A teacher study group explores issues of home and community literacies with a goal of utilizing out-of-school literacies to support in-school literacy learning. The result was the beginning of a new mindfulness that allowed them to begin to recognize the existence and legitimacy of home and community literacies. They explored how their own biases…

In this article we look at how a community of practice in one midsize urban K-12 school district engaged in a community mapping process to discover, gather, and analyze a rich array of community and home resources in order to create classroom practices and curriculum that integrated the literacies of home and school and led to transformed student…

Teacher research has a long, rich history. However, teacher research is primarily limited to practicing teachers and those pursuing graduate education. It is only beginning to be used as means of understanding the instructional needs of English learners. In this article, a preservice teacher and her university instructor describe the role of…

Marilyn Johnston-Parsons writes about collaboration. She describes several university-school collaborations with which she has been involved in terms of the tensions and the dialogue that has been associated with them. While she worries about the state of collaboration in this educational age, she admits to "cautious optimism" that more…

This article examines how five teachers, who participated in a national program, supported and sustained collaborative teacher inquiry as a means for addressing inequities in their classrooms and schools. Their efforts illustrate both the possibilities and challenges that emerge as teachers interact, analyze data together, and write about…

Schools bring people together. Yet for many children there are major discontinuities between their lives in and out of school and such differences impact on literacy teaching and learning in both predictable and unpredictable ways. However if schools were reconceptualised as meeting places, where different people are thrown together (Massey, 2005)…

Souto-Manning shares her journey as a second-grade teacher-researcher, offering insights into the relationship between a reading program that is (over)determined by scores, multiple-choice questions, and book levels, and the ways children, parents, and teachers worked together to maintain their commitment to a more equitable community of learners.…

The research reported in this article invites educators to rethink their assumptions about students and families. Using data from a qualitative, longitudinal teacher-research study, the author presents seven lessons that she has learned from the families of her students and challenges other teachers to seek ways to learn about the families they…

This paper describes diverse language learners' use of dialogue journaling in an elementary school setting. The author, a teacher researcher, conducted a qualitative research study with eight participants, ranging from fourth to sixth grade; all were learners adding English to their language repertoire. Through an in-depth analysis of student…

This article focuses on a collaborative project between two fifth-grade dual language teachers (English-Spanish) and a university researcher as they engaged children in a study of memoir. The bilingual children in these classes cultivated their genre knowledge by participating in the ways of writers of memoir through the careful adaptations the…

This article describes the author's efforts to engage teachers in language study in a graduate course involving graduate students in Literacy Studies and TESOL programs. In the course "Language, Culture, and Identity: Issues for Teachers and Children," teachers study language like linguists: looking closely at language in use through in-class…