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This study aims to illustrate how one-sixth grade language arts teacher transforms the theory of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) into practice, an effort made visible through classroom discourse.

This classroom discourse inquiry is guided by tools of reconstructive discourse analysis which encourage a complex consideration of communicative efforts with intent to deconstruct them in the process of uncovering how oppressive social power structures are maintained. Additionally, reconstructive discourse analysis drives attention to how the data analyzed can reveal both how discourse marks moments where justice is constructed as well as how unjust structures may be reshaped into those that are more equitable.

In a setting where rapport and trust have been established, intentional teacher-driven classroom discourse influenced the ability of student cultures, namely, their languages, to be sustained in the classroom on their own merits and not merely as a conduit for accessing dominant academic material.

The information presented in this manuscript in the form of analysis of discursive classroom moments provide examples for equity-driven practitioners to engage in similar critically reflective activities with the potential to expose instances of CSPs or to assist in the identification of instances where the taking up of CSPs should sought.

One difficulty in transforming theoretical stances to practical actions stems from oversimplification of CSP and related asset-based pedagogical practices as “just good teaching.” By deconstructing classroom discourse, this study can subsequently reconstruct effective, generative, culturally sustaining approaches to community practice within a classroom learning space.

It was a typical Wednesday in Room 4. Wednesday mornings meant time for Invitations. A time cherished and enjoyed by the intermediate students in Ruth’s elementary classroom. Invitations were a time for small groups of students to work together across disciplines on self-selected topics offered by the teacher but grown from student interests. On a weekly basis students signed up for Invitations – sometimes sticking with a topic for several weeks and sometimes attending to a new topic each week. Topics ranged anywhere from using technology, taking apart CD players to discover how they work, exploring media coverage of current events, debating social issues, dissecting plants, to making maps. Students then worked cooperatively in student-facilitated groups to use multiple ways of knowing, and available resources and materials to ask important questions, to investigate issues of significance, to pursue possibilities, and to inquire with others.

Adult student identities within EAL (English as an Additional Language) classrooms have often been positioned as static, homogenised and exoticised within scholarly literature. Within such positioning, teachers have embraced pedagogical practices which classify students by country of origin and represent student identities within binaries of Self and the Other, limiting these students' identity positionings for adoption within the EAL classroom. As a result, students are often rendered voiceless by essentialist discourses on culture and identity in the classroom that serve to replicate and reinforce dominant societal discourses and strengthen existing institutional power structures.

By drawing on a postcolonial theoretical framework comprising theories of race, identity, power, representation, synecdoche and Third Space, this paper interrogates current literature to understand the complex multidimensional and dynamic cultural identities of adult EAL students.

This paper reveals that adult EAL students are still being oversimplified within the classroom, not just disadvantaging students and institutions, but also hindering multicultural pedagogies.

This paper suggests that teachers require opportunities for critical reflection incorporated within a critical pedagogy in decolonised classrooms that can not only build respectful and equitable awareness of their students' cultural identities and educational and historical backgrounds but provide important implications for effective pedagogical practices.

The purpose of this study was to explore the utility of a virtual reality (VR) classroom experience for improving the capacity of instructional leaders. Specifically, school leaders used VR to build their classroom observation and analysis skills to prepare to have more effective post-observation conversations with teachers. The authors provide insights from multiple data points that highlight the affordances of the virtual setting for improving classroom observation skills.

Drawing on the application of simulations to practice classroom observations, the authors developed a VR experience in which participants tag observable elements of academic discourse using codes from two observation protocols. The protocols identify elements of equitable student access: how teachers call on students and how they design questions. Seventy-five school leaders used the VR platform to observe a classroom scenario and code evidence of equitable classroom access. The authors analyzed data from tagging in the virtual reality scenario and triangulated these data with survey data focused on observation practices from participants' schools. A reflection component is included on the platform to collect these qualitative data.

The study results indicate that the virtual reality platform provides an innovative process for leadership professional development focused on building school leaders' capacity to identify elements of academic discourse during classroom observations. Participants reported that the opportunity to practice classroom observations in a risk-free environment was useful. However, for school leaders to fully transfer the data to using in conversations with teachers, they benefit from leadership coaching.

This study ascertains the potential effectiveness of an advanced technology for enhancing instructional leadership by using evidence-based classrooms observations to drive improvements in teaching practice. Beyond the utility of the virtual reality tool, this study provides a proof of concept for the next generation of instructional leadership through teacher observations with augmented reality.

To describe the role one classroom writing community played in shaping students’ understandings of the analytical writing genre; and to discuss the impact the community had on students’ developing academic writing identities.

While research has demonstrated the impact of classroom writing communities on student writing practices and identities at the elementary level (Dyson, 1997) and for secondary students engaged in fiction writing (Halverson, 2005), less is known about the role classroom writing communities may play for secondary students who are learning to write in academic discourses. This chapter explores the practices of one such classroom community and discusses the ways the community facilitated students’ introduction to the discourse of analytical writing.

The teacher turned the classroom writing community into an authentic audience, and in so doing, he developed students’ understandings of the analytical writing genre and their growing identities as academic writers. First, he used the concept of immediate audience (i.e., writing to persuade real readers) as the primary rationale for students to follow the outlined expectations for analytical writing. Second, he used inquiry discussions around student work (i.e., interacting with other members of the writing community) to prepare students for a future audience of prospective independent school English classrooms.

