Intersections of Diversity, Literacy, and Learner Difficulties: Conversations between Teacher, Students and Researchers 9811935319, 9789811935312

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Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile Dennis A. Conrad   Editors

Intersections of Diversity, Literacy, and Learner Difficulties Conversations between Teacher, Students and Researchers

Intersections of Diversity, Literacy, and Learner Difficulties

Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile · Dennis A. Conrad Editors

Intersections of Diversity, Literacy, and Learner Difficulties Conversations between Teacher, Students and Researchers

Editors Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile Department of Education University of Hartford West Hartford, CT, USA

Dennis A. Conrad School of Education and Professional Studies State University of New York at Potsdam Potsdam, NY, USA

ISBN 978-981-19-3531-2 ISBN 978-981-19-3532-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3532-9 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

There are so many people we would like to thank for their contributions to this text. First, we share a deep appreciation for all the contributors who have shared their stories of diversity, literacy, and learner difficulties with us. Their commitment to students’ success is laudable and epitomizes incredible passion and tenacity, which we celebrate. Change is never easy. All contributors imagined possibilities for their diverse learners, recognized a story to be celebrated, and chose to share the lessons learned. We also thank the teachers and teacher candidates we have worked with over the years who have allowed us to view the successes and challenges teachers face as they renew their commitment to teaching and learning and ultimately to a better global society through education again and again. We are so very grateful to our friends and colleagues who through their support and action remind us that education is liberation. Finally, we thank our families who in their own ways are champions for diversity and inclusion. Special emphasis goes to our children and grandchildren who, embarking on their own educational and life journeys, candidly share their perspectives on social injustice and the need for advocacy. Their stories together with our lived experiences continue to fuel a passion for change and hope for a bright future. We dedicate this work to them and to all learners who are journeying toward literacies in all forms and models.

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Contents

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Premise of the Book: Considering Learner Difference and Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile and Dennis A. Conrad

Part I 2

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Literacy Contexts: A Matter of Difference

“I’m Writing to Teach Those Who Do Not Know”: Making the Case for Inclusive Pedagogy that Values Difference and Capitalizes on Students’ Expertise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Patricia C. Paugh Collaboration in Career and Technical Education to Support All Learners: Reflections and Practices from the Field . . . . . . . . . . . . Marta Albert, Cindy Ciaralli, and Nancy Pitman Effective Planning and Revising Strategies for Meeting the Needs of Students with Learning Difficulties and Literacy Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mei Shen

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(Re)Framing Difficulty: ELLs and Literacy Instruction . . . . . . . . . . . Dyanis A. D. Conrad

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Listen to Their Voices: Early Childhood Professionals Reflect on Their Experiences Teaching Language Skills to Young Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Candace Barriteau Phaire

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Stories of Teaching (and Learning How to Teach) Literacy to Diverse Learners in a Language Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Philippa Parks

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Part II

It’s Personal: Advocacy and Action

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Learner Differences and Second Language Learning: A Post-colonial Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Beulah Forteau-Jaikaransingh

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The Construction of Literacy Identity: Alice’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile

10 An Ecological Examination of “Literacies”: A Mother’s Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Mary A. Bastien and Dennis A. Conrad Part III Moving Forward & Building Bridges 11 Constructing Successful School Models for Inclusive Literacy: Supporting Student Success Through Strategic Instruction in Diverse Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile, Kristen Hughes, Kristina Verdili, Dennis A. Conrad, and Lisa Philip-Lovelace 12 Moving All up at Sireira Moderna Academy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Onika Noreiga and Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile 13 Final Thoughts Conversations, Intersections, and Education for All: Where To? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Dennis A. Conrad and Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Abodeeb-Gentile Theresa is an Associate Professor of Education and former Director of Elementary Education at the University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT. Dr. Abodeeb-Gentile is also an educational consultant and works with schools in The U.S. and abroad who are focused on providing effective literacy instruction to support diverse learners. She has worked with numerous urban and failing schools in the process of school turn around in the U.S. which has helped to support large gains in student achievement. Prior to becoming faculty at the University of Hartford, Dr. Abodeeb-Gentile was a classroom teacher and literacy specialist for 18 years. She is the co-author of the book Journey of Discovery: Building a Classroom Community through Diagnostic Reflective Portfolios published by the International Reading Association. Dr. Abodeeb-Gentile has published several journal articles and chapters and regularly presents her research at both national and international conferences. Her research, scholarly work and interests include: intersections of pedagogy, literacy, identity, and inclusive education. Conrad Dennis A. is a Professor Emeritus at State University of New York at Potsdam. He most recently held the position of Manager of Student Support Services at the Ministry of Education in Trinidad and Tobago where he spent several years focused on supporting student success and inclusive education to ensure access for ALL learners. Dennis is a former professor and Department Chair in the Department of Inclusive and Special Education at SUNY Potsdam. Prior to getting his Ph.D. at Virginia Tech, he was a teacher and principal at both regular and special schools in Trinidad and Tobago. Dennis has received several awards including the President’s award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship related to cultural pluralism. He is also a former Chair of the Caribbean and African Studies SIG at the American

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Educational Research Association. Professor Conrad has published numerous articles and chapters and has co-edited multiple books including: Achieving Inclusive Education in the Caribbean and Beyond. Springer; Responding to Learner Diversity and Difficulties. Caribbean Discourse in Inclusive Education II, Information Age & Caribbean Discourse in Inclusive Education- Historical and Contemporary Issues. Information Age.

Contributors Abodeeb-Gentile Theresa Department of Education, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT, USA; School of Education and Professional Studies, State University of New York at Potsdam, Potsdam, NY, USA Albert Marta The State University of New York, Potsdam, NY, USA Bastien Mary A. Freeport, Trinidad and Tobago Ciaralli Cindy Madison-Oneida BOCES, Verona, NY, USA Conrad Dennis A. West Hartford, USA; State University of New York, Potsdam, USA Conrad Dyanis A. D. Equity & Diversity in Education at Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, VA, USA Forteau-Jaikaransingh Beulah Arima, Trinidad and Tobago Hughes Kristen Wilbraham, MA, USA Noreiga Onika University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad Parks Philippa Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada Paugh Patricia C. University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA Phaire Candace Barriteau Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT, USA Philip-Lovelace Lisa Henrico, VA, USA Pitman Nancy Madison-Oneida BOCES, Verona, NY, USA Shen Mei State University of New York at Potsdam, Potsdam, NY, USA Verdili Kristina East Longmeadow, MA, USA

