to enrich the discourse on ICT integration by assisting school stakeholders to reflect on their own ICT integration strategies.
... Future research could examine the extent to which child characteristics, such as their age, gender or reported reading interests, affect children's agency when reading digital books in diverse learning environments and with various family members. For future studies with older children, who are likely to be more verbally engaged with e-books, it might be helpful to consider children's linguistic engagement during the interaction and how children's and parents' comments during book AGENCY IN EARLY READING OF DIGITAL BOOKS 28 reading relate to the agency parameters established with high school students (Reeve, 2013) and adult readers (Ivey & Johnston, 2015). ...
A comprehensive understanding of children’s motivation to read e-books requires a multifaceted and contextualized conceptualization of children’s agency. In this study, agency was operationalized as a set of behaviour indicators of children’s control (behavioural agency), adults’ perceptions of reader identities afforded by the content and format of books (social agency), and specific multimedia and interactive features that afford personalisation (agentic design). In a comparative qualitative case study, seven preschool children and their mothers were observed reading four story-based interactive e-books (story-apps). Multimethod analysis that combined design evaluation with observational and interview data revealed behavioural agency was demonstrated in the children’s frequent, prolonged, and repetitive physical engagement with the story-apps. Social agency became foregrounded in relation to constitutive reader identities. Agentic design was related to children’s sense of autonomy. The findings have implications for how we theorize, operationalize, and apply the concept of agency in children’s e-books and reading for pleasure.
... In understanding the importance of engaging with a text in community for language acquisition (Ivey & Johnston, 2015), graffiti boards can facilitate conversation as students share their personal connections or responses to the book they are reading. This also contributes to the students' comprehension of the story and provides needed differentiated linguistic support in mixed-level classes. ...
Adolescents who are newcomers in a country and beginning to acquire English as an additional language are often in secondary classrooms with teachers who do not speak their languages. Due to these communication obstacles, there is a great need for teachers to build relationships with their students while setting optimal conditions for literacy development across languages (e.g., English and Spanish) and domains (e.g., oral, written, and digital communication). Guided by tenets of culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy, the authors describe how two self‐identifying monolingual English‐speaking teachers formed relationships with high school newcomers during a summer literacy institute. The authors highlight three specific literacy activities that facilitated students’ oral, written, and digital literacy skills in both English and Spanish while also creating a space for caring relationships to form between students and teachers.
... Future researchers should continue to question and work to define classroom engagement, particularly as the meaning of the term shifts as multimodality is incorporated in classrooms. Future researchers might take up Ivey and Johnston's (2015) discussion of socially situated (Deakin Crick, 2012) and intellectual (Fredricks et al., 2004) definitions of engagement as a model for considering what engagement means in relation to multimodality. ...
Purpose:
This paper aims to explore recent research (2007-2017) on the implementation of multimodal writing instruction in secondary English courses. It seeks to highlight the varied ways in which theoretical conceptions of multimodality have been implemented in writing instruction and the impacts of these implementations on students' experiences in classrooms.
Design/methodology/approach:
The author used a keyword search of relevant academic databases to identity articles within the search parameters. This was followed by bibliographic branching to identify additional articles and two rounds of open coding to identify themes for analysis.
Findings:
The literature revealed a diversity of approaches to incorporating multimodal writing in classrooms; teachers mixed modalities within assignments, paired writing in print with multimodal composition and redesigned entire units or courses around multimodality. Studies showed the impact of multimodality on student learning through shifts in conceptions of communication, increases in student engagement, composition for real audiences and an increased role for students’ interests and identities.
Practical implications:
This review has implications for teachers and researchers interested in developing multimodal writing curricula. It highlights the specific ways in which multimodal writing can be incorporated into instruction and the changes in student learning that result from this shift.
Originality/value:
While theoretical writing on multimodality is abundant, multiple researchers have noted the difficulty of finding research on classroom implementations of multimodality (Howell et al., 2017; Smith, 2017). This review is intended to address this difficulty by contributing to a body of literature that teachers and scholars can draw on as they conceptualize and design multimodal writing experiences for students in the future.
... The design of the LMC was informed by previous research that demonstrated the positive impact of text-based peer collaboration and social interaction (e.g., Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003) and metacognitive conversations (e.g., Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko, & Mueller, 2001) on literacy learning, particularly in the context of cross-age tutoring or mentoring relationships (e.g., Juel, 1996). The design also was informed by prior research that documented the positive impacts on both classroom learning ecologies and individual learning trajectories that resulted from membership in authentic classroom literacy communities that promoted extensive, engaged reading (e.g., Ivey & Johnston, 2013, 2015. ...
Secondary literacy instruction often happens to adolescents rather than with them. To disrupt this trend, we collaborated with 12th-grade “literacy mentors” to reimagine literacy teaching and learning with 10th-grade mentees in a public high school classroom. We used positioning theory as an analytic tool to (a) understand how mentors positioned themselves and how we positioned them and (b) examine the literacy practices that enabled and constrained the mentor position. We found that our positioning of mentors as collaborators was taken up in different and sometimes unexpected ways as a result of the multiple positions available to them and institutional-level factors that shaped what literacy practices were and were not negotiable. We argue that future collaborations with youth must account for the rights and duties of all members of a classroom community, including how those rights and duties intersect, merge, or come into conflict within and across practices.
... One area for future research is developing methodologies that can account for the ways in which students' relational activities within and outside of text influence each other. Ivey and Johnston's (2015) use of third generation CHAT is one promising avenue. ...
In this article, I consider expanding meaningfulness in literacy research by exploring the possibilities offered by a relational perspective on literacy and its study. An interdisciplinary relational perspective is outlined and used to rethink what happens when we engage in reading and writing. Questions guiding this exploration include: What makes literate activity meaningful, and how might a relational perspective enhance meaningfulness in studying this activity? What does a relational perspective look like as a theoretical frame for literacy research, and why might such a perspective be needed now? A synthesis of literacy research representing a relational perspective will be presented and examples of methodological applications offered. I conclude with the consequences of a relational perspective including implications for student well-being, assessment practices, and capacities for social justice work.
... Because textual transactions are grounded in the personal, varied interpretations of the same story may arise across readers (Brooks & Browne, 2012). Transformations in students' worldviews may well occur in textual discussions with others in which multiple perspectives are considered and new ways of relating to one another are imagined (Ivey & Johnston, 2015). ...
How might literature be shared with students for transformative purposes? Literature has the power to shape students’ worldviews through the exploration of diverse human experiences, but how students engage with diverse characters is important to reaching transformative goals. The author identified teachers’ pedagogical moves within a preschool conversation on gender around the picture book My Princess Boy by Cheryl Kilodavis. Noticing how gender normativity manifested in the classroom, teachers used the book to open the conversation on gender, honor students’ sensemaking, and complicate gender norms through responsive listening. Using examples of teacher–student interactions across the preschool book conversation, practical suggestions are provided for teachers to facilitate transformative dialogue when sharing diverse texts with young students.
