Faculty: Roni Jo Draper

This narrative study describes the experiences of a group of teacher educators as they worked together in a collaborative research activity investigating theories of literacy and the preparation of secondary teachers. The collaboration was organized around the precepts associated with participatory action research (PAR). After four years of collaboration, the narratives of the members of the group revealed (a) changes to the practices and identities of the participants, (b) how the group formed a community, and (c) the ways in which the institution supported the work of the group. Organizing collaborative activities around PAR holds promise to not only produce quality research, but to support the improvement of teacher preparation programs and the development of teacher educators. However, this work requires institutional support that fosters collaborative work without mandating either collaborations or outcomes.

Much has been written to convince content-area teachers to include literacy instruction as part of their regular content instruction. The purpose of this study was to determine how the messages available in the literature are framed and how they might be viewed by content-area teachers, especially mathematics teachers. The analysis revealed that messages available to content-area teachers about literacy neglect, deemphasize, or misrepresent mathematics and/or mathematics education. These finds may help explain why content-area teachers, particularly mathematics teachers resist ideas related to content-area literacy instruction.

In this essay, Roni Jo Draper reflects upon her professional journey as a content-area literacy teacher educator, describing how she first became a literacy teacher educator and how she later came to collaborate with a group of teacher educators who specialize in disciplines such as music, theater, and mathematics. Drawing upon naturalistic data from the group's participatory action research project, she explains how their collaboration shaped her understanding of her own professional role and expanded her definitions of texts, content-area literacy, and literacy itself. Informed by insights she gained through the project, Draper argues that content-area literacy instruction should promote mastery of the intellectual discourse within a particular discipline. She also suggests ways to increase collaboration between literacy and content-area specialists working in the field of teacher education.

For years literacy educators and researchers have worked within a narrative for content-area literacy that insists that content-area teachers provide instruction in their classrooms that allows their students to use literacy to learn content. Despite resistance from content-area teachers, this literacy-for-learning narrative has remained fairly consistent. For this study, the authors engaged in a dialogic content analysis in order to offer a critique of the current narrative surrounding content-area literacy as exemplified in the Common Core State Standards for English language arts (CCSS-ELA) and to offer a counternarrative. The critique of the current content-area literacy narrative focuses on definitions of text and literacy and the instructional roles placed on teachers. The counternarrative proposed by the authors is predicated on an expanded notion of texts and literacy and on the expectation that teachers engage students in activities that approximate authentic disciplinary practices.