Review Board

A special thanks to our editorial review board Paige Bray Ed.D., [email protected], Department of Education, University of Hartford Deborah Conrad Ph.D., [email protected], Department of Education, State University of New York Ann Courtney Ed.D., [email protected], Emeritas University of Hartford Susan Gapp Ed.D., [email protected], Department of Education, University of South Dakota Sarah Hart Ph.D., [email protected], Department of Education, University of Hartford Pikwah Lam Ph.D., [email protected], Department of Education, University of South Dakota Thilagha Jagaiah Ph.D., [email protected], Department of Education, University of Hartford Julie Sochacki J.D., [email protected], Department of English, University of Hartford Ann Smith Ph.D., Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Montreal

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Chapter 1

Premise of the Book: Considering Learner Difference and Literacy Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile and Dennis A. Conrad

Introduction The issue of general education, literacy learning, and special education as disparate— even competing—paradigms came to light for us during a conversation that we had in 2016 when the School of Education at SUNY-Potsdam was considering a merger of the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction, Literacy, and Special and Inclusive Education. We began discussing the perceived challenges and realized that we share extensive experience and strong beliefs about inclusive education that intersect; we both consider ourselves to be, first and foremost, inclusive educators. Dennis, the second author, has served as a regular education teacher, a special education teacher, an alternate school principal, and a teacher educator for over thirty years. The first, Theresa, has been an inclusion classroom teacher, a literacy specialist, and a teacher educator in elementary and literacy education for more than 25 years. Our perspectives and philosophies connected; we both saw a need for collaborative rather than compartmentalized pedagogical practice. We both acknowledge that inclusive education emerged from a critique of rights-based special education that follows a model of deficit ability. As the pedagogy of inclusive education developed, practices in schools began to focus on the conditions for learning. There was also a shift away from seeing struggling learners as requiring labels and away from the view that they need separate specialized instruction. The Response to Intervention (RTI) process, for example, served to reduce the numbers of students labeled T. Abodeeb-Gentile (B) Department of Education, University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] D. A. Conrad School of Education and Professional Studies, State University of New York Potsdam, Potsdam, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 T. Abodeeb-Gentile and D. A. Conrad (eds.), Intersections of Diversity, Literacy, and Learner Difficulties, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3532-9_1

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as learning disabled. Further, RTI placed the responsibility for supporting students back into the general education classroom (Alahmari, 2019). However, despite this evolution, there still are lingering feelings and challenges related to what we might call turf issues among teachers both in the United States and elsewhere regarding what counts as a truly inclusive model of instruction. Through continued discussion, we noted that some of the challenges point toward teacher preparation in relation to disposition as well as content mastery. We consider both factors important to an effective differentiated model of instruction as Conrad et al. (2019) have pointed out. These scholars noted that their study respondents contended that despite having the required expertise, literacy specialists and special education teachers operate outside of the regular school context. In addition, we noted that there seemed to be little consistency in how intervention models and support services were conceptualized and offered. In only a few cases did it seem as though literacy specialists, classroom teachers, and special educators truly operated as a team in meeting the needs of diverse learners. Speaking as a former alternate school principal, Dennis believes that Then, as now, there was and is a need for teachers with expertise in emotional, behavioral, and related learning difficulties. Such difficulties include issues related to literacy, to intellectual disabilities, and to overall pedagogical skills. After some twenty years, these teachers still struggle to provide effective academic interventions to their learning communities. In both the Caribbean and U.S. contexts, I have found that blending paradigms and models in literacy and special education present a troubling challenge for many educators.

For Theresa, as an inclusive classroom teacher and literacy specialist in U.S. public schools, this has been a serious issue for more than 20 years. Further, over the last 10 years as a researcher and consultant, it has remained an issue. As she put it, “I continue to observe the tensions … the disjointed intervention planning and support being evidenced across paradigms to meet student needs”. Naraian (2017) conceptualized the challenges that are experienced by the resistant—if not competing—paradigms of special education and literacy. She explained that at the heart of the challenge lies the tension between direct instruction (DI) and learner centered instruction. The former is an historically privileged approach in special education while the latter is often the preferred model among literacy specialists and general educators. In many cases, it comes down to definitions of what counts as ability and what counts as disability, each side criticizing the other for not adequately considering the best approach for all students and especially for students who might struggle with the dominant narratives in schools. In many ways, this seems to cast educators as being on the far left or far right of best practice and characterizes the familiar dichotomy between constructivist approaches and direct instruction models. This extends to colleagues in teacher education since our work in preparing teachers and our research still appears to remain separate even under the same principles of inclusive practice. Cochran-Smith and Dudley-Marling (2012) have discussed the theoretical underpinnings of special education as compared with regular education and see this comparison as a major factor in the resulting dichotomy between these two educational paradigms that often sets up a barrier to inclusion.

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Historically, the field of special education has drawn on “behavioral psychology, medicine and psychometrics” (Cochran-Smith & Dudley-Marling, 2012, p. 238) to focus on learning as a set of fixed skills that can be broken down. In contrast, many general educators draw on the traditions of social psychology and sociocultural perspectives on learning (see Gee, 2015). This perspective counters the idea that learning can be reduced to a prescribed set of autonomous skills (Street, 2014). Learning within the socio-cultural framework is dependent on a context. From this perspective, behaviors such as learning to read and write can be considered only within the cultural context in which they are taking place. Such opposing views often leave educators at odds in any consideration of the best ways to support learners in contemporary classrooms. Because each focus is dependent on these theoretical underpinnings, many educators are unable to move past these issues toward a common understanding of shared instruction, and this leaves disciplines in silos and educators unable to best serve students. Each side appears to believe that any compromise somehow undermines the very practices that shape our purpose as educators. This dichotomy, in turn, may marginalize the very students we are trying to educate. Some teacher educators who operate in the Disability Studies paradigm contend that it is really a matter of differences versus deficit models (Valle & Connor, 2019). Cochran-Smith and Dudley-Marling (2012) have interpreted this as an issue with the dis in disability. From this deficit perspective, the dis focuses on what students cannot do rather than considering possibilities or working from their strengths. While special educators are, of course, able to see students’ strengths, the premise of special education is focused on correcting the deficits that students seem to show. Baglieri et al. (2011) pointed out what is central to the field of Disability Studies in their noting that disability is an idea, not a thing. It’s not that people don’t vary or differ from one another in sometimes very noticeable ways, but to call or think of some of those ways as ‘disabilities’ is to make a social judgement, not a neutral or judgment free observation. Put differently, it is not the way in which people vary or the differences they have in comparison to others, but what we make of those differences that matters. (p. 270)

For Dennis, The fact of the matter is that all students are unique in their learning strengths, needs, and challenges. Personally, I take the stance of viewing persons and abilities from a place of competence rather than incompetence. It is frustrating, though, because in creating an industrialized approach to education, politicians have usurped the role of educators. Policy has continually reproduced the deficit perspective and although legislation on inclusion has appeared to move us closer, there is still a great divide in many cases between and among special education, literacy, and diversity. Policy and legislation have continued to focus on difference as a deficit and although teacher educators who are informed by a sociocultural perspective on learning might personally reject this stance, they are left with little voice to refute it. While teacher educators seek to empower their students to inform their own thinking about difference, they are still subject to navigating systems in which policy and deficit thinking prevail. It is a continual conflict.