... Quelles traces de ces réceptions permettent aux chercheurs et enseignants d'observer les réactions d'un étudiant face à un texte littéraire écrit (monomodal) et à une adaptation filmique (multimodale) ? De manière plus générale, comment peut-on savoir si ces traces sont garantes de construction de sens chez le lecteur, et ensuite sur le spectateur (Ivey et Johnston, 2013, 2015a, 2015bLysaker et Miller, 2013) ? ...
La didactique de la lecture est en constante évolution depuis la réforme de 2005 au Québec et l’intégration progressive des TICs et des compétences multimodales (Lebrun, Lacelle, & Boutin, 2012). D’un point de vue épistémologique, la phénoménologie du lecteur ne s’en trouve pas délaissée, mais bien adaptée en fonction de ces changements. Financée par le CRSH, cette étude se penche sur les transactions entre des lecteurs de CEGEP et Incendies, un texte dramaturgique imprimé ainsi que sa version augmentée sous forme d’œuvre cinématographique. À l’instar d’une récente étude sur les réactions des élèves de secondaire 3 dans laquelle nous avons montré que la lecture était un acte multimodal (White et Lemieux, sous presse; Lemieux et Lacelle, 2016) et nous inspirant d’études pertinentes sur la lecture-spectature (Lacelle, 2009; 2012), nous présentons les résultats d’une étude de cas retraçant les moments d’engagement avec cet univers narratif par le biais de la forme monomodale (livre) et multimodale (film). Cette étude fournit des pistes épistémologiques et empiriques pour les recherches à venir dans le domaine de la didactique de la lecture.
... The third generation of AT has assisted researchers to analyse the "historical relationships among multiple activities by identifying how the results from a past activity affect new activities" (Yamagata-Lynch, 2010, p. 1-2). Various studies refer to activity theory as activity theory (AT) (see Goodnough, 2016;Gregorcic, Etkina, & Planinsic, 2017;Lim & Hang, 2003), while other studies refer to it as cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (see Daniels & Warmington, 2007;Ho, Victor Chen, & Ng, 2016;Ivey & Johnston, 2015). This study used the third generation of AT to examine historical, object-oriented activities, mediations, systemic contradictions, and the relationships between components within and among the different activity systems for successful ICT-integrated teaching. ...
This multiple-case study drew upon Engeström's (1987) activity theory (AT) to understand the conditions and explain the systematic contradictions that facilitate successful Information and Communication Technology (ICT) integration in schools. The data were collected through in-depth interviews and document analysis from one primary and one secondary public school in Malaysia. In-depth interviews were carried out with nine participants, including principals, ICT coordinators, and teachers. Findings revealed three conditions that led to successful ICT integration: 1) types of ICT tools in the school, 2) rules and regulations in the school that shape the ICT culture, and 3) division of labour within the school community. The findings indicate that school stake-holders must work together to resolve tensions introduced by systemic contradictions in different activity systems , which shape school ICT culture. The study aims to enrich the discourse on ICT integration by assisting school stakeholders to reflect on their own ICT integration strategies.
... Many scholars have used some variation of culturalhistorical activity theory (CHAT) with middle school students to provide a more engaged learning experience (Betts, 2006;Ivey & Johnston, 2015). These scholars focus on the role activity systems play in conceptualizing human interaction (Engeström, 1987;Roth, 2007;Vygotsky, 1978). ...
... In addition, Johnston (2013, 2015) have focused their recent empirical work on the dialogic and social nature of engagement as it happens in and through community activities. They found that secondary classroom structures and activities that support engaged reading as part of social practices had transformative effects for both teachers and students (Ivey & Johnston, 2015), with students reporting a range of positive outcomes related to reading (e.g., talk about books, knowledge about books), as well as outcomes related to their social, cultural, and emotional lives (Ivey & Johnston, 2013). ...
In their 1985 report, Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading, Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson defined reading and proposed five principles that guide its successful enactment: (1) reading is a constructive process, (2) reading must be fluent, (3) reading must be strategic, (4) reading requires motivation, and (5) reading is a continuously developing skill. In this article we revise the definition from reading to literacy and rethink the principles in response to theoretical and empirical developments in the intervening years with regard to the processes of, and contexts for, reading. Our updated principles include: (1) literacy is a constructive, integrative, and critical process situated in social practices; (2) fluent reading is shaped by language processes and contexts; (3) literacy is strategic and disciplinary; (4) literacy entails motivation and engagement; and (5) literacy is a continuously developing set of practices. We redefine each principle and offer new explanations in light of what we now know.
The full article may be accessed at the Journal of Education's website: http://www.bu.edu/journalofeducation/
Young Adult Literature has often been utilized to explore reader responses especially in attention to how fiction provides space to explore identity and one’s place within a larger societal context. In this duoethnography, we explored the importance of children and young adult literature’s influence on our own identity development. We share our primary findings that highlight the ways reading stories has provided escape, space for self-discovery and questioning, as well as pathways of learning to cultivate empathy and work towards social justice. We agree with Ellis’s (2014) argument that storytellers must share stories in a way that makes lessons or emotional effects apparent–for it is in those effects that we notice our connections to ourselves and others. We therefore share connections between our own experiences and the larger implications of reading young adult fiction as a tool for both individual and collective identity formation.
This study explores the dialogues about social values, emotions and feelings that emerge during the implementation of dialogic literary gatherings (DLG). DLG is a classroom-based program grounded in the dialogic reading of classic books. Ten DLG sessions with fourth-grade students (n = 126) were implemented in 5 elementary schools in Spain. The analysis of dialogues that took place in selected DLG sessions reveals that students discuss a range of topics related to social values, emotions or feelings and that they relate these topics to different domains in their daily life (classroom experiences, relationships with their family or peers, etc.). The results suggest that the interactive environment surrounding classic books that is created in DLG allows students to address themes that matter to them, thus providing the students with valuable opportunities to increase their social and emotional awareness.
A third‐grade educator and university researcher collaborated to develop an after‐school virtual book club curriculum for students during the pandemic. Third‐grade students were encouraged to explore social justice issues prevalent in their community first by reading relevant children's books, doing research, and collaborating to develop potential action plans to address the issues. The study examined the impact of the books, the identification with characters, and the benefit of small group pedagogy. Students were intrinsically motivated to read, research, and collaborate over social justice issues voluntarily given free choice, minimal guidance, and opportunities. The results showcased the importance of small group discussion with young children, the power of choice in research‐based activities, and the desire for students to have their voices heard in important matters.
This review of research examines definitions of reading motivation, instruments for measuring reading motivation, reading motivation interventions and instructional designs, and student outcomes related to reading motivation. The population for this review was restricted to middle or high school students who: (a) have a qualifying disability in reading, (b) are identified as having “reading difficulties,” or (c) present characteristics of dyslexia but are otherwise not identified. Definitions of reading motivation were generally ambiguous or ill-defined in relationship to the construct being measured. A variety of established reading motivational scales were identified, as well as some that were author-constructed. Although evidence from previous studies demonstrates a positive contribution of reading motivation to student outcomes, there were less significant relationships found between student outcomes and those students with reading disabilities or reading difficulties.
