Interrupting Gendered Discursive Practices In Classroom Talk About Texts

Interrupting Gendered Discursive Practices in Classroom Talk about Texts

Cultural Diversity and Discourse Practices in Grade Nine

In the classroom, knowledge is widely distributed among the students and teacher, but is difficult to share across linguistic and cultural barriers. Seeking paths across these barriers, Lynne Wiltse meticulously explores the question: What is the discourse frame in which students and teachers work? Situated in a grade nine multilingual classroom, her work provides a rich description of the research process in the classroom. At the same time, she draws the reader sequentially through the analysis, revealing inferences in increasing levels of abstraction within a framework of “communities of practice.” She highlights issues related to second language acquisition, students’ immigration experiences, teaching, and learning, and points the way toward multi-vocal dialogues and practices that can forge a path across cultural and linguistic divides.

Boys, Girls, and the Myths of Literacies and Learning

This timely and authoritative book provides a critique and deconstructs the myths that serve to uphold the current "moral panic" around boys' supposed failures in literacy and diminished chances of success. Readers are asked to look beyond simple gender binarism to see different, more complex and often more egregious categorizations of students in their classrooms, other than the simplistic male/female categories, and begin to question and address some of those issues: poverty, racism, violence, environment, and more complex issues of gender, patriarchy, and hegemony. The authors suggest different ways of teaching literacies to both boys and girls and propose that while solutions are not simple, they are critically important in promoting positive educational experiences for all students, regardless of gender, class, culture, race, or sexual orientation.