For Theresa,

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T. Abodeeb-Gentile and D. A. Conrad Having taught in an Integrated Elementary and Special Education program for the past 14 years, where students get certified in both special education and elementary education, I see the challenges that exist between these two paradigms. In our program, many faculty have made attempts to cross over assignments and practices in student field experiences, but it is challenging. Schools take on inclusive practices in many different ways and pre-service teachers struggle to understand the tensions they experience between special education and general education both in course work and in the field. I see it very clearly in the literacy methods courses that I teach. When students are asked to develop lesson plans and teach literacy lessons that differentiate for all students, their cooperating teachers in the field struggle to support them with this. While it is a program expectation, we, as faculty, are not always on the same page and both certification demands, and other legislative bodies, require us to pursue different perspectives in general and special education. This is frustrating for faculty and confusing for our students.

Naraian (2017), identified educators who seemed to navigate these competing paradigms successfully for the greater good of inclusive practice. These educators shared a rich sense of teacher identity that was determined largely by their individual experiences and school communities. Naraian asked the question, “In reaching across professional boundaries to enact inclusion, how should teachers identify themselves: as special educators, inclusive educators or (when dually certified) general educators … or all three?” (2017, pp. 55–56). In this study, she explored the idea of an eclectic approach and found that successful and effective teachers attended to reflective practice and did not subscribe to a purist approach. Teachers who were informed by sociocultural perspectives and constructivist pedagogies in their overall purpose drew, at times, on the tradition of explicit instruction. This practice was used to support particular aspects of literacy learning based on student needs. In other words, they employed a narrowed focus on the needs of the moment—increased skills in specific forms of literacy practices—alongside a more global understanding of the functional skills necessary for students to take up their roles as citizens of their communities. (Naraian, 2017, p. 61)

An eclectic and flexible approach allowed these teachers to help students learn both the functional and applied skills of literacy. The approach also necessitates a critical and shared understanding of discourse as Gee (1999) has observed. In a more recent conversation, we considered how students might benefit from both educators’ and allied professionals’ shared understandings of their roles, language, culture, and practices in supporting student success. In addition, we explored many perspectives on literacies including those of new literacies (Coiro et al., 2008), multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000), disciplinary literacies (McConachie & Petrosky, 2010; Shanahan, 2019) and pluriversal literacies (Perry, 2021). We surmised that a more integrated approach to literacy and a more inclusive socially just system might foster collaboration centered on student needs. This perspective, once again, goes beyond the traditional ideology that difference denotes deficit and includes, rather than excludes, multiple stakeholders to support greater access for all. The notion of disciplinary literacies is associated with McConachie and Petrosky (2010) who defined it as the use of reasoning, reading, investigating, speaking, and writing needed by a particular discipline to form complex content knowledge. We think that these disciplines, as they are enacted in schools, might include general education teachers,

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literacy teachers, and special education teachers coming together to support student access. Indeed, we note that according to disciplinary literacy experts, literacy is used differently in the various disciplines and subject areas because these “fields create different kinds of knowledge, and they create that knowledge differently, and communicate that knowledge differently, and critique and evaluate that knowledge differently” (Shanahan, 2017, p. 1). Based on this notion, we assert that while disciplinary literacy refers to the literacy skills needed and demonstrated within an academic discipline, it also includes the impact it has on social milieu and vice versa (see Shanahan, 2019). From this stance, a further question emerges in relation to marginalized students: “Might disciplinary literacy also apply to other related disciplines and professionals?” School social workers, guidance officers, psychologists, and other stakeholders who support student learning and success can also contribute expertise related to their own disciplinary literacies that support access for students. From this perspective, such awareness, coupled with readiness to collaborate across teams of stakeholders to meet the unique needs of marginalized students along with expanded perspectives on learner difference, might be key to the facilitation of student success.

Theoretical Perspectives This volume is grounded in ideologies about learning and pedagogy that stem from sociocultural perspectives on learning, including those evident in the work of Vygotsky (1978, 1986) who noted that learning is socially mediated. We also draw on the work of Freire (2000) since we believe that education should be a force of liberation and not of oppression. We believe that to provide a truly inclusive education, it is necessary to examine dominant constructions of learning and question who decides what counts as learning, in particular literacy learning, and how that is demonstrated. For example, a student’s performance in the classroom often has less to do with their innate abilities as it does with how they are positioned by the content, the context, and the dispositions of the educators who are assessing them (Abodeeb-Gentile, 2008). These understandings are socially mediated and highly dependent on the teacher’s expectations based on the beliefs that inform instruction, the practices in the classroom, the curriculum, the resources made available to the learner, and the interactional context (Abodeeb-Gentile, 2008; Naraian, 2017). Guided by the work of Vygotsky, Freire, and others, our shared beliefs about learning and pedagogy center on a position based on social constructivism and social justice. From this perspective, we advocate for an anti-deficit stance and, in so doing, draw heavily on the field of disability studies that focuses on abilities rather than disabilities as its overarching theory. In order to find common ground and promote truly inclusive settings in which all learners can thrive, we open a conversation that contrasts with the one in which traditional dichotomized positions are held. These are often taken up in academic settings between and among those in special education, general education, and literacy education from the point of view of necessarily

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opposing and disparate approaches to learning (Cochran-Smith & Dudley-Marling, 2012; Naraian, 2017). The achievement gap seems to grow and schools struggle to embrace best practices for all the members of an increasingly diverse classroom. Through this volume, we invite all educational advocates to come together in an effort to maximize learning opportunities across the existing divides.