“If your horse is dead, dismount,” is Dakota tribal wisdom that reminds us to do the most obvious thing. In this paper, we describe how middle school students in summer school finally challenged us to ‘dismount’ from our traditional remedial reading instruction. In our new approach, middle schoolers chose topics for study and shared what they were learning. Ongoing interviews, along with tutor reflections and researcher observations, showed the criticality of students’ identities in their topic studies. Pursuing questions that were connected to their identities resulted in self-regulatory behaviors, including goal-setting and persistence. Additionally, students labeled as struggling readers demonstrated a broad range of literate behaviors, including reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and composing. This paper adds to the research that challenges a model of remedial instruction where students are positioned as deficient and instead reframes literacy instruction as a tool for helping students act agentically.
This paper draws from multiple publications in the Literacy Studies, Game Studies and Multimodal fields to foreground the affordances of using modern video game aesthetics - particularly their user interfaces or screens - as learning scaffolds in the under-resourced English classroom context. Though this may be seen as a well-worn terrain for research today (nearly 30 years after the advent of Game Studies), it is argued that video games remain somewhat underrepresented in literacy education, with the Covid-19 pandemic and recurrent lockdowns even further cementing games technologies from learners' home domains as the new frontier in teaching and learning. The benefits of importing such technologies into the classroom is nothing new to the field. Yet, this study innovates by optimising the most accessible of graphological media (pencils, pens, paints and paper) during participants' transmodalisations of prescribed English literature - particularly Shakespeare's plays - into a range of video game screenshots, including character menus, maps, and heads-up-displays. The research site is a public high school in Johannesburg, South Africa, with five Grade 10-12 learners drawing the screenshots in response to an extracurricular, multimodal enrichment programme. The author contends that this programme (or similar pedagogies) may encourage future groups to delve further into the complexities of their school setworks, which may then be connected meaningfully to their own, increasingly digital life-worlds. Recognising game-making as an extraordinarily complex undertaking, the researcher then offers a fine-grained analysis of each participant's text-to-game re-genrefication. In this way, the powerful representational properties of the video game medium can come to light, reaffirming its importance as a semiotic resource and pedagogic tool.
This article reports on the implementation of a formative assessment tool (the Writing Engagement Scale, or WES) in grades 3–5 in schools in the United States. We used confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to collect validity evidence for the WES for our population. Results demonstrated acceptable validity and reliability. In addition, survey results indicated that teachers perceived the WES to be useful as a formative writing assessment. We make the case that the WES provides an opportunity to inform teachers’ practice and help researchers understand the dimensions of students’ engagement in writing.
English language arts (ELA) teachers and literacy researchers are increasingly attending to the ways that digital technologies may be integrated into the curriculum. Video games, which now feature extensive narrative structures, interactive play systems, and complex multimodal semiotics, offer one avenue through which ELA teachers can expand upon the texts and literacy practices included in language arts curricula. However, professional resources and research on the use of video games in literacy classrooms remain scarce. To understand how educators have begun to integrate games into ELA curriculum and instruction, the authors conducted a state‐of‐the‐art review of the emerging literature on video games in secondary ELA classrooms. Through an inductive search and coding process, 21 studies were identified and analyzed. Two major findings emerged regarding both the specific instructional practices that instructors in the studies employed and the overall effects on students' learning described in the studies. First, the studies highlighted examples of video game instruction through the use of game analysis, game design and production, text production, and inquiry/research. Second, studies emphasized students’ expanded conceptions of literacies, development of literacy practices, growth of critical and analytical thinking skills, enhanced engagement, and increased opportunities for peer collaboration and mentoring. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for literacy instruction and research. English language arts (ELA) teachers and literacy researchers are increasingly attending to the ways that digital technologies may be integrated into the curriculum. Video games, which now feature extensive narrative structures, interactive play systems, and complex multimodal semiotics, offer one avenue through which ELA teachers can expand upon the texts and literacy practices included in language arts curricula. However, professional resources and research on the use of video games in literacy classrooms remain scarce.
Frustrated by the ineffectiveness of externally mandated reforms to positively influence the academic performances and attitudes of their students who came from families with limited economic resources (>98%), two fourth-grade teachers used their teaching visions to redesign daily instructional activities. Consistent with their visions and a quest for more- effective reform strategies, they promoted agency by soliciting students’ input and feedback regarding the nature and format of their studies. Guided by situated learning theory, which underscores the potential for students who have been marginalized for whatever reason, to adopt positive learning trajectories when allowed to demonstrate agency, they collaborated with university researchers using design-based research methods, to provide opportunities for students to become engaged, remake identities, and improve learning. As students adjusted to new expectations, they increased engagement in daily studies, reflected on emerging life goals, portrayed positive learning identities, and demonstrated improvement onformal and informal assessments. Discussion focuses on how teachers might promote robust literacy reforms by teaching-beyond-the-test, using their visions to promote students’ agency.
The authors present a plan for classroom teachers and literacy professionals to conduct case studies, particularly of students’ reading motivations and engagement. The authors argue for case study as a way for practitioners to contribute important knowledge to the field that is grounded in practitioners’ deep, contextual understanding of the realities of classroom life. A roadmap for conducting a case study is presented, beginning with the selection of an inquiry topic and proceeding through data collection, analysis, and sharing of results. The roadmap is grounded in examples from the authors’ and other practitioner researchers’ case studies of reading motivation and engagement, and additional resources and suggestions for accomplishing a case study within the constraints of classroom routines are provided.
Science of reading is a term that has been used variously, but its use within research, policy, and the press has tended to share one important commonality: an intensive focus on assessed reading proficiency as the primary goal of reading instruction. Although well intentioned, this focus directs attention toward a problematically narrow slice of reading. In this article, we propose a different framework for the science of reading, one that draws on existing literacy research in ways that could broaden and deepen instruction. The framework proposes, first, that reading education should develop textual dexterity across grade levels in the four literate roles first proposed by Freebody and Luke: code breaker (decodes text), text participant (comprehends text), text user (applies readings of text to accomplish things), and text analyst (critiques text). Second, the framework suggests that reading education should nurture important literate dispositions alongside those textual capacities, dispositions that include reading engagement, motivation, and self‐efficacy. Justification is offered for the focus on textual dexterity and literate dispositions, and we include research‐based suggestions about how reading educators can foster student growth in these areas. Finally, we propose that reading education should attend closely to linguistic, cultural, and individual variation, honoring and leveraging different strengths and perspectives that students bring to and take away from their learning. Reimagining a science of reading based on these principles has the potential to make it both more robust and more socially just, particularly for students from nondominant cultures.
The authors discuss the tension between the science of reading and adaptive teaching. The discussion focuses on the ways in which the science of reading emphasizes the teaching of reading as decontextualized and compartmentalized aspects of literacy acquisition that are distant from culturally sustaining and relevant pedagogies and restrict teachers in their efforts to teach reading. The authors demonstrate that adaptive teaching is a vital characteristic of effective reading teachers and recommend that scholars—those who study reading processes and reading acquisition (i.e., the science of reading) and those who study effective literacy instruction—work across paradigms to research the nuances of these processes, particularly in ways that study diverse student and teacher populations in various real‐world classroom contexts.
