Disjuncture, Design, and Disruption: Bridging the Gap Between Students' Everyday and Academic Knowledge through Historical Inquiry.

This dissertation presents my findings from the design study, Teen Empowerment through Reading, Research, and Action. In this study, I designed and implemented both an after-school and in-class historical research program on a local problem with students in one high school in a Midwestern city during the 2009-2010 school year. I used Constant Comparative Analysis with a range of data sources including field notes, student work, surveys, and student achievement data from the school, to explore the following research questions: •What decisions were made during the process of designing this program and what principles drove my design process? •What decisions and changes were made in the process of implementing this instructional design and why were they made? •What were the affordances and challenges provided by this particular instructional design and what did I learn from them? Analyzing data from the development and enactment of the design, I found that the instructional design introduced a different cultural model of learning into the classroom, one that did not always align with, and even disrupted, students’ deeply ingrained patterns of classroom learning. As a result, and despite the fact that I had considered factors such as student interest, student skill and knowledge, and text complexity, I still faced a range of instructional dilemmas during implementation. To resolve emerging problems, I made a range of interactive decisions which attempted to shift the structure of learning activities. These choices often targeted the interactive space between readers, texts, activity, and context (Rumelhart, 1984; Snow, 2002) and attempted to reframe their interaction. In particular, the instructional design challenged students at times with texts and activities which came into conflict with their past experiences of, and expectations for, history learning. Nevertheless, the design also offered students many important opportunities to engage with texts in a process of inquiry they found interesting and engaging. Through this analysis, I discuss the types of choices and dilemmas experienced teachers face when implementing innovative curricula and argue that new designs must actively seek to disrupt pre-existing cultural models and practices of learning with which they do not align.Ph.D.Education StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89646/1/daristoc_2.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89646/2/daristoc_3.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89646/3/daristoc_1.pd

Enacting Disciplinary Literacy Instruction: Essential Practices in Action

In this paper, we will explore elements of the Essential Instructional Practices for Disciplinary Literacy: Grades 6-12 , a statewide initiative in Michigan designed to support exactly this kind of teaching. In particular, we will discuss key instructional implications of the Essential Practices for both social studies and ELA instruction and highlight important commonalities and distinctions across these two content areas. We provide concrete examples of these practices in action as we share activities and reflections from a curricular project we undertook with US History and ELA teachers called Equitable Futures. In this initiative, teachers engaged their students in inquiry-driven learning that involved the development of a range of disciplinary literacy practices and tools

Learning to Link Research, Practice, and Disciplinary Literacies: An Interview With Darin Stockdill

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88013/1/JAAL.54.8.7.pd

Adolescents as Readers of Social Studies: Examining the Relationship between Youth’s Everyday and Social Studies Literacies and Learning

In this paper, we examine the relationship between student engagement and social studiesliteracy, exploring the possible connections between students’ reading interests and practices andsocial studies learning. With a sample of 802 secondary students from five schools in one urbancommunity, we use complementary methods to explore survey and interview data. Descriptiveanalysis of survey data indicated that study participants often perceived social studies educationin school as boring and irrelevant. Nevertheless, qualitative analysis of interview data from asubsample revealed that many young people describe using texts to explore dimensions of theiridentities as well as themes of struggle and conflict. We use these findings to illuminateconnections between youths’ concerns and interests and the enduring problems taken up by thesocial sciences, arguing that attention to these connections has the potential to engage studentsand develop their thinking and literacy practices in the social studies

Adolescents as Readers of Social Studies: Examining the Relationship between Youth’s Everyday and Social Studies Literacies and Learning

In this paper, we examine the relationship between student engagement and social studiesliteracy, exploring the possible connections between students’ reading interests and practices andsocial studies learning. With a sample of 802 secondary students from five schools in one urbancommunity, we use complementary methods to explore survey and interview data. Descriptiveanalysis of survey data indicated that study participants often perceived social studies educationin school as boring and irrelevant. Nevertheless, qualitative analysis of interview data from asubsample revealed that many young people describe using texts to explore dimensions of theiridentities as well as themes of struggle and conflict. We use these findings to illuminateconnections between youths’ concerns and interests and the enduring problems taken up by thesocial sciences, arguing that attention to these connections has the potential to engage studentsand develop their thinking and literacy practices in the social studies