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Teaching English to 12th grade students
After my time as a high school English teacher, I wondered "Am I a teacher of literature or of literacy?" and "Do students' identities have anything to do with school?" (or something to that effect). -
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First introduction to the concept of literacy sponsorship
I first encountered Deborah Brandt's theory of sponsors of literacy in a class on research in composition. I would run into her several more times before I recognized that sponsorship was how I wanted to look at the relationship between teachers and learners. Deborah Brandt -
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Identity in Education course
Where I first came to see identities as multiple, changing, and expressed outwardly. Important articles for me here included introductions to peoples' "possible selves" (Markus & Nurius, 1976) and the connections between narratives and identities (Sfard & Prusak, 2005). Dorothy Holland's book with multiple collaborators was an important text in the process. Holland Lachicotte Skinner and Cain -
Literacy events
Shirley Brice Heath's masterpiece of an ethnography of literacies practiced by communities that fed into a single school. The first person to really show how disconnects between home literacies and school literacies occur--but she also was part of doing something about that: leading professional development & getting teachers to visit homes to prepare parents for school. [Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words](www.amazon.com/Ways-Words-Language-Communities-Classrooms/dp/0521273196/) -
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Positioning theory
For over two years, I have been working with a group at Pitt to understand more about this specific theory, which is about the ways we use conversations to be seen as a specific kind of person and establish the people we talk to in specific relationships to us. For example, the kind of teacher I portray to my students tells them what kind of students I expect them to be. [Positioning theory book](www.amazon.com/Positioning-Theory-Contexts-International-Action/dp/063121139X/) -
Is literacy autonomous or ideological?
A course on new literacies discussed writers who claimed that the act of learning or developing a new literacy--learning to write--restructures the brain. But this kind of thinking is Eurocentric and hegemonic. It's more useful to think of literacies as having histories--developed by people to accomplish something specific. They carry ideologies. Brian Street on autonomous and ideological literacy -
Putting Identities together with Sponsorship and Literacy Learning
I give a presentation at a conference. Here's what I'm trying to put together: I think I am a teacher (of teachers) of literacy, and those literacies are culturally shaped. I think identities in education matter and that they're shared and constructed socially. I think literacies are ways in which we create and communicate identities. Learning in school can meet academic goals while also helping students consider how literacies and language are ideological and carry identies. -
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Dissertation
I will study how great Engliah Language Arts teachers give their students opportunities to succeed academically while learning multiple literacies. In the interactions around literacy learning, I will be looking for how teachers and students use talk to understand what literacies are for and how they shape identities that can be used for academics, professional life, and personal life. I think that sponsorship will help me explain that intersection of teacher action and student appropriation.