In 1975, Robert Shuman wrote an article that highlighted ways that secondary educators
could support struggling readers within their own content-area classrooms. Some of the
points made are still currently supported by research while many others have either been
challenged by literacy scholars or expanded in new and exciting ways. This article reviews
each of the recommendations Shuman identified with new information and research to discuss how the recommendation would be noted within today’s secondary classrooms.
Children’s literate development is mediated by classroom talk. That same talk also mediates children’s emotional, relational, self-regulatory, and moral development. Consequently, the discourse of some literacy teaching practices may be important for shaping the course of human development, and those dimensions of human development can play reciprocal roles in children’s literate development. For example, conversations about the inner life of book characters (and authors) expand children’s social imaginations, which improve their self-regulation, social relationships, and moral development. Coincidentally, literacy learning requires cognitive self-regulation (e.g., working memory, attention, focus), social self-regulation in interactions with peers and teachers, and emotional self-regulation (e.g., frustration and anxiety). Children who develop self-regulation earlier, and to higher levels, develop decoding and reading comprehension earlier. Similarly, when children’s conversations explore the pragmatics of their linguistic interactions, such as how to disagree productively, they become more able to comprehend texts and argue persuasively but also more able to learn from and with each other. Children need to acquire “the codes,” but the ecology of acquisition matters a great deal not only for the ease of acquisition but also for the nature of the literacy that is acquired and for the trajectory of human development. Children’s social and emotional development lies squarely in the bailiwick of the language arts and the literate talk within which they are immersed. But the accompanying human development, in turn, supports literate development.
The authors examined the dimensions of reading engagement for rural ninth-grade students who participated in a supplemental literacy intervention for students who struggled with school-based reading. Using a comparative case study approach, researchers investigated the ways in which engagement was characterized and undermined within the context of the class. Behavioral, motivational, cognitive, and social dimensions of engagement were studied. Findings showed students reported active engagement in reading outside of school and used knowledge and skills as capital in the classroom. Students embodied agency in engaging in or resisting in-class literacy activities as they related to their goals and interests. Implications for supplemental literacy courses are discussed.
This study evaluated the reading and motivational profiles of 187, 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, in three southeastern elementary schools, each with a history of low achievement. The majority of students were minorities, failed to demonstrate proficiency on the most recent state-mandated reading assessment, and were from families with limited economic resources. To evaluate reading profiles, students’ completed assessments, focusing on the five components of reading. To evaluate motivation, students completed the Motivation for Reading Questionnaire. While reading scores overall improved by grade level, actual performances fell below grade-level expectations, with the greatest discrepancy occurring between narrative and expository comprehension. While the identified reading factors, Word Recognition and Meaning, were similar to those of other researchers, the motivation analysis, unlike Wigfield and Guthrie’s (1997 Wigfield, A., & Guthrie, J. T. (1997). Relations of children’s motivation for reading to the amount and breadth of their reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89,430–432.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), did not include an avoidance factor. Moreover, when motivation and reading factors were combined, the number of profiles changed, underscoring the importance of providing interventions based on both reading performances and motivational orientations. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for designing interventions to support non-proficient students’ reading development.
There is evidence that student-selected reading of compelling, relevant young adult literature helps address the problem of low reading engagement among adolescents, but schools rarely take up this option as a curricular priority. A major source of apprehension for adults is fear that students might be placed at risk by exposure to realistic content of some young adult books or that parents might object. In this article, the authors take up this problem by describing the experiences of eighth-grade students in classes where engaged reading of disturbing books was the norm. The authors offer students’ perspectives, as well as those of some of their parents. Students documented the many positive ways that they were transformed by the books and the ensuing conversations. Their parents agreed and described resulting changes in family conversations and relationships.
Given school librarians promote reading and assist students in the self-selection of texts, this case study examines youth information-seeking practices, specifically book selection, within the context of a genrefied fiction collection. It examines how sixth grade students interacted with the collection along with their teachers’ perceptions of the collection’s recent genrefication. Data includes observation and video recording of 16 sixth grade students’ browsing activity during four checkout times, interviews with eight students, and survey responses from eight classroom teachers. Findings include that students used prior knowledge of genre for beginning book selection, preferred browsing with a peer and were more likely to leave with a book when they did, and tended to browse across genres even when coming to the library with a particular genre in mind. Classroom teachers viewed genrefication as a means for supporting students as readers, and appreciated that the library’s organization reinforced their curricular goals around teaching the concept of genre.
For students to learn optimally, teachers must design classrooms that are responsive to the full range of student development. The teacher must be adaptive, but so must each student and the learning culture itself. In other words, adaptive teaching means constructing a responsive learning culture that accommodates and even capitalizes on diversity to ensure that each student is learning optimally. There are 2 primary resources for accomplishing this, engagement and the classroom talk that the teacher orchestrates.
ERODING WORK IDENTITIES We live in risky times (Beck, 1992; Friedland & Boden, 1994). The boundaries and certainties that shored up systems from nation-states to professional bodies for the past 150 years are dissolving, leaving individuals feeling exposed and unprotected by familiar and historically grounded practices. New forms of work combining real-time face-to-face negotiations with more distributed connections mean that we are linked as individuals perhaps as never before (Giddens, 1991); and the work systems we occupy are perhaps more open, with, as Sennett (1999a) puts it, “febrile” boundaries and mixed work forms. At the same time, the sequential linearity of early modernism, evidenced in narrative structures that give historical coherence to current actions, has been disrupted. For example, people may now need to take into account the narratives of other workgroups as they align their actions across time and space and learn when to interact and when to withdraw. The workplace is therefore now less likely to be the source of a sustained identity, whether we are victims of short-term contracts (Sennett, 1998), are boundary-breaking creatives (Guile, 2007), or are specialist professionals collaborating on complex tasks (Edwards, 2005). However, as we are propelled forward, sustained more by a sense of our own purposeful agency than by a situated form of professional identity, we are perhaps in danger of revisiting a past that gave rise to the very certainties currently being eroded.
The authors argue for a reconceptualization of rigor that requires sustained, direct, and systematic documentation of what takes place inside programs to document how students and teachers change and adapt interventions in interactions with each other in relation to their dynamic local contexts. Building on promising new programs at the Institute of Education Sciences, they call for the formulation of collaborative research standards that must require researchers to provide evidence that they have engaged in a process to surface and negotiate the focus of their joint work, and to document the ways participation in this process was structured to include district and school leaders, teachers, parents, community stakeholders, and, wherever possible, children and youth. They close by describing how this new criterion—“relevance to practice”—can ensure the longevity and efficacy of educational research.
The present study introduced “agentic engagement” as a newly proposed student-initiated pathway to greater achievement and greater motivational support. Study 1 developed the brief, construct-congruent, and psychometrically strong Agentic Engagement Scale. Study 2 provided evidence for the scale’s construct and predictive validity, as scores correlated with measures of agentic motivation and explained independent variance in course-specific achievement not otherwise attributable to students’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement. Study 3 showed how agentically engaged students create motivationally supportive learning environments for themselves. Measures of agentic engagement and teacher-provided autonomy support were collected from 302 middle-school students in a 3-wave longitudinal research design. Multilevel structural equation modeling showed that (a) initial levels of students’ agentic engagement predicted longitudinal changes in midsemester perceived autonomy support and (b) early-semester changes in agentic engagement predicted longitudinal changes in late-semester autonomy support. Overall, these studies show how agentic engagement functions as a proactive, intentional, collaborative, and constructive student-initiated pathway to greater achievement (Study 2) and motivational support (Study 3). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)
Understanding others’ mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human
societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults.