A Social Constructivist View This view situates learning as social and as made up of socially mediated processes. According to Vygotsky (1978), there are three major points to be made: learning takes place through negotiated meaningful interactions with others, including more capable peers or, in the case of children, through interactions with adults who scaffold learning within a child’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978); language and context socially situate learning; and tools for learning are acquired by understanding what is culturally relevant and necessary for success in a cultural context. From this perspective, constructions of ability and disability are made visible through examining the demands and the expectations of the social context. Gee (2015) also examined the social construction of learning and, specifically, literacy. While he acknowledged the validity of cognitive views of literacy, he also expressed the need to understand how those cognitive views and approaches to literacy and learning must be considered within the sociocultural context that gives much deeper meaning to these practices. From this perspective, readers, writers, and teachers learn practices that are enacted for a particular purpose within a particular context. This refutes the idea that literacy or learning of any kind is the acquisition of a fixed set of prescribed skills that can be mastered once and for all. When teachers and teacher educators take on the sociocultural perspective of learning, they recruit students as partners in co-constructing opportunities and strategies that help them to be successful at a particular task and in a particular context (Cochran-Smith & Dudley-Marling, 2012; Gee, 2015). In traditional schooling, the view of ability is socially constructed and contrasted with a view of disability that takes into consideration the physical, cognitive, social, economic, and linguistic experiences of learners. Historically, a special education narrative has focused on a deficit perspective that resulted in labeling students who had variabilities in learning as somehow disabled (Naraian, 2017). This view privileges the idea that there is a dominant ideology that determines what counts as learning and, within that, also privileges what constitutes successful models of teaching and learning. Based on a medical model, learners are considered disabled if they cannot meet the predetermined benchmarks outlined by traditional schooling. This model suggests that there is something inherently wrong with the learner and promotes the idea that they need to have corrective instruction to be able to meet predetermined benchmarks. In many contexts, this has also meant DI (Carnine, 1999). Disability studies in education (DSE), however, has refocused the notion of disability by replacing the deficit lens with an understanding of learning variabilities

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as an integral part of the human condition (Connor & Gabel, 2013). From this perspective, advocates assert that learning, including literacy learning, is socially constructed and what it means to be considered successfully literate is highly dependent on the social context of such learning. DSE focuses specifically on an anti-deficit point of view and resists a medical model of instruction. Baglieri et al. (2011) have advocated for “plurality of perspectives” (p. 268) and pose the question, “Might we instead consider all of human differences and diversity normal?” (p. 271). Dudley-Marling and Gurn (2010) contended that in fact the idea of normal as it relates to the idea of the normal curve, a measure by which individuals are compared and assessed is not normal (p. 3). They asserted that the notion that most people cluster within a particular range on a bell-shaped curve drastically oversimplifies human diversity. Advocates of DSE promote a consideration of individuals and the acknowledgement of their differences and, crucially, their voices. A plurality of perspectives urges educators to consider diversity as a human condition that is socially constructed. Further, learner differences must be accounted for when we consider effective pedagogy and access to learning (Baglieri et al., 2011).

Direct Instruction vs Social Constructivist Perspectives DI is a model that focuses on teaching students what are known as basic skills. This approach becomes a matter of judgement and is determined by an ideology that declares what counts as basic and what counts as learning in general. Dudley-Marling and Paugh (2005) pointed out that under the banner of No Child Left Behind, this model was touted as a corrective for all students labeled not only as disabled but also as disadvantaged because of socio-economic circumstances. Linked legislation, aimed at ensuring that all children would be able to read at grade level by grade 3 and would be able to perform at a grade level benchmark on state standardized tests, was implemented. This began not only to drive instruction in schools but also determined federal funding for reaching these goals. These deficit perspectives that label students as struggling by any measure according to school norms dismiss students’ social, cultural, linguistic, and experiential learning as factors that play a role in how learning is perceived and enacted in school settings. Advocates of DI that have, historically, included special education advocates and legislators, contend that general education practitioners and literacy specialists willfully ignore data supporting it (Carnine, 1999). However, advocates of both disability studies in education and of a sociocultural perspective on learning and literacy see the narrow definitions and measures of so-called struggling and disability as problematic in the ways in which they label students and limit possibilities. We contend, along with Naraian (2017), that reflective practitioners enact best practices when they are informed by the contexts in which their students are learning, and work toward providing them with the skills necessary to succeed within a meaningful learning context. This notion refutes a one-size-fitsall approach and embraces the ideology of true inclusive practice based on providing access.

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Education as Liberation In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (2000), critiqued what he called a banking model of education. In this model, the teacher is the depositor and the students are the depositories. The more the teacher deposits, the better teacher she is, and the more willing the students are to receive what is deposited, the better students they are. This model is referred to as the banking model because it suggests that learning can be deposited, filed, and stored to increase capital, much like currency in a bank. Freire critiqued the banking model of education because it effectively silences creativity and transformation which, he asserts, should be the basis for all learning. This banking approach privileges the notion that there is a fixed single approach to learning and that we all must memorize and recite the same information to be successful in school. Macedo in his introduction to the English translation of Freire’s work advocated for education as liberation and called for learning to be a transformative and fluid process that promotes inquiry as the basis of human nature. Advocacy of inquiry diminishes the notion that there is one body of knowledge to be shared by those who have it with those who do not. Freire and Macedo (1987) also critiqued dominant views of universal literacy in Reading the Word and the World. Here, as in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 2000) the notion that literacy should be thought of as a set of prescribed skills, as is often the case in schools, is rejected and, instead, literacy relevant to peoples’ lives is extolled and making available the tools of literacy, including reading and writing, as a means of emancipation from oppressive educational contexts and constructs, advocated instead. This call for emancipation and liberation from a one-size-fitsall approach speaks powerfully to us given our belief in what education should be. However, in the business of everyday schooling, both in the United States and some English-speaking Caribbean countries, cultivating equitable and inclusive learning contexts remains a challenge and brings about more questions than definitive answers. The focus on literacy is an important one since this is a greatly debated area of practice in schools. As Freire, Macedo emphasized, we must consider the social context in which our students are learning. We must focus on not only the skills required in the moment-by-moment learning context (the word) but also those necessary to give them access in the broader community (the world). Given the disparity that exists between the necessary skills that span contexts, educators must consider embracing a broader perspective that serves all learners.

Conclusion We acknowledge, in this volume, the challenges that educators face as they seek to educate students from increasingly diverse backgrounds. We focus on the stories, perspectives, and recommendations of stakeholders interested in creating inclusive classrooms in which diversity is recognized, articulated, and valued. In their chapters,

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the contributing authors reflect carefully about how the concepts of learning, difficulty, literacy, and difference are defined. We all consider the identities of students as well as those of teachers and teacher educators in our assessment of the challenges that accompany the navigation of competing paradigms, given human diversity, but we believe that this attempt is central to all considerations of learning and inclusive education. We advocate for a social justice stance on education and reject a deficit model of learning. We seek to learn from the stories and perspectives shared in the following chapters in which the authors provide us with opportunities to see possibilities for coming together from a place of inquiry in the fervent hope of understanding the complex issues in the interests of a better education for all. Collectively, these educators illustrate the experiences and the subsequent struggles toward inclusion they face in contemporary education given the divide between the competing paradigms of general education, literacy, and special education. The struggles faced and lessons learned remind us that there is nothing easy about comprehending the human condition nor the call to service. Together, our collective voice embodies the desire for change, re-envisions possibilities for the future, and renews our deep commitment to inquiry, to schools, to learning, and to our students.

