In this paper, I share results of collaborative inquiry with youth and teachers into how the arts can create more relational learning spaces in the classroom. I offer a framework for relational teaching and learning through the arts guided by the questions: Who am I? Who are you? And who are we? Through these dimensions, I explore how arts-based…

Technology continually changes day-to-day interactions, and emergent bilingual learners often multitask, using several digital tools, at times simultaneously, to communicate and learn. Students may text, post on social media, and listen to music as they complete their work. Studies have examined the affordances of technology for language learning,…

In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes "anti-black linguistic racism" and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following…

This article illustrates how critical multimodal literacy practices engage secondary students to further explore differences and similarities between past and present instances of discrimination within a process drama, where students and teachers explore a topic through unscripted role-play. Data from a classroom-based ethnography are drawn on to…

We know little about the challenges districts and teachers face when establishing Ethnic Studies courses. In one school district, variation in teachers' Ethnic Studies knowledge impeded the production of curricula and its implementation. This study examines how Ethnic Studies teachers responded to the problems of differential knowledge and…

Language ideologies profoundly shape and constrain the use of language as a resource for learning in 'multilingual' or linguistically diverse classrooms. In this paper, we draw attention in particular to the ideology of languages as stable, boundaried objects and to the colonial invention of African languages. Against this backdrop, we analyse an…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate teacher-initiated whole-group oral reading practices in two ninth-grade reading intervention classrooms and how teachers understood the purposes of those practices. Design/methodology/approach: In this qualitative cross-case analysis, a literacy-as-social-practice perspective is used to collaboratively…

This linguistic anthropological case study demonstrates the ways in which a heterogeneous lab group of adolescents in a ninth-grade physics classroom constructed "raciolinguistic ideologies" that intersected with their locally constructed notions of science expertise. Using ethnography and discourse analysis this study unpacks how…

In usual understandings of learning, youths' development in classrooms is portrayed as a move from being a novice to an expert. However, findings of the present anthropologically framed study support us to argue that learning, rather, can be characterized as youths' simultaneous occupation of novice and expert roles. We refer to this simultaneous…

Engaging middle school students in science continues to be a challenge in Australian schools. One initiative that has been tried in the senior years but is a more recent development in the middle years is the context-based approach. In this ethnographic study, we researched the teaching and learning transactions that occurred in one ninth grade…

This article is a call to literacy teachers and researchers to embrace the possibility of attending more consciously to the senses in digital media production. Literacy practices do not occur only in the mind, but involve the sensoriality, embodiment, co-presence, and movement of bodies. This paper theorises the sensorial and embodied dimension of…

This dissertation builds on and extends research on the relationship between equity-minded mathematics teaching, specifically teaching mathematics for social justice, complex instruction, and project-based learning, and students' learning and identity development. Although different in their structures and strategies, equity-minded mathematics…

Sexuality and humour share a fraught relationship at school, so that how humour might be productively employed in sexuality education constitutes a "risky" consideration. This paper explores the role of humour in sexuality education as observed in a Year 9 New Zealand health class. Adding to existing literature emphasising students' use…

The present study concerns the activities teachers develop and ninth-graders' participation in responses to those activities. The objectives of this study were to identify and describe the types of teaching activities developed and how students respond to them and to show how the target language is used in the classroom. The data collection was…

Commercial publishers have shaped reading and writing instruction in American schools through their interpretations of state-developed reading and writing standards and standards-aligned materials, which teachers then implement in English classes, including those serving multilingual learners. This paper uses microethnographic discourse analysis…