We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments
1 to 5) and cognitive ToM (experiments 4 and 5) compared with reading nonfiction (experiments 1), popular fiction (experiments
2 to 5), or nothing at all (experiments 2 and 5). Specifically, these results show that reading literary fiction temporarily
enhances ToM. More broadly, they suggest that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art.
This article examines a praxis model of teacher education and advances a new method for engaging novice teachers in reflective practice and robust teacher learning. Social design experiments—cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children—are organized around expansive notions of learning and mediated praxis and provide new tools and practices for envisioning new pedagogical arrangements, especially for students from nondominant communities. The authors examine one long-standing social design experiment, the UCLA UC Links/ Las Redes partnership and the work of one exemplary novice teacher to illustrate the importance of mediated, reflective practices in helping apprentice teachers develop a coherent and orienting framework for teaching and learning that has both heuristic and explanatory power. The authors illustrate how cultural historical concepts of learning and development and situated practice become the means for university students to gain distance and reflect on the beliefs and practices that have informed their understandings of teaching and to “rise to the concrete” practices of learning jointly and resonantly.
The paper examines studies based on the theory of expansive learning, formulated in 1987. In recent years the theory has been used in a wide variety of studies and interventions. The theory builds on foundational ideas put forward by Vygotsky, Leont’ev, Il’enkov, and Davydov, key figures in the Russian school of cultural–historical activity theory. Studies based on the theory are reviewed in six sections: expansive learning as transformation of the object, expansive learning as movement in the zone of proximal development, expansive learning as cycles of learning actions, expansive learning as boundary crossing and network building, expansive learning as distributed and discontinuous movement, and formative interventions. A separate section is devoted to critiques of expansive learning. It is concluded that the ultimate test of learning theories is how they help practitioners to generate learning that grasps pressing issues the humankind is facing. The theory of expansive learning currently expands its analyses both up and down, outward and inward. Moving up and outward, it tackles learning in fields or networks of interconnected activity systems with their partially shared and often contested objects. Moving down and inward, it tackles issues of subjectivity, experiencing, personal sense, emotion, embodiment, identity, and moral commitment.
The goal of this paper is to contribute to recent scholarship that pursues radical revision of prevalent models of personhood mired in outdated notions of human development and its foundational principles. To achieve this goal, I revisit and expand Vygotsky's project of cultural historical psychology to offer a dialectical framework that encompasses but is not limited to relational ontology. Premised on the notion of collaborative transformative practice as the grounding for human Being and Becoming,1 my proposal is that at the core of human nature and development lies an ineluctably activist stance vis-à-vis the world; it is the realization of this stance through answerable deeds composing one unified life project that forms the path to personhood. The ethical dimension appears as foundational to Being and Becoming because it is integral to actions through which we become who we are while changing the world in collaborative pursuits of social transformation. From an activist transformative stance persons are agents not only for whom “things matter” but who themselves matter in history, culture, and society and, moreover, who come into Being as unique individuals through and to the extent that they matter in these processes and make a contribution to them.
This article suggests that the principle of object-relatedness, introduced by Vygotsky and expanded by A. N. Leontiev, can be used to conceptualize human subjectivity within a profoundly social view of hu- man development. This is achieved by reformulating the premises of cultural-historical activity theory to include the notion that material production, intersubjective exchanges, and human subjectivity form a unified three-fold dialectical system. Focusing on the constant manifold transitions among compo- nents of this system as its modus vivendi reveals (a) individual and collective processes as being interre- lated and co-evolving levels of activity, and (b) the practical relevance of human subjectivity alongside the human relevance of material practices. Such an expanded view posits human subjectivity on a con- tinuum of regulatory mechanisms of social practice, to which both individual and social processes be- long. It is further conceptualized as a form of practical transformative pursuits in the world, and as a lawful and necessary moment of human life endowed with the capacity to generate new activity cycles. The co-evolution of collective motives and personal goals, as well as the practical relevance of theoret- ical constructions, are used as illustrations.
This study examined elementary school students’ perceived support for recreational reading from their mothers, fathers, and friends. Participants, including 130 fourth graders and 172 fifth graders, completed the researcher-developed Reading Support Survey, which assesses how often children experience and how greatly they enjoy multiple types of reading-supportive behaviors. The survey was based on a synthesis of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research on older children’s experiences of support for recreational reading. Theories emphasizing the importance of social factors in the development of reading motivation and attitudes and domain-general theories of motivation and social support also influenced the survey design and study hypotheses. Perceived reading support showed four underlying dimensions, two reflecting source of support and two reflecting type of support as the organizing element. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses demonstrated that perceived parent and friend support each contributed uniquely to the prediction of multiple dimensions of self-reported reading motivation and frequency, controlling for reading achievement, gender, and grade level. Children perceived greater reading support from their mothers than from their fathers or friends. There were few differences in perceived reading support, reading motivation, or habits by gender or grade level. The findings of this study expand the research base on the relations of children’s experiences of parental support for reading with reading motivation and activity, which has largely focused on preschool and primary-grade children, to older children.
Gergen's conception of human agency as a relational phenomenon and its adequacy to the tasks of psychological description and explanation are examined. A contrasting view is discussed that shows how psychologically capable agency can be rendered intelligible only by attending to its developmental emergence in historically established sociocultural contexts. It is argued that an elaborated developmental account is necessary to comprehend how psychological agency, once it has emerged, is a unique form of relational being capable of transcending its biophysical and sociocultural origins. From this perspective, agentive personhood is not simply “a social performance,” but rather, an active structuring of existence.