References Abodeeb-Gentile, T. L. (2008). A critical discourse analysis of classroom literacy practices in fourth grades: The critical moments (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Massachusetts. Alahmari, A. (2019). A review and synthesis of the Response to Intervention (RtI) literature: Teachers’ implementations and perceptions. International Journal of Special Education, 33(4), 894–909. Baglieri, S., Valle, J. W., Connor, D. X., & Gallagher, D. J. (2011). Disability studies in education: The need for a plurality of perspectives on disability. Remedial and special education. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0741932510362200 Carnine, D. (1999). Why education experts resist effective practices: And what it would take to make education more like medicine. Thomas Fordham Foundation. Cochran-Smith, M., & Dudley-Marling, C. (2012). Diversity in teacher education and special education: The issues that divide. Journal of Teacher Education, 63(4), 237–244. Connor, D. J., & Gabel, S. L. (2013). “Cripping” the curriculum through academic activism: Working toward increasing global exchanges to reframe (dis) ability and education. Equity & Excellence in Education, 46(1), 100–118. Conrad, D. A., Abodeeb-Gentile, T., & Philip, L. M. (2019). Education for all? Exploring teacher perspectives on inclusive education among primary teachers in Trinidad and Tobago. Journal of Education and Development in the Caribbean, 18(2), 19–55. https://doi.org/10.46425/j21802 6306 Coiro, J., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C., & Leu, D. J. (2008). Handbook of research on new literacies. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. Routledge. Dudley-Marling, C., & Gurn, A. (2010). Introduction: Living on the boundaries of normal. In C. Dudley Marling & A. Gurn (Eds.), The myth of the normal curve (pp. 1–8). Peter Lang.

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Dudley-Marling, C., & Paugh, P. (2005). The rich get richer: The poor get direct instruction. In B. Altwerger (Ed.), Reading for profit: How the bottom-line leaves kids behind (pp. 156–171). Heinemann. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (Rev. Ed.). Continuum. (Original work published in Portuguese 1968, in English 1970). Freire, P., & Macedo, D. P. 1. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word & the world. Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Gee, J. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis. Routledge. Gee, J. P. (2015). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (3rd ed.). Routledge/Taylor and Francis. McConachie, S. M., & Petrosky, A. R. (2010). Content matters: A disciplinary literacy approach to improving student learning. Jossey-Bass. Naraian, S. (2017). Teaching for inclusion: Eight principles for effective and equitable practice. Teachers College Press. Perry, M. (2021). Pluriversal literacies: Affect and relationality in vulnerable times. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(2), 293–309. Shanahan, T. (2017). Don’t let content area reading experts confuse you about disciplinary literacy. https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-literacy/don-t-let-content-areareading-experts-confuse-you-about-disciplinary Shanahan, T. (2019). Disciplinary literacy in the primary school. National Council for Curriculum and Assessment. Street, B. V. (2014). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. Routledge. Valle, J. W., & Connor, D. J. (2019). Rethinking disability: A disability studies approach to inclusive practices. Routledge. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language (Rev. ed.). Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Theresa Abodeeb-Gentile is an Associate Professor of Education and former Director of Elementary Education at the University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT. Dr. Abodeeb-Gentile is also an educational consultant and works with schools in The U.S. and abroad who are focused on providing effective literacy instruction to support diverse learners. She has worked with numerous urban and failing schools in the process of school turn around in the U.S. which has helped to support large gains in student achievement. Prior to becoming faculty at the University of Hartford, Dr. Abodeeb-Gentile, was a classroom teacher and literacy specialist for 18 years. She is the co-author of the book Journey of Discovery: Building a Classroom Community through Diagnostic Reflective Portfolios published by the International Reading Association. Dr. AbodeebGentile has published several journal articles and chapters and regularly presents her research at both national and international conferences. Her research, scholarly work and interests include: intersections of pedagogy, literacy, identity, and inclusive education. Dennis A. Conrad is Professor Emeritus at State University of New York at Potsdam. He most recently held the position of Manager of Student Support Services at the Ministry of Education in Trinidad and Tobago where he spent several years focused on supporting student success and inclusive education to ensure access for ALL learners. Dennis is former professor and Department Chair in the Department of Inclusive and Special Education at SUNY Potsdam. Prior to getting his Ph.D. at Virginia Tech, he was a teacher and principal at both regular and special schools in Trinidad and Tobago. Dennis has received several awards including the President’s award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship related to cultural pluralism. He is also former Chair of the Caribbean and African Studies SIG at the American Educational Research Association.

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Professor Conrad has published numerous articles and chapters and has co-edited multiple books including: Achieving Inclusive Education in the Caribbean and Beyond. Springer; Responding to Learner Diversity and Difficulties. Caribbean Discourse in Inclusive Education II, Information Age & Caribbean Discourse in Inclusive Education-Historical and Contemporary Issues. Information Age.

Part I

Literacy Contexts: A Matter of Difference

Chapter 2

“I’m Writing to Teach Those Who Do Not Know”: Making the Case for Inclusive Pedagogy that Values Difference and Capitalizes on Students’ Expertise Patricia C. Paugh

Introduction Jacob, a third grader in an urban classroom, was excited as he approached me with a book from a classroom text set open in his hands. He and his classmates had been engaged in urban gardening projects since September. It was now late spring, and his teacher, Mary Moran, had assembled boxes of books on the topic of plants and gardening from several local city library branches. Students had access to these books for free reading. In addition, every day the whole class engaged in a joint exploration of one of the books as an interactive read-aloud. These read-alouds were purposeful. At times a book was chosen to investigate a question raised by one of the student gardeners, and, at other times, a book was chosen by the teacher to engage students in the analysis of language used for different purposes. For example, one of Jacob’s classmates had been sketching sprouts emerging in the classroom garden and wondered why some sprouts had single leaves and some double. To investigate further, a whole class read-aloud was held during which students unpacked diagrams in a plant dictionary and considered how these could be used to locate such information. On this particular day, Jacob, a smiling boy with round cheeks and blond hair, wearing thick black-framed glasses, sought me out during an independent reading time. I was an adult working as a co-researcher with his teacher. He was excited to point out his discovery of some how to verbs in a book he was reading. Jacob wanted me to share his discovery of language for giving instructions for “teaching people” how to plant tomatoes, a topic of another of the class’s previous read aloud sessions (Paugh & Moran, 2013). The fact that he volunteered to share information about a book he had chosen to read, and then the fact that his discovery reflected excitement P. C. Paugh (B) University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 T. Abodeeb-Gentile and D. A. Conrad (eds.), Intersections of Diversity, Literacy, and Learner Difficulties, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3532-9_2

