The purpose of this qualitative study was two-fold: (a) to understand the perceptions and experiences of urban high school disciplinary teachers' specific discourse communities and disciplinary literacy practices in a Midwestern metropolitan city, and (b) to understand these teachers' perceptions related to the literacy initiative at Eastside High…

This study explores the impact of implementing a peer mediation program in a middle school setting through an action research framework, presented as a series of case studies. The group of students receiving the intervention are on one "team" in the middle school, sharing the same group of teachers. The team is on a lower academic track,…

Objective: To inform efforts to boost college completion and professional preparation for the linguistically diverse New Mainstream, we explored language and literacy demands, and how faculty conceive of those demands, in one allied health program at one community college in California. We also explore the implications for the preparation of…

The authors, working from a "new literacies studies" perspective, suggest that educators can better teach their students if they develop their own knowledge of the purposes, types, and language conventions students use in their informal out-of-school literacy practices. The purpose of this study was to identify the literacy practices…

This study examines a social network site (SNS) where specific interlocutors communicate by combining aspects of academic American English (AE), digital language (DL), and African American Language (AAL)--creating a digital form of AAL or digital AAL (DAAL). This article describes the features of DAAL in the discursive, online context of MySpace,…

In making a case for ecocomposition, Sidney Dobrin has claimed that writing, place, and environment cannot be separated. As Donehower, Hogg, and Schell and Deborah Brandt might argue, literacy cannot be separated from place either. But it might sometimes be separated from environment as an ecosystem that has value distinct from, and without the…

In this article we explore similarities and differences between two school subjects, Norwegian and mathematics, taking a phenomenological perspective and a didactic meta-perspective (literacy perspective). Our argument is presented on three levels which together build on the perspective of meta-language. First we consider the level of discourse…

I see a parallel between the illiteracy I witnessed while working in the court system and the challenges facing first-year writers at the university. In both cases, problems arise due to unfamiliarity with the discourse community into which one enters. In response, because much of the language governing composition and rhetoric is rife with place…

This paper examines an often-overlooked contributing factor to minority student collegiate attrition: students' limited knowledge of--and sometimes resistance to--the kinds of academic discursive practices they need to become "full participants" (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in the university setting. Adopting a Vygotskian view of sociolinguistics, we…

The purpose of this study was to investigate instructor participation in asynchronous discussions through an in-depth content analysis of instructors' postings and comments through the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework (Garrison et. al, 2001). We developed an analytical tool based on this framework in order to better understand what instructors…

This paper reports on a collaborative project aimed at addressing the learning challenges faced by non-traditional students at the interface of TAFE and Higher Education. Our pedagogy is informed by engagement with a critique of competency-based education that espouses "bringing knowledge back into" the curriculum (Wheelahan, 2010a) and a critique…

Presented primarily in the context of graduate education in design, this paper argues that apprentice-master pedagogical models of learning and the development of exclusively tacit knowledge are inadequate resources for preparing the next generation of high level design practitioners or teachers. Today's design context requires more than formal…

In order to fill in the research gap related to the theory and practice of critical literacy in Taiwan, this article describes an English Conversation activity offered during the 2005 spring semester at a university in southern Taiwan. The article uses a critical instructional model to analyze students' team dialogues as responses to a…

This comparative study examines the role of contextual features embedded in a dialogic environment in fostering literacy. The study, implemented by language arts teachers in a middle school setting, investigates the effectiveness of an instructional program designed to create a collaborative dialogic learning environment that imparts literacy. The…

Storytime programs for young children are ritual events in the everyday life of the public library. This article analyzes data from two such programs to identify and analyze the work carried out by program leaders, their adult and child participants, and other social actors in other settings (e.g., library CEOs) in order to enable the program to…