Layered Identities and Being Gabby: A Five-Year Longitudinal Case Study

Compton-Lilly examines the identity construction of one student, Gabby, over a five year period to explore layers of gender and race that affect identity construction. In particular, she asks how does being female and Latino contribute to the ways Gabby and her family make sense of Gabby. Compton-Lilly draws on a rich data set (e.g., observations, interviews, artwork, photographs, writing) to explore the various ways Gabby enacts her identities in the contexts of home and school. Through this analysis, the roots of intersectionality become visible. In short, we begin to understand how identities are enacted within contested spaces where the figured worlds people bring - entailing the ways of being, acting, and interacting that are available to self and others - align and clash both presenting and restricting possibilities

Building on What Children Bring: Cognitive and Sociocultural Approaches to Teaching Literacy

This paper examines what is meant by “building on what children bring.” While many educators maintain that teachers need to build on what children bring to classrooms, the field of education has constructed different understandings of what this entails. This paper explores two different conceptions of what children bring: those grounded in cognitive theories about reading and those grounded in sociocultural theories of reading/literacy. I suggest that despite historical splits in the reading/literacy field that educators must balance cognitive and sociocultural considerations in order to access the vast range of knowledges that children bring to literacy learning. After exploring cognitive and sociocultural models of reading/literacy through the work of Marie Clay and Kris Gutiérrez, I present two theoretical models that hold promise for helping educators to recognize cognitive and sociocultural understandings about what children bring as compatible and integral to exemplary teaching. Finally, I describe some of my own teaching experiences that demonstrate how instruction can build on the full range of knowledges that children bring. My goal is to contribute to the construction of an enhanced view of “what children bring” that balances abilities and knowledges specific to literacy with knowledges about literacy practices and the social meanings of texts

Editorial Introduction

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to meet with teacher researchers from across the country at a day-long preconference sponsored by the International Reading Association’s Teaching as a Researching Profession Special Interest Group and Teacher as Researcher Subcommittee. This is not the first time I have had the opportunity to connect with teacher researchers. In fact, I have been active with teacher research for over twenty years. Back in 1987 the idea of teacher research was radical. Imagine teachers researching their own practices and using their insights to talk back to policies and mandates that limit learning for children and their teachers. We believed that we were involved in important work and that our effects would be far reaching

Learning and Thriving With Questions: a Helpful Resource for Teacher Researchers

Contemporary educators live is an era of advertised quick fixes and simple solutions that too often leave us feeling cheated and alone. The acclaimed phonics program, the scripted behavior reinforcement scheme, and the carefully sequenced, research-based scope and sequence all leave us much as they found us - continuing to seek ways to improve instruction for our students. As teacher researchers recognize, no one resource will serve all of our needs and challenges. Collaboration from supportive peers is integral to developing and maintaining exciting, compelling, and productive research projects. However, there are resources that can support us as we embark on and continue this journey. Living the Questions: A Guide for Teacher Researchers is one of these resources

Exploring Reading Identity: Urban Parents Defining Themselves As Readers

As part of a teacher-research study I interviewed ten of my urban first grade students and their parents about reading. One parent, Ms. Webster, referred to people who read a lot as bookworms and bookish people who don\u27t have no fun. She explained, All they do is sit in the house and read books all day long or sit outside and read books. .

Editorial Introduction

Gordon Wells is the founder of Networks and has served as our editor for eight volumes (AKA eight years). He has kindly agreed to continue to serve to the review board and continue to act as a mentor to myself as I take on the new responsibility of editing this online journal. The transition has taken some time, much more time than I had hoped, but I suspect that the time was well invested. With a lot of help from a phenomenal group of people here at the University of Wisconsin Madison, we have been able to use the Open Journal System to post the journal and to handle the submission process. This system is a extremely helpful in handling submissions and tracking those submissions through the review process. It is with great humility that I commence my tenure as editor. I suspect our readers will find this current issue of Networks to be engaging and informative

Review: Classroom Interviews: A World of Learning

Garth Boomer once wrote, To deliberately learn is to research. To Boomer, teachers and students are researchers when they purposely seek to understand aspects of their world. As a first grade teacher, it would be difficult for me to find a day of teaching that did not involve deliberate learning. Each day brings novel inquiries, new questions, and constant reflection on the events that transpire. Hopefully my students share this sense of wonder and interest as they learn to read, write, and research

Review: Teacher Researcher Perspectives on Parent Involvement

What is happening at your school to foster parent involvement? Where I teach, parent involvement is a constant struggle. Programs that promise to bring parents into the school come and go quickly; they are never well-attended and the parents who do attend the first session often do not return for the second. Teachers, observing this lack of involvement, complain that parents don\u27t care and do not support the school. The rhetoric around our school blames parents when things go wrong for children at school