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about language made a powerful statement about his classroom environment. Jacob had been identified in his school as a struggling student. Testing indicated that his reading and writing skills were below grade level. At this time, he had been retained in the third grade for an additional year. His Individualized Education Plan required him to be taken out of his classroom for remedial instruction. Often during my visits, I noted that the special education teacher or an aide would arrive to fetch Jacob for instructional support elsewhere in the school. However, across both years that Jacob remained in Ms. Moran’s classroom, she made sure that he and all others in the classroom, despite a range of learning differences, were full participants in projects that integrated literacy learning with history and science investigations. My purpose in this chapter is to argue for pedagogies, such as Ms. Moran’s, that position all students as capable learners who consequently live up to these expectations, especially those who, in other aspects of their school lives, are identified as struggling, less-than-capable learners. I begin with a review of literature on sociocultural theories that challenge individualistic medical models that continue to dominate when society and schools address learning differences. This literature review includes a Harvard Educational Review forum responding to “Cross-pollinating culturally sustaining pedagogy and universal design for learning: Toward an inclusive pedagogy that accounts for dis/ability” (Alim et al., 2017). In this forum, panel member Django Paris commented that “we want to understand people as whole, not broken on the way in, and we want schooling and education to help keep young people whole as they continue to grow in a dynamic world” (p. 17). In concordance with the scholars in this forum and others highlighted in the review, I use a framework for socially-just inclusive education to explore classroom-based research in which differentiated instruction successfully created high expectations in all students. The first set of examples occurs in the literature and the second set draws from data collected and analyzed through a multi-year collaborative inquiry project that Ms. Mary Moran and I conducted in her urban elementary classroom. The literature review and pedagogical examples offer a counter narrative to currently accepted notions of inclusion that continue to reference students’ capabilities against normative criteria rather than build on the potential of difference as central to instructional practice.

Literature Review: “What Are Reasons Behind Separate Instruction for Some Students?” Assumptions about difference often hide behind unexamined notions about what it means to be normal. In this section I consider how notions of difference affect classroom culture and the learning of children in those classrooms since, as educators, our epistemological beliefs, and actions toward how people learn, may create very different school experiences for the children we teach. In terms of the focus of this edited volume, even what counts as inclusive education may vary given such assumptions. Therefore, I go on to present two very different perspectives on learning;

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the first locates learning in the individual mind and body while the second locates learning in the social and interactional context of a learning space (e.g., a classroom). I do not mean to dichotomize these in ways that negate differences among learners, but argue, instead, that not attending to invisible belief systems may inadvertently interfere with the process of fully supporting the diverse learners for whom we are responsible.

A Medical Model: Positioning Learners as Individuals in Relation to a Constructed Norm When the teaching and learning focus remains on the individual person’s mind and body, that person is positioned in relation to other individuals. In schools, teaching is focused on standardized notions of what counts as normal, and individual learning is assessed against a normal curve (Dudley-Marling & Gurn, 2010) not only of physical and mental abilities, but also against dominant racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, and linguistic expectations of how people learn and interact. Norm-focused assimilationist perspectives underlie policies and practices for addressing the diversity that learners bring to school. Therefore, in the culture of schooling, when an individual differs, especially at the lower end of the norm, they are presumed to be lacking the skills for school success that are possessed by normal children (DudleyMarling & Burns, 2014). Special education policies and practices developed from this framework are constructed to provide such students with the physical, neurological, cognitive, social, linguistic, sensory, and, we could imagine, cultural skills necessary to function within established norms. Approaches such as those in which the disability is located in the individual, are intended to fix or cure an individual’s deficiencies in ways that mirror a medical model. In fact, the term diagnose is frequently used in this discourse. Addressing individual deficiencies leads to a set of accepted institutional policies and practices aimed at enabling students to function better within the normal expectations for learning successfully in classrooms and these require specialist preparation. DudleyMarling and Burns (2014) have outlined three approaches most often found in this model: (1) Remediation—assessing to identify and then directly address deficiencies in the student; (2) Compensatory skill training—providing the student with strategies to overcome or compensate for the deficiencies, and (3) Adaptation—adjusting the learning environment and/or the curriculum to meet the child’s needs. In the elementary schools where I have worked, I have witnessed all three approaches in action. A student whose performance does not fit expectations will be referred for consultation in the special education system. If monitoring and later testing determine need, the child may receive support from a specialist or aide in and out of the classroom. For example, a struggling reader might visit a reading specialist for extra instruction in phonics or comprehension strategies. A child who does not sit still and attend to tasks might be furnished with movable seating such as an exercise ball rather than a desk

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or, with further diagnoses, be prescribed medication to regulate attention. I have seen different levels of supplementary reading texts used to differentiate the topic at hand in a reading anthology. For example, similar books about the life cycle of a frog may be available to all fourth graders but at different levels of text complexity. These and many other solutions might be helpful or not depending on the context and the child. It has been argued that for some students a deficit model presents a conundrum in that a short-term solution may negatively affect long term learning. Critiques, such as one provided by Dudley-Marling (2015), noted that when “low level, basic skills curricula” is the intervention for student difficulty often this is realized by “instructional practices that diminish learning” and “limit the rich learning opportunities afforded to students in high achieving environments.” Thus, some students “learn more slowly because of the scope and pace of remediation” (p. 7). In one of my university classes, I asked preservice teachers to analyze the content of two supplementary texts resembling the informational book on frogs described above. They found that the text created for students deemed strong readers was more complex in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. These readers accessed important concepts that were missing in the lower level, in which book the ideas, along with the language, were more simplistic. Thus, a student’s inability to decode and comprehend text at grade level would limit his/her access to rich and important concepts needed for learning the science content. In this case we need to ask, “Is the intervention, while addressing an identified deficit, limiting in any other way for a student?” and “What other capabilities of this student are being ignored by this instructional decision?” along with “Is it possible to differentiate or even identify the learning potential of all students by partitioning curriculum and instruction in this way?”.

