Several Unique Ways That May Inform The Future Of Literacy Research

By Author: Adela
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As a research team we worked together in several unique ways that may inform the future of literacy research. First of all, the team consisted of (in addition to myself) two graduate students (both of whom had been classroom teachers), and two classroom teachers at the school. From the beginning we thought of the project as an opportunity to develop a practical application of a theory of learning and teaching to a specific learning context.

We had all read the work of Brazilian educator Freire (1970) and we were very much interested in the applications of critical pedagogy to the high school literacy classroom. Additionally the teachers and graduate students were familiar with my research on youth popular culture and literacy engagement. We decided to work together to create a learning context where youth, through having the opportunity to express a critique of their personal and social worlds, would come Vibram Fivefingers Shoes to a greater understanding of the oppressive social, political, and material conditions that made life more difficult for them and for those about ...
... whom they cared, while also seeing themselves as agents with the potential to change these conditions. We felt that this process of humanization through writing would improve the academic literacy skills of the students.

Because all of the university team had significant teaching experience, Miss Rodriguez very much wanted us to be a part of the general life in the classroom. For the remainder of the school year we would all visit the class at least once a week and we staggered our visits so that one of us would be in the classroom at least three days out of the week. As classroom participants we would help students individually, offer minilessons to the whole class, and continually participate in the collective conversation about refining the classroom curriculum. Miss Rodriguez also had considerable experience with educational research. Prior to becoming a classroom teacher, she worked for an educational foundation that collected data on innovative classroom practices. From these experiences, Miss Rodriguez understood the importance of documenting the Critical Minds Project, so as we talked about developing and refining the curriculum and pedagogy, we also talked about research questions, data collection, and Vibram Five Fingers On Sale the bridge between theory and classroom practice in the context of a ninth-grade English classroom with its mandates, standards, and involuntary measures of assessment.

In this way the working environment sought to break down the binaries between teachers and researchers. In the same way that Freire (1970) advocated for teacher-students and student-teachers in the ideal dialogic classroom, we sought to develop teacher-researchers and researcher-teachers in the ideal inquiry-focused English classroom.