There is growing awareness among psychologists that the individualistic and rationalistic character of contemporary psychological theories of the self reflect an ethnocentric Western view of personhood. In opposition to this view, it is argued from a constructionist perspective that the self can be conceived of as dialogical, a view that transcends individualism and rationalism. A comparison of 3 contructionist forerunners (G. Vico [1966], H. Vaihinger [1935], and G. A. Kelly [1955]) suggests that to transcend individualism and rationalism, the embodied nature of the self must be taken into consideration. Moving through space and time, the self can imaginatively occupy a number of positions that permit mutual dialogical relations. The classic Jamesian distinction between the I and the Me is translated in a narrative framework. The implications for 3 areas of psychological research (attribution theory, moral development, and the individual differences paradigm) are briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The authors explored different aspects of children's reading motivation and how children's motivation related to the amount and breadth of their reading. The reading motives assessed included self-efficacy, intrinsic–extrinsic motivation and goals, and social aspects. Fourth- and 5th-grade children (
N = 105) completed a new reading motivation questionnaire twice during a school year. Children's reading amount and breadth were measured using diaries and questionnaires. Children's reading motivation was found to be multidimensional. Their motivation predicted children's reading amount and breadth even when previous amount and breadth were controlled. An intrinsic motivation composite predicted amount and breadth of reading more strongly than did an extrinsic motivation composite. Some aspects of girls' reading motivation were more positive than boys'. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper offers steps towards overcoming current fragmentation within sociocultural approaches by expansively reconstructing a broad dialectical view on human development and learning (drawing on Vygotsky’s project) underwritten by ideology of social justice. The common foundation for sociocultural approaches is developed by dialectically supplanting relational ontology with the notion that collaborative purposeful transformation of the world is the core of human nature and the principled grounding for learning and development. An activist transformative stance suggests that people come to know themselves and their world as well as ultimately come to be human in and through (not in addition to) the processes of collaboratively transforming the world in view of their goals. This means that all human activities (including psychological processes and the self) are instantiations of contributions to collaborative transformative practices that are contingent on both the past and the vision for the future and therefore are profoundly imbued with ideology, ethics, and values. And because acting, being, and knowing are seen from a transformative activist stance as all rooted in, derivative of, and instrumental within a collaborative historical becoming, this stance cuts across and bridges the gaps (a) between individual and social and (b) among ontological, epistemological, and moral–ethical (ideological) dimensions of activity.
The present research introduces the concept of experience-taking-the imaginative process of spontaneously assuming the identity of a character in a narrative and simulating that character's thoughts, emotions, behaviors, goals, and traits as if they were one's own. Six studies investigated the degree to which particular psychological states and features of narratives cause individuals, without instruction, to engage in experience-taking and investigated how the merger between self and other that occurs during experience-taking produces changes in self-judgments, attitudes, and behavior that align with the character's. Results from Studies 1-3 showed that being in a reduced state of self-concept accessibility while reading a brief fictional work increased-and being in a heightened state of self-concept accessibility decreased-participants' levels of experience-taking and subsequent incorporation of a character's personality trait into their self-concepts. Study 4 revealed that a first-person narrative depicting an ingroup character elicited the highest levels of experience-taking and produced the greatest change in participants' behavior, compared with versions of the narrative written in 3rd-person voice and/or depicting an outgroup protagonist. The final 2 studies demonstrated that whereas revealing a character's outgroup membership as a homosexual or African American early in a narrative inhibited experience-taking, delaying the revelation of the character's outgroup identity until later in the story produced higher levels of experience-taking, lower levels of stereotype application in participants' evaluation of the character, and more favorable attitudes toward the character's group. The implications of these findings in relation to perspective-taking, self-other overlap, and prime-to-behavior effects are discussed.
In this article, Elizabeth Birr Moje, Melanie Overby, Nicole Tysvaer, and Karen Morris challenge some of the prevailing myths about adolescents and their choices related to reading. The reading practices of youth from one urban community are examined using mixed methods in an effort to define what, how often, and why adolescents choose to read. By focusing on what features of texts youth find motivating, the authors find that reading and writing frequently occur in a range of literacy contexts outside school. However, only reading novels on a regular basis outside of school is shown to have a positive relationship to academic achievement as measured by school grades. This article describes how adolescents read texts that are embedded in social networks, allowing them to build social capital. Conclusions are framed in terms of the mysteries that remain - namely, how to build on what motivates adolescents' literacy practices in order to both promote the building of their social selves and improve their academic outcomes.
With Learning by Expanding (Engeström, 1987), the development of cultural-historical activity theory entered a new phase. The book articulated a variety of structural aspects that researchers using cultural-historical activity theory might look for when attempting to analyze concrete human praxis. These aspects are captured emblematically by a triangular representation that has been a main scaffold for many scholars in their effort to understand a theory quite alien, in its dialectical foundations, to that of Western theorizing. Yet some elements of it have not yet come to be appreciated. Thus, to understand practical activity and the participative thinking that accompanies it requires understanding “the regulating effect of emotion” (Leont'ev, 1978, p. 27), because the “objectivity of activity is responsible not only for the objective character of images but also for the objectivity of needs, emotions, and feelings” (p. 54). Many scholars have focused only on the structural aspects of activity, its systemic dimensions (Roth & Lee, 2007). These scholars have not taken into account the agentive dimensions of activity, including identity, emotion, ethics, and morality, or derivative concepts, such as motivation, identification, responsibility, and solidarity - all of which are integral to concrete praxis and its singular nature. These “sensuous” aspects of activity come into focus only if the whole activity - not only its structural but also its agentive dimensions - is analyzed.
The book is a collection about cultural-historical activity theory as it has been developed and applied by Yrjö Engeström. The work of Engeström is both rooted in the legacy of Vygotsky and Leont'ev and focuses on current research concerns that are related to learning and development in work practices. His publications cross various disciplines and develop intermediate theoretical tools to deal with empirical questions. In this volume, Engeström's work is used as a springboard to reflect on the question of the use, appropriation, and further development of the classic heritage within activity theory. The book is structured as a discussion among senior scholars, including Y. Engeström himself. The work of the authors pushes on classical activity theory to address pressing issues and critical contradictions in local practices and larger social systems.
Within the emerging field of research on student engagement, there exists a wide variety of work in terms of definitions, constructs, and methodologies. In this chapter, we argue for the importance of “finding the humanity in the data,” understanding and investigating student engagement and disengagement as a function of the perceptions of students about their experiences in the learning environment. After setting out a conceptualization of engagement, we examine data from the High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE), a self-report survey containing both multiple-option and open-response questions. Our analysis is focused on the words and school experiences of students as a way of understanding levels and dimensions of student engagement in school. Using examples from the field, we describe ways in which schools use student perception data to understand and strengthen student engagement. We conclude by setting out challenges for research, policy, and practice in the field of student engagement.
This chapter develops a definition of engagement which is underpinned by a participatory enquiry paradigm and invites an exploration of patterns and relationships between variables rather than a focus on a single variable. It suggests that engagement is best understood as a complex system including a range of interrelated factors internal and external to the learner, in place and in time, which shape his or her engagement with learning opportunities. The implications of this approach are explored first in terms of student identity, learning power and competences and second in terms of student participation in the construction of knowledge through authentic enquiry. Examples are used to illustrate the arguments which have been generated from research into the theory and practice of Learning Power and from the Learning Futures programme in the UK and Australia. The chapter argues that what is necessary for deep engagement in the twenty-first century is a pedagogy and an assessment system which empower individuals to become aware of their identity as learners through making choices about what, where and how they learn and to make meaningful connections with their life stories and aspirations in authentic pedagogy. In this context, the teacher is a facilitator or coach for learning rather than a purveyor of expert knowledge.
In this chapter, we review research on students’ engagement in reading activities and how classroom instructional practices influence engagement in reading and other academic activities. We define engaged readers as motivated to read, strategic in their approaches to reading, knowledgeable in their construction of meaning from text, and socially interactive while reading. We present a conceptual model of reading engagement linking classroom practices directly and indirectly to students’ motivation to read, behavioral engagement in reading, and reading achievement. A major premise of this model is that behavioral engagement in reading mediates the effects of classroom practices on reading outcomes. We present evidence from a variety of experimental and correlational studies documenting the direct and indirect links among classroom practices, motivation, behavioral engagement, and achievement outcomes. One reading comprehension instructional program on which we focus is Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction. This program integrates strategy instruction and instructional practices to foster students’ reading motivation, and teaches reading, in particular, in content domains such as science and social studies.
