1st Edition

Drawing on Students’ Worlds in the ELA Classroom Toward Critical Engagement and Deep Learning

By Richard Beach Copyright 2022
310 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

310 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

310 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book approaches English instruction through the lens of “fi gured worlds,” which recognizes and spotlights how students are actively engaged in constructing their own school, peer group, extracurricular, and community worlds. Teachers’ ability not only to engage with students’ experiences and interests in and outside of school but also to build connections between students’ worlds and their... Read more

Part I: Overall Framing of Co-Authoring Practices in Figure Worlds

Chapter 1: Students Co-Authoring Figured Worlds    

Chapter 2: Co-Authoring Practices Through Components Constituting Figured World

Chapter 3: Fostering Co-authoring of Figured Worlds in the Classroom 

Chapter 4: Engaging Students in Research on Their Participation in Figured Worlds 

Chapter 5: Engaging Students in YPAR as Critical Social Action

Part II: Students Co-authoring Different Figured Worlds 

Chapter 6: YPAR as Figured World: Co-authoring Identities, Literacies, and Activism by Limarys Caraballo

Chapter 7: Co-Authoring Peer Group Figured Worlds  

Chapter 8: Co-authoring Extracurricular Worlds 

Chapter 9: Co-Authoring Sports Figured Worlds  

Chapter 10: Co-Authoring Family Figured Worlds  

Chapter 11: Co-Authoring Workplace Figured Worlds  

Chapter 12: Co-authoring Popular Culture/Virtual Media Worlds 

Part III: Implications for Teaching 

Chapter 13: Implications for Teaching: Bringing Students’ Worlds into the Classroom 

Biography

Richard Beach is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, USA.

Limarys Caraballo is Associate Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA.

"A fresh and stimulating perspective on drawing creatively from student perspectives and experiences. Here we have clarity, scholarship, and strong arguments for learning about human abilities by listening intently and recognizing the immense power of student experiences and feelings.  Fascinating and persuasive exemplars throughout the volume."

--Shirley Brice Heath, Professor Emerita, Stanford University, USA

"What would it mean—and how might it happen—if teachers and students were to juxtapose the social practices of their everyday lives outside of school with those of the secondary English language arts classroom? How might they together author new ‘worlds’ in which caring, mutuality, curiosity, wonder, justice, and community were both the how and the what of classroom learning? These are the questions Beach and Caraballo explore building on observations of and interviews with teachers and students who themselves are exploring such questions in their own classrooms. At a time when classroom education suffers from the modernist alienation of goals, objectives, and assessments, and the nihilism of poststructuralist relativism and partialism, the questions Beach and Caraballo pursue provide educators with classroom models and practices and a language for crafting a new vision of the English language arts classroom."

--David Bloome, Professor Emeritus of Literacy Education, The Ohio State University, USA