Full Description
This book consists of the reports of 13 urban elementary teacher researchers' year-long inquiries around literacy topics--conducted as part of a collaborative school-university action research project. The focus is on how they attempted to transform their teaching practices to meet the needs of students from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, and how their inquiry efforts resulted in developing more collaborative styles of teaching. These teachers explore how collaborative classroom interactions occur when teachers move away from teaching-as-transmission approaches to ones in which they share power and authority with their students--viewing them not as 'at risk' but instead as 'at promise.' Because the everyday interactions between teachers and students are realized by social talk in the classroom, classroom discourse was analyzed to study and document the teacher researchers' efforts to make changes in the locus of power in literacy teaching and learning. Their chapters are filled with classroom discourse examples to illustrate their points. The volume includes teacher inquiries conducted in elementary classrooms from kindergarten through eighth grade. Three took place in bilingual classrooms, one in a special education class. These inquires cover a range of literacy topics, including reading-aloud, language richness, writing, literature discussion groups, drama, and 'pretend' reading. The background and theoretical underpinnings of the project are discussed in an introduction written by the editors; in the conclusion they pull together the major themes in the teacher researchers' chapters and discuss the political implications of their efforts to change literacy teaching and learning in their urban classrooms.
Contents
Contents: Preface. C.C. Pappas, L.B. Zecker, Introduction: Creating Collaborative Relations of Power in Literacy Teaching-Learning. S.W. Soltero, Exploring Language Richness in a Bilingual Kindergarten Classroom. D. Collier, Pretend Reading Is for Everybody in Kindergarten--Even the Boys! A. Barry, Now I Know My ABC's, Plus a Whole Lot More! Using Alphabet Books With First Graders. P. Wolfer, My Journey to Create a Writing Workshop for First Graders. S. Cohen, Learning How to Scaffold Second Graders to Become Authors in a Bilingual Classroom. H. Jones, Creating Safety Zones in Reading Aloud to Empower Second Graders as Readers. R.L. Mehra, Fostering Second Graders' Participation in Literacy Activities Around a Novel Study. D.A. O'Malley, It Is Never Too Late to Change! Rethinking Read-Alouds for Third Graders. S.T. Pasewark, Promoting English Through English Read-Alouds in a Third-Grade Bilingual Classroom. S.C. Jacobson, For the Love of Reading: Inquiries in Reading Aloud and Creating Literature Discussion Groups in Fourth Grade. P. Fowler, Reflections on Drama in a Sixth-Grade Classroom: A Year of Discovery. B. Braun, How to Loosen Tongues With Drama: Children Try in Their Own Way in a Special-Education Classroom. M. Rassel, Teaching Research Writing: Our Search for Voice in the Eighth Grade. C.C. Pappas, L.B. Zecker, Summary and Ongoing Reflections: Struggles and Significance in Creating Collaborative Interactions and Talk in Urban Classrooms.