In this interview Prof. Engeström discusses his professional trajectory and interest in cultural-historical activity theory with a focus on its insights into the fields of work and human development. He comments on recent transformations within this theoretical orientation, many of them promoted by his research into a variety of workplaces and organisations. Methodological aspects, and in particular formative intervention methods such as the Change Laboratory, are also considered. Prof. Engeström's published work covers a multitude of real-life contexts and offers us a perfect example of how psychological research can be a powerful tool not only for understanding reality but actively shaping it.
This study examines students' perceptions of the outcomes and processes of engaged reading in classrooms prioritizing engagement through self-selected, self-paced reading of compelling young adult literature. The primary data were 71 end-of-year student interviews, supported by end-of-year teacher interviews, biweekly observational data, on-the-fly conversations with students, and video/audio records of student-initiated book discussions. An inductive analysis yielded 15 main categories of outcomes, including changes in students' identities, in their sense of agency, and in their relational, moral, and intellectual lives. The web of relationships among the processes and outcomes is examined through 317 causal statements made by students in interviews. Finally, a case study illustrates the cascading and reciprocal effects of engaged reading on one student's development. These adolescents showed, to varying degrees, an awareness of these processes and self-transformations, and thus a sense of agency with respect to their own development—their personhood and future narratives. This study raises questions about the adequacy of existing models of engagement for explaining students' engaged reading experiences and about currently advocated approaches to teaching English language arts that (a) minimize the roles of engagement and fiction, (b) require students to read the same text, (c) focus on engaged reading as an individual cognitive act without regard for the social nature of literate and human development, and (d) expect uniform outcomes across students.
In this article I make an argument for literacy practice as a means for self and other dialogue. Through a theoretical framework that examines the concepts of heteroglossia and the dialogical self, I explore the literacy practices of Isaac, a working-class adolescent diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and his attempts to bring meaning to his life struggles. I argue that, particularly for those learners whose lives are marginalized from the cultural center, reading, writing, and other forms of expression are valuable media through which learners seek understanding of the chaos around them. Given this existential need to make meaning, I then argue that the teaching of reading and writing needs to be seen as more than the learning of discrete skills and instead should be viewed as providing learners ways to call their own lives and the lives of others into dialogue.
Prologue Part I. Practice: Introduction I 1. Meaning 2. Community 3. Learning 4. Boundary 5. Locality Coda I. Knowing in practice Part II. Identity: Introduction II 6. Identity in practice 7. Participation and non-participation 8. Modes of belonging 9. Identification and negotiability Coda II. Learning communities Conclusion: Introduction III 10. Learning architectures 11. Organizations 12. Education Epilogue.
This is an ethnographic case study examining how discussions of multicultural young adult literature among a group of white, rural teachers and researchers were shaped by sociopolitical contexts and participants' constructions of racial identity. Focusing on the interactions of three teachers and ourselves, we used performance theory to help us understand how our ways of performing the self were shaped at the macro level by institutional and societal ideologies and the micro level by professional affiliations and identities. In analyzing data, we used qualitative coding procedures to arrive at key and illustrative events. These events were then analyzed using the tools of discourse analysis, which helped us to focus on the ideological underpinnings of the discourse. Our analyses revealed that as participants attempted to engage with the literature and bond with one another, we enacted personal, professional and group affiliations that served to sustain particular norms of whiteness even as we attempted to disrupt them.
This paper describes an innovative approach to continuous professional development using Exploratory Practice (EP), a form of practitioner research developed in second language teacher education and professional development. One of the goals of EP is to empower teachers, so that they can develop a better understanding of their classroom environment, and from this, devise strategies for enhancing learning opportunities for students. It draws on a framework of Critical Learning Episodes (CLE) as a tool to enable them to investigate their practices in classroom interaction. This approach has guided a group of university teachers to understand their classroom practice which has, as a result, led to novel insights by the teachers, improved learning opportunities for students and a better quality of life for all in the classroom.
This chapter describes how internal high school reforms can be aimed at six different dimensions of student motivation and engagement. Students will respond to more accessible immediate rewards such as good grades and teacher praise when high schools improve with focused extra help for 8 needy students and other interventions to narrow skill gaps or recognize individual progress. Students will benefit from embedded intrinsic interest in their school program when innovations are introduced to challenge their minds and creativity. Students will find more functional relevance in their studies when high schools integrate academic and career education. Students will enjoy a more positive interpersonal climate for learning when high schools use smaller learning communities with teacher teams and advisors. Students will find opportunities to exercise their own personal nonacademic talents when schools provide more diverse electives and extracurricular activities. Students will feel more connected to shared communal norms when high schools practice fair disciplinary procedures and provide for some shared decision-making. Different combinations and sequences of high school reforms are discussed in terms of implementation strategies and the interactions of the six dimensions of student motivation and engagement. High school reform can be aimed at either the external constraints and incentives for school improvement or the internal conditions for student engagement and learning. This chapter puts reforms of the internal conditions in the context of alternative strategies for improving American high schools and examines six different aspects of student engagement in high school and how specific internal reform efforts can activate and maximize each component.
In studies of learning, emotion is understood as an expression of affect separate from the mind and in need of discipline rather than constructed through language, culture, and power. This study focuses on emotion in a diverse urban classroom and explores, instead, how emotive interactions in a race-related discussion were mediated by texts, talk, and histories of participation. We theorize emotion as action linked to language and identity, and argue that emotion, when viewed as mediated action, offers a broader critical literacy. This critical literacy is deeply related to how students and teachers, as social actors, mobilize emotion to transform texts and signs, acts that are widely understood to be central to sociocultural and social semiotic concepts of learning, but are otherwise veiled in English classrooms.
The reading process and reading development have been addressed by researchers for decades. As a result we know much about what reading is and how it happens. However, less is known about how reading influences other aspects of children’s development, specifically the development of social imagination. To address this, we examined the narrative produced by one child during wordless picture book reading using a conceptually derived coding scheme to identify instances of social imagination. We asked: Is children’s use of social imagination visible in wordless book reading, and if so, what does it look like and how might it give us a more detailed in-process view of the reader–text transaction? Results suggest that the use of social imagination is observable in wordless book reading and that it is an integral part of the comprehension of stories. From this we posit that through vicarious engagement with others, the process of reading may influence the relational capacity for social imagination.
Teacher quality largely determines student outcomes and many argue for high quality teacher training and professional development (PD). Much PD has been heavily critiqued and what constitutes effective provision for teachers remains contested. Disenfranchisement of teachers, through neglect of prior expertise and failure to acknowledge teachers’ working contexts, some argue, are to blame. A PD project with five biology teachers and a teacher educator, grounded within a cultural, historical activity theoretical (CHAT) tradition, was initiated to address these shortcomings. Edwards’ concept of relational agency was employed to investigate and interpret teacher collaboration. Teachers’ perceptions about the project were gathered using free-response questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, with the data being analysed using a CHAT framework. The positive impact on teacher practice reported here was related to having opportunities to own and be responsible for one’s own and others’ development, exploiting the distributed expertise available and supporting collaborative work.
