The author suggests that we apply recent research knowledge to improve our conceptualization, measures, and methodology for studying the effects of teachers’ professional development on teachers and students. She makes the case that there is a research consensus to support the use of a set of core features and a common conceptual framework in professional development impact studies. She urges us to move away from automatic biases either for or against observation, interviews, or surveys in such studies. She argues that the use of a common conceptual framework would elevate the quality of professional development studies and subsequently the general understanding of how best to shape and implement teacher learning opportunities for the maximum benefit of both teachers and students.

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Improving Impact Studies of Teachers’ Professional Development: Toward Better Conceptualizations and Measures

Locating learning in teachers’ communities of practice: opening up problems of analysis in records of everyday work

Academic literacies research has developed over the past 20 years as a significant field of study that draws on a number of disciplinary fields and subfields such as applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociocultural theories of learning, new literacy studies and discourse studies. Whilst there is fluidity and even confusion surrounding the use of the term ‘academic literacies’, we argue in this paper that it is a field of enquiry with a specific epistemological and ideological stance towards the study of academic communication and particularly, to date, writing. To define this field we situate the emergence of academic literacies research within a specific historical moment in higher education and offer an overview of the questions that the research has set out to explore. We consider debates surrounding the uses of the singular or plural forms, academic literacy/ies, and, given its position at the juncture of research/theory building and application, we acknowledge the need for strategic as well as epistemological and ideological understandings of its uses. We conclude by summarising the methodological and theoretical orientations that have developed as ‘academic literacies’, conceptualised as a field of inquiry, has expanded, and we point to areas that merit further theoretical consideration and empirical research.

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Defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy

This article, written for a general audience, focuses on the importance of keeping adolescents' interests and needs foremost in mind when designing literacy instruction at the middle and high schoo...

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Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents

In a 1996 American Educational Research Journal (AERJ) article, Deborah Ball and Suzanne Wilson (Ball & Wilson, 1996) made an argument for “integrity in teaching,” in which they framed integrity as the commitment to “fusing” the moral aspects of teaching with the intellectual The central question they explored was how to deal with conflicts between the intellectual work of teaching content concepts and the moral work of teaching those content concepts to human beings, that is, to people with varying perspectives on the value of the content, varying skill sets and ways of knowing that they brought to their learning, and rich and full lives that might or might not intersect with the content under study Ball and Wilson argued that these tensions produced constant dilemmas for teachers who must negotiate a desire to meet content learning objectives with their respect for students’ backgrounds and beliefs, which sometimes contradict or dismiss targeted content Ten years later, I would like to draw from and spin that argument by suggesting that a corollary of Ball and Wilson’s teaching with integrity is the concept of teaching with and for social justice Teaching in socially just ways and in ways that produce social justice requires the recognition that learners need access to the knowledge deemed valuable by the content domains, even as the knowledge they bring to their learning must not only be recognized but valued In this review, I revisit that notion of teaching as the fusion of the intellectual and the moral and ask a slightly different question: What does current research tell us about attempts to fuse the moral and intellectual in a way that produces socially just subject-matter instruction at the secondary and postsecondary levels? Furthermore, what would it look like to fuse the moral and intellectual to produce a subject-matter instruction that is not only socially just but also produces social justice?

Chapter 1 Developing Socially Just Subject-Matter Instruction: A Review of the Literature on Disciplinary Literacy Teaching

Throughout the United States, concern is growing among educators about the numbers of students in secondary schools who do not read well. In response, committed and well-meaning educators are increasingly advocating remedial reading courses for struggling adolescent readers. In this article, Cynthia Greenleaf, Ruth Schoenbach, Christine Cziko, and Faye Mueller offer an alternative vision to remedial reading instruction. The authors describe an instructional framework — Reading Apprenticeship — that is based on a socially and cognitively complex conception of literacy, and examine an Academic Literacy course based on this framework. Through case studies of student reading and analyses of student survey and test score data, they demonstrate that academically underperforming students became more strategic, confident, and knowledgeable readers in the Academic Literacy course. Students in Academic Literacy gained on average what is normally two years of reading growth within one academic year on a standardized...

Christine Cziko

Papers

Apprenticing Adolescent Readers to Academic Literacy

Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms. The Jossey-Bass Education Series.