By turning the classroom writing community into an authentic audience through inquiry discussions, teachers can develop students’ deep and flexible understandings of a potentially unfamiliar writing genre. Furthermore, by employing the classroom writing community as a support for moving students through moments of struggle, teachers implicate students’ expertise as academic writers, thereby facilitating their willingness to take on academic writing identities.

This paper aims to present findings from a three-year qualitative study that used a model of teacher learning referred to as teaching as inquiry (Manfra, 2019). Teaching as inquiry centers the teacher as a learner in a prolonged and “systematic process of data collection and analysis focused on changing teaching” (p. 167). Findings from the larger qualitative study demonstrate the work of collecting transcripts and using discourse analysis to analyze classroom discourse fostered high school English teachers’ knowledge and skills for facilitating critical conversations (Schieble et al., 2020). For this paper, the authors highlight Paula, a white, female secondary teacher who is dual certified in English Language Arts and ESL. Findings from Paula’s case demonstrate the ways the teacher inquiry group disrupted Paula’s language ideologies of linguistic purism, an ideology embedded in white supremacist and colonialist, hegemonic language policies and practices (Kroskrity, 2004), and transformed her instructional practices over time.

The research used qualitative methods for design and scope to generate an information-rich instrumental case study (Stake, 1995). Case study is a form of qualitative inquiry that concentrates on experiential knowledge of the case. This study used case study methods to construct an instrumental case to understand how participation in the teacher inquiry group shaped Paula’s facilitation of critical conversations. Data analysis used inductive and deductive qualitative coding procedures and discourse analysis (Gee, 2004; Rogers, 2018) to address the research questions.

Findings demonstrate that prior to meeting with the teacher inquiry group, Paula’s teaching practices embodied linguistic separatism by emphasizing that standardized English was the “appropriate” way to participate in critical conversations. Through studying her classroom discourse, the inquiry group supported her to critically question these instructional practices and ideologies. Findings demonstrate that the work of the inquiry group supported her embodiment and articulation of a translanguaging ideology that supported her facilitation of critical conversations.

Findings from this study contributes to scholarly and professional knowledge about how models of teaching as inquiry (Manfra, 2019) demonstrate a positive or reconstructive impact on teacher and student learning. This study highlights the potential for reconstructive shifts in the context of how teachers learn together and the tools that support them in doing so.

This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions.

Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality.

The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community.

This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on a two-year lesson study by a teacher exploring peer collaboration and examines a teacher’s discourse that might generate a mathematical participation structure in which students needing help are likely to participate.

A math class conducted by a teacher in a Tokyo secondary school was observed for two years. The teacher’s questions in whole-class discussions were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Then, the teacher received feedback and retrospectively wrote his viewpoint or concerns.

The following features of the teacher’s questions were observed: no bias in any questions; various questions soon after group discussion, including easy expression of unstructured thoughts; and a consistent view of learning, such as not ending learning despite having received answers. These features were not fixed strategies, but one end of the reflective trajectory in considering the relation between students’ growth and lessons’ mathematical content. Possibly, this reflective cycle might support participate structure in which students learn collaboratively.

Long-term observation and spending time with one class enabled the researcher to investigate lesson study systematically and showed the significance of teachers and researchers studying together.

Discourses of racism have always circulated within US classrooms and, in the current sociopolitical climate, they move with a renewed sense of legitimacy, entitlement and violence. This paper aims to engage the consequences of these shifts for the ways that racism works in university-based classrooms and, more specifically, through the authors’ own teaching as White language and literacy educators.

This teacher narrative reconceptualizes moments of racialized violence in the courses, as constructed via circulating discourses of racism. The authors draw attention to the ways that we, as White educators, authorize and are complicit in this violence.

This paper explicates a praxis of questioning, developed through efforts to reflect on our complicity in and responsibility for racial violence in our classrooms. The authors offer this praxis of questioning to other White language and literacy teachers as a heuristic for sensemaking with regard to racism in classrooms.

The authors situate this paper within a broader struggle to engage themselves and other White educators in work for racial justice and invite others to take up this praxis of questioning as an initial step toward examining the authors’ complicity in – and authorization of – discourses of racism.

This paper aims to delve deeply into the sometimes clashing interplays in English classrooms to explore the ways in which new media makes visible long-existing discourses and assumptions about the purpose of schools and the roles of teachers and students.

This piece draws upon discourse analysis and utilizes the frame of strategies versus tactics (de Certeau, 1984) to trace the complex classroom interplays between a high school English teacher, a partnering researcher and a high school junior during the process of a month-long digital photography project.

Data reveal that, at times, both teachers and students made moves to preserve the status quo of the school space (through strategies), and at other times, worked to reshape the space for more relevant purposes (through tactics.) Strategies that emerge from teacher moves include the formalization of requirements and the controlling of bodies; the student strategy described is the perpetuation of stereotypes. Teacher tactics reported include repositioning identities, reframing “the work” and opening up space for inquiry. Student tactics include resistance, shifting to the personal, subverting a given task and self-positioning. The author argues that generative potential exists at the intersection of teacher tactics and student tactics, and calls for furthering the co-construction of classroom spaces.

By zooming in on the process, rather than the product, that ensued as the focal student created and defended her photographs representing school as jail, this paper emphasizes the agency that both teachers and students can enact in sometimes limiting classroom spaces.