RESEARCH ABOUT the importance of interest in learning suggests that students who have access to materials of interest are more likely to read and thus to improve their reading achievement and attitudes. This study examined the reading preferences and access to reading materials of sixth-grade students from three middle schools in a large ethnically and economically diverse southwestern U.S. school district. Preference surveys and open-ended questions about favorite materials and authors showed that the most preferred materials among students were scary books and stories, comics and cartoons, magazines about popular culture, and books and magazines about sports. Other popular materials were drawing books, books and magazines about cars and trucks, series books, funny books, and books about animals. Comparisons by gender, income, reading attitude, and achievement found more similarities than differences. Students' school access to reading materials was examined through a student questionnaire and through interviews with their teacher and librarians. The majority of students obtained reading materials from purchased sources (stores or their homes) rather than schools and libraries. Classrooms ranked a distant last for book sources among even low-income students. interviews with teachers and librarians along with classroom visits showed that the availability of the most popular materials was limited across schools and classrooms.
Middle school students are often characterized as disinterested readers (McKenna, Kear, & Ellsworth, 1995), yet studies of adolescent reading typically do not feature students' voices about classroom practices (Alvermann, 1998). This study used students as primary informants about what motivates them to read in their middle school classrooms. We surveyed 1,765 sixth-grade students in reading/language arts classrooms in 23 diverse schools in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. Students described how classroom environments motivated their reading through open-ended responses, short answers, and checklist items. To obtain richer data about positive instructional environments, we conducted follow-up interviews with 31 students in 3 classrooms in which students reported high engagement with reading. Using qualitative methodology, we conducted a content analysis of the survey responses and compared these findings with the interview data. We identified several overall findings about positive features of instruction. First, students valued independent reading and the teacher reading out loud as part of instructional time. Second, when asked what they liked most about time spent in the class, students focused more on the act of reading itself or personal reasons for reading rather than on social aspects or activities related to reading. Third, when students were asked what motivated them to read at school, they emphasized quality and diversity of reading materials rather than classroom setting or other people. When considering how middle school classrooms measure up, issues emerged about access to reading materials in the classroom and lack of diverse reading materials at school. These findings raise questions about the range of materials used for middle school reading/language arts instruction and the place and purpose of student independent reading.
This paper is an introduction to the rest of this Special Issue of Language Teaching Research devoted entirely to Exploratory Practice (EP), a form of practitioner research. It is also an introduction to EP itself, telling the story of the development of its practices and its principles over the last ten or so years. Readers already familiar with EP may wish to go directly to the other seven papers in this issue, for illustrations of EP in practice, for research about EP, and for a more thorough review of the relevant research literature (see especially the papers by Miller and by Perpignan).
The case for EP presented below is based on a perceived need for practitioner research to be rethought: to be refocused on understanding, and ultimately on a concern for the quality of life in the language classroom, for both teachers and learners. The paper includes, in Section VII, a brief introduction to the other papers in this volume.
The concept of school engagement has attracted increasing attention as representing a possible antidote to declining academic motivation and achievement. Engagement is presumed to be malleable, responsive to contextual features, and amenable to environmental change. Researchers describe behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement and recommend studying engagement as a multifaceted construct. This article reviews definitions, measures, precursors, and outcomes of engagement; discusses limitations in the existing research; and suggests improvements. The authors conclude that, although much has been learned, the potential contribution of the concept of school engagement to research on student experience has yet to be realized. They call for richer characterizations of how students behave, feel, and think—research that could aid in the development of finely tuned interventions
THE OVERARCHING pedagogical goal of this formative experiment was to facilitate engaged reading and writing in a language arts classroom of seventh- and eighth-grade native Spanish speakers who were assigned to a team composed solely of second-language learners for the entire school year. Fourteen students participated in the study. An intervention was designed to emphasize (a) self-selected reading and (b) whole-class and small-group teacher-directed reading and writing on high-interest topics. Initial assessments of literacy and the use of accessible and culturally diverse reading materials were keys to the instruction. Modifications to the intervention for the whole class are explained and highlighted through the experiences of students, Changes in the instructional environment were noted, and unanticipated effects related to student compliance are described. The results and discussion address the challenges of assessing literacy among second-language learners and the importance of teacher expertise.
In this paper, we argue that emotion in English classrooms is a mediated action mobilized through discursive and material practices that transform texts and signs. We first provide an overview of the current state of English as a secondary school subject in the United States to provide a context for our work on emotion within a critical literacy framework. Next, we theorize emotion as mediated action rather than as an internal psycho-physiological state. Finally, we offer an example of how emotion was mobilized in a racially and ethnically diverse classroom that focused on documentary film analysis and production in ways that constrained and enabled particular ideologies, identities, and opportunities for learners. We argue that personal growth models of English focus on the right and tasteful kind of affect (or feeling) and mask the ideological roots of language which emotion – when we cease to police it – has the potential to illuminate.
The ideas of Vygotsky [Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum. (Original work published 1934.)] have been increasingly influential in accounting for social–environmental influences on the development of social understanding (SU). In the first part of this article, I examine how Vygotskian ideas have to date been recruited to explanations of the development of SU. Next, I present a model of SU development which draws on two implications of Vygotsky’s ideas: the importance of semiotic mediation for mental functioning, and the dialogic nature of the higher mental functions. I then consider the value of the proposed model in accounting for evidence from three areas of enquiry: the typical development of SU in infancy and early childhood, relations between individual differences in SU and social–environmental variables, and atypical development. The model is suggested to be particularly helpful in understanding the transition from intentional-agent to mental-agent understanding, and the role of language in SU. Remaining challenges include a need to specify further the cognitive processes underlying internalization, and to gather more extensive evidence on the roles of typical and atypical social experience in SU development.
The discussion of design experiments has largely ignored the Vygotskian tradition of formative interventions based on the principle of double stimulation. This tradition offers a radical approach to learning reasearch which focuses on the agency of the learners. The principle of double stimulation is used and developed further in the intervention methodology called Change Laboratory, created in the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research at University of Helsinki. The paper analyzes the Change Laboratory methodology and its potential for generating expansive learning, using data from an intervention conducted in 2006 in the surgical unit of a university hospital in Finland. The analysis demonstrates how the agency of the learning collective developed hand-in-hand with the construction and implementation of a new organization of work by the collective. Such expansive learning goes beyond knowledge construction, resulting in materially anchored new practices.
Language is a means we use to communicate feelings; we also reflect emotionally on the language we and others use. James Wilce analyses the signals people use to express emotion, looking at the social, cultural and political functions of emotional language around the world. His book demonstrates that speaking, feeling, reflecting, and identifying are interrelated processes and shows how desire or shame are attached to language. Drawing on nearly one hundred ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the cultural diversity, historical emergence, and political significance of emotional language. Wilce brings together insights from linguistics and anthropology to survey an extremely broad range of genres, cultural concepts, and social functions of emotional expression. © Cambridge University Press 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.