This article follows one year in the life of one of the authors of this article, Eto--the year she was a graduate student in the M.Ed. program and concurrently was teaching in a second grade elementary school. Addressing her subjective emergence along the intertwining experiences in two different contexts: it explores her conversations with her…

Whenever the author explains the brain to her second-grade students, the look on their faces is one of simultaneous fascination and relief. What caught her off guard was the relief. In retrospect, it makes pure sense. Of course it was a relief for them to realize that they could affect their brains and its abilities--that nothing was set in stone.…

This five month qualitative study explored, over time and across literacy events, the ways in which a second grade teacher, Ms. Wilson, and her students built a shared frame of reference, or shared mental context, for viewing reading. Data sources included: field notes, video and audiotaped records, artifacts, and teacher and student interviews.…