A Social Constructivist Stance: Challenging Traditional Medical Model/Deficit Perspectives on Learning and Learners A counter-narrative to the medical or deficit model considers learning to be constructed through interactions in a social context. A sociocultural view does not deny learning differences, but situates them, instead, in interactions in which the self is constructed through relationships or what Dudley-Marling and Burns (2014) described as a “distributed self” that is “dependent on relationships, actions, artifacts, and objects” in the surrounding context (p. 15). These authors draw on seminal research by McDermott (1993) and McDermott and Varenne (1995) on how the institutional processes of schooling construct students as disabled. McDermott and Varenne (1995) provided the example of “Adam” a student who appeared disabled in his classroom yet functioned without problem when engaging in similar activities in a social environment such as an after-school club. Another example can be found in the

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generative work of Sarah Michaels (1981) in which she discusses an African American kindergartener who was constructed as having “language deficits” in traditional classroom sharing time because she was operating in a different cultural framework, one that actually required higher levels of cognitive processing and connections but did not match typical Western classroom discourses. McMillon and Edwards (2000) provided a third example of “Joshua”, an African American boy who excelled in the literacies important in his Sunday church pre-school but was excluded from his group in a traditional preschool classroom because his so-called behaviors did not align with participation expectations valued at church but unrecognized by the white teachers. I have drawn on these works in exploring current public-school classrooms with the preservice teachers in my classes. What we discover is that, despite all this research having been conducted several decades ago, a deficit model remains entrenched in the ways in which current schools continue to regard children’s learning and learning differences. Those who adopt a critical and socio-cultural view problematize normative frameworks described above since these are based on the notion of what Gloria LadsonBillings describes as a “generic kid” within a generic curriculum model (Alim et al., 2017, p. 6). One critique relates to what are known as best practices or one-sizefits-all solutions that can be applied to specific learning needs. Scholars, such as Ladson-Billings, in the Harvard Educational Review forum mentioned above (Alim et al., 2017), advocated for the culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies that H. Samy Alim identified in this forum as “generic pedagogies” (p. 7). For example, Alim elicited feedback from preservice teachers at Stanford University who reported being prepared to teach an imagined “mainstream student” with a “mainstream way of teaching” (p. 7) but arrived at the classroom unready for the complexities they encountered. Literacy scholar Elizabeth Moje’s (2000) argument that we can never assume sameness across students or their communities is extended by the classroom research of a colleague in her field, Anne Haas Dyson. In her extensive classroom ethnographies, Dyson (2015), reflective of earlier work by Heath (1983), demonstrated how children who were operating as sophisticated language users were often not recognized as bright because their performance did not fit the expectations of normalized classroom discourse when compared to what were determined to be traditionally typically developing learners. She argued that in order to value “respectful inclusion . . . we must move outside of the narrow image of the ‘ideal child’, and we must dismantle the myth of the singular path to language arts success” (Dyson, 2015, p. 206).

The Power of Normative Discourse A major institutional mechanism that maintains normative discourse is the evolving culture of high-stakes accountability. High stakes test scores reify the assumption that “students should learn academic content at the same pace and demonstrate learning in the same manner regardless of diverse abilities, and expectations of what a child

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should be able to know and do at a given grade level” (Waitholler & Thorius, 2016, p. 374). Assessments regulate cultural capital when they are used to sort students by ability, consigning some to remedial narrow instruction and others to enriching instruction. These designations mark some students as smart but also pathologize others as disabled with potentially negative consequences (Davis, 2013). The nomenclature of dis/ability is used by some sociocultural scholars. The slash does not deny physical or psychological differences but indicates, instead, that differences are a product of cultural, political, and economic practices and may ultimately contribute to the richness of the learning community. This nomenclature sends a message to educators to disrupt historic norms by recognizing and valuing biological, psychological, gender, race, and language diversity in learning communities and, ultimately, in society (Alim et al., 2017; Davis, 1995). Recognition of intersections of difference can inform the redesign of classroom practices that currently position some students as smart and others as lacking (Dudley-Marling, 2015).

High Expectations Curriculum: Repositioning Learners and Learning Differences Legislation aimed at serving students with disabilities has resulted in changes in policies and practices of schooling that include moving students away from separate educational placements toward inclusion in regular education settings. Current efforts to create Free and Appropriate Education in the Least Restrictive Environment for all children are described in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 2004 along with several amendments, most recently in 2015 as Public Law 114–95, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). IDEA related legislation resulted in nearly all students with disabilities spending at least part of the day being educated alongside children without disabilities (Dudley-Marling & Burns, 2014). This movement to include rather than separate is what is meant by inclusive education, defined by the National Center on Inclusive Education (2011), as encompassing presumed competence, authentic measurement, full participation, reciprocal social relationships, and learning to high standards by all students with disabilities in age-appropriate general education classrooms, with supports provided to students and teachers to enable them to be successful. (p. 1)

While the intention of this legislation presumes attention and greater access to quality education for greater numbers of students, there remain disparities in the identification of students as disabled when racial and linguistic diversity is calculated. Waitoller and Artiles (2013) described the realities of inclusion as a “continuous struggle” towards a) the redistribution of quality opportunities to learn and participate in educational programs, b) the recognition and value of differences as reflected in content, pedagogy, and assessment tools, and c) the opportunities for marginalized groups to represent themselves in decisionmaking processes. (p. 35)

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A sociocultural argument for a shift in discourse addresses the systemic issues that position a student as disabled. This stance advocates for greater attention to critical and socially constructed learning spaces that shifts the dominant gaze away from fixing individual students so that they can assimilate into what is considered normal what Hehir (2002) has termed ableism. Instead this stance moves that gaze toward creating classrooms that align with Joseph Michael Valente’s description found in his contribution to the Harvard Educational Review forum, “difference[as]a property of the group” (Alim et al., 2017, pp. 9–10). Ms. Thao Vo, a novice teacher who participated in an inquiry group that informed my dissertation study, provides an excellent example. Vo taught first grade in a regular public school connected to an adjoining school serving deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students. For some of the day, Vo taught literacy to both hearing and DHH first graders. Worried that, as a new teacher, she was not meeting the needs of the latter, she asked a learning specialist from the DHH program to teach alongside her for several sessions. She reported that she observed practices from that specialist, such as strategies to check for text comprehension, that not only supported the DHH students, but added to her own expertise in ways that were productive for all the students in her class. This was a powerful illustration of the power of instructional practices during which attending to so-called difference benefits the learning of all (Paugh, 2002). Thus, rather than creating a separate curriculum meant to correct individual deficiencies, a sociocultural stance supports curriculum that provides access to “high expectations” (Dudley-Marling & Michaels, 2012, p. 8) and “substantive intellectual codes” for all learners (Woods et al., 2015, p. 50). Rethinking deficit culture through a high expectations curriculum assumes competence in all students and indicates that they can all be valued and challenged as learners “along with peers in a collective learning environment” (Dudley-Marling, 2015, p. 9). This has significance for all students, such as those in the case shared by Ms. Vo, but is especially significant for students who have experienced repeated academic failure. A high expectations curriculum is engaging, flexible, and inclusive of student resources. Knowledge is constructed in ways that both draw on students’ social, cultural, and linguistic capital and challenge them fully (Luke, 2012). In this environment, the expertise of children is valued. Luke has supported this focus by explaining that with a high expectations curriculum the “classroom universal is not basics or standards but construction of knowledge through classroom discourse” (p. viii). Examples of such a curriculum, including those shared below, the first from the literature, and the second collected during a multi-year collaborative inquiry carried out in an urban third grade classroom taught by Ms. Mary Moran, demonstrate a range of roles for teachers and students when ways of knowing from participants are collectively valued and challenged, and opportunities for learning are offered to all (often including the teacher as learner). Again, this does not negate the expertise of, or explicit instruction from, the teacher, but is grounded in dialogic relationships between participants and what is being learned. Language that repositions learners and learning in this way is reflected in terminology such as asset-focused or can do found among educators who wish to challenge deficit-focused school culture. However, as my preservice teaching candidates find in the midst of the realities of

