Language Arts, Vol. 86, No. 1, September 2008

Table of Contents

Issue Theme: Explaining Change: Theories in Action

• Call for Manuscripts

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  Abstract: Abstract for this article is currently not available.

  Keywords: Elementary

• Thoughts from the Editors: Learning and Literacy in Action

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  Abstract: Abstract for this article is currently not available.

  Keywords: Elementary

• Every Mark on the Page: Educating Family and Community Members about Young Children’s Writing

  Kate Foley Cusumano

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  Abstract: Family and community members often look at children’s writing from a deficit point of view – seeing only what’s “wrong” with it, what needs “fixing.” Teachers can take a proactive role as family and community member educators, communicating to them how writing develops in young children and how they can play a positive role in this development.

  Keywords: Elementary, Literacy, School-Community Relation, Writing

• Writing and Painting Our Lives into Being: School, Home, and the Larger Community as Transformative Spaces for Learning

  Ralph A. Córdova, Jr.

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  Abstract: Narrated by a researcher-teacher, drawing from an interactional ethnographic and sociolinguistics perspective, he re-examines his previous teaching practices as a teacher-researcher in order to build a conceptual model for communities-based learning.

  Keywords: Elementary, Diversity, Literacy, Pedagogy, School-Community Relation, Writing

• Building Relationships with Theory: Signs and Tools in Everyday Life

  Meredith Whittaker

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  Abstract: This article demonstrates how, even as adults, we make ever-changing relationships with the world around us, including relationships with theory. The author illustrates how we must adapt and change in order to incorporate new learning into our social experience. This tale of negotiating the DC subway system may strike a chord for many who have experienced new learning situations as adults.

  Keywords: Media Studies / Journalismm, Research, School-Community Relation

• Negotiating a Top-Down Reading Program Mandate: The Experiences of One School

  Lucinda Pease-Alvarez and Katharine Davies Samway

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  Abstract: This article reports on a study that investigated how teachers from the same urban elementary school serving a low- to medium-income student population interpreted, negotiated, and resisted a district-wide mandate requiring them to implement the Open Court Reading program.

  Keywords: Elementary, Assessment, Literacy, Pedagogy, Standards

• Focus on Policy: Shaping Policy through Collective Research

  Michelle Proctor and Peter Demerath

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  Abstract: Working from the assumption that policies are a form of social practice instead of simply a mandate that is uniformly delivered and passively received, the authors describe a theory and practice of policy research from a six-month collective qualitative study of curricular change and high-stakes testing that raise questions about the relationships between teachers’ knowledge, policy enactment and policy development.

  Keywords: Elementary, Assessment, Diversity, Pedagogy, Standards

• Research Directions: In Praise of Wiggle Room: Locating Comprehension in Unlikely Places

  Maren Aukerman

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  Abstract: Comprehension has often been conceptualized in ways that privilege either the “right” understanding of a text (comprehension-as-outcome), or getting to that “right” understanding (comprehension-as-procedure). This article makes a case that we should, instead, teach with an eye toward fostering comprehension-as-sense-making—a socially purposeful decision-making process undertaken by the reader that does not depend on arriving at the “right” understanding.

  Keywords: Elementary, Assessment, Diversity, Language, Literature, Pedagogy

• Profiles and Perspectives: “On the Psycholinguistic Method of Teaching Reading” Revisited

  Frank Smith and Kenneth S. Goodman

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  Abstract: Ken Goodman and Frank Smith met for the first time in 1970, though they had each been studying and writing, separately, about the reading process for several years prior to that. They commemorated the occasion by collaborating on an article, On the Psycholinguistic Method of Teaching Reading which appeared soon after in The Elementary School Journal.

  Keywords: Language, Literacy, Research

• Professional Book Reviews: From Theory to Practice: Vygotsky, Sociocultural Research, and Classroom Assessment

  Jessica C. Zacher

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  Abstract: In this column, the author reviews four books about literacy and learning, three with a distinctly Vygotskian bent. First is an edited collection, "The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky" (Daniels, Cole, & Wertsch, 2007), which includes well-written essays about Vygotsky’s theories.

  Keywords: Language, Literacy

• Children’s Literature Reviews: Changes and Transformations in Children’s Folklore and Fantasy

  Barbara Z. Kiefer

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  Abstract: The theme of “change” can be found in many forms in children’s folklore and fantasy. Kitchen maids transform into queens and lowly, poor boys into wise rulers (or vice versa); traditional tales from around the world feature animal characters who are changed into human form and must deal with the tension of belonging fully neither in their first world nor in their second.

  Keywords: Literature

• In Closing…: Learning

  Joanne Durham

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  Abstract: This In Closing… page features a poem that begins with a discussion between a teacher and her young student: “‘What happens to the sun at night?’ asks the teacher. A four-year-old, cross-legged on the carpet, confidently explains, ‘It goes to New Jersey.’” This exchange and the poem that follows remind readers about the ways that children make meaning, changing as they learn and grow.

  Keywords: Elementary, Language, Writing

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