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their school placements, the institutional environments based on deficit thinking and separate instruction that are deeply embedded in school culture continue and remain resistant to such shifts, affirming the what Waitoller and Artiles (2013) described above as a “ continuous struggle” towards inclusion (p. 35). One mechanism for change is to connect this theoretical framework to reality with examples and demonstrated learning within such pedagogies, especially those inclusive of students traditionally marginalized or under-educated in traditional systems (Alim et al., 2017; Dudley-Marling & Burns, 2014). Luke (2012) has argued that adopting high expectations pedagogies is a question of social justice since the “hardest translation of all for any of us who work in schools [is] the turning of normative discourses of social justice into face-to-face material social relations” (p. viii). In alignment with Luke, Joseph Michael Valente, in the Harvard Educational Review Forum mentioned earlier reaffirms this need to connect theory to practice since [i]t’s one thing to have discussions like we are having now, as sort of a theoretical discussion. But it’s another thing when you are actually trying to think on your feet in a classroom as a teacher. (Alim et al., 2017, pp. 9–10)

Echoing these sentiments I ask, “In what ways can a critical, socio-cultural instantiation of inclusion be demonstrated with close inquiry into everyday classroom talk and curriculum practice?”.

Exemplars of High Expectations Curriculum in the Literature A high expectations curriculum is the type of curriculum usually reserved for children in high achieving classrooms, those found in wealthier school districts, or in the provision of specific programs aimed at educating children who are identified as gifted or talented. Two existing exemplars of a high expectations curriculum are shared in this section. Here literacy educators provide demonstrations of inclusive curriculum; children are positioned as experts capable of complex thinking. In the first, Dudley-Marling (2015) provided evidence from his work with urban elementary students using a practice of Interpretive Discussion. He enacted this curriculum with students in a New York City school in which demographics identified students as having, mostly, low income/high poverty socio-economic status, with many in the class being English Learners and/or having special needs. This was a context in which high stakes testing and basic skills curriculum are traditionally prioritized. DudleyMarling engaged fourth graders in learning through a process called Interpretive Discussion during which teachers scaffold readers with open-ended questions and guide them in practices of meaningful evidence-based discussion using challenging texts. He noted that the key goal of this practice was for students to initiate and develop complex reasoning rather than compete for correct pre-determined responses. He found that fourth grade students “made claims, cited evidence, respectfully challenged and supported each other to make sense” in ways that resembled the type of

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student-owned discussions he sees in his university classes (p. 9). When all students in the class were scaffolded with strategies for interacting with complex and challenging texts, they engaged in the high-level reasoning associated with high achieving students. Dudley-Marling (2015) used this evidence to counter what is known as the pedagogy of poverty based on bottom-up curricula that relegate low-income students to narrower test-focused educational experiences (p. 7) and, in so doing, gives us a concrete example of instruction that provides access for students to complex texts and, as I mentioned earlier, complex ideas. Woods et al. (2015) provided suggested lessons based on their inquiry with teachers in high-poverty Australian classrooms, again demonstrating the outcomes of challenging intellectual work that respects, values, and builds upon students’ social and cultural perspective, especially their sense of identity related to the places in which they live. Their plans, drawing from critical multiliteracies theories (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009), incorporate critical, culturally responsive, and inclusive literacy practices with the goal of enabling all students to participate in the critical analysis of texts. Lessons are “designed around the principle that all children deserve to engage with substantive content and to develop capacities in critical approaches to literacy at the same time they develop other literacy skills such as decoding, spelling, grammar, and comprehension” (Woods et al., 2015, pp. 46–47). What is important to note here is that in these curricula high level expectations are not divorced from necessary skills for accessing text or, more broadly, for accessing academic discourse. Instead, they suggest lessons that counter the belief related to bottom-up pedagogies based on the belief that students must demonstrate proficiency with lower levels of texts before being provided with opportunities and support to tackle more substantive materials. Chapter 9 in this volume written by Abodeeb-Gentile points to the consequences of the latter when children are purposefully denied access to engaging and interesting content because of perceived skill deficits, being forced to wait to access these texts until they have developed lower-level capacities. In my experience as a former elementary teacher and reading specialist, I noted that many students, once relegated to what are known as lower-level groups, rarely changed that position throughout their school career. The lesson plans provided by Woods et al. (2015) develop higher level thinking alongside providing explicit instruction about how texts work. These scholars describe their inclusive lessons as “engaging, relevant, conceptually rich, and socially significant learning occasions where ways that language and text work are laid bare and ready to be reconstituted by children for their own means” (p. 51). They argue that learning the codes of texts, necessary to literacy, can be taught through teaching students to analyze how texts have been authored for particular purposes and audiences. Vital to their pedagogy is collaborative idea construction; Similar to Dudley-Marling’s instruction, students are positioned to create new ideas building on those of peers, and at times constructing that knowledge through respectful disagreement. Teachers in these classrooms incorporate forms of scaffolded dialogue during which they explicitly introduce, model, and share learning expectations while also responding to, and building ownership of, that learning interactively with their students. Woods et al. (2015) summarized this type of inclusive in saying,

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P. C. Paugh For us achieving inclusion is an ongoing everyday practice where all teachers are constantly checking that all students are participating, interacting with each other, with complex ideas, with texts, and in ways that allow them to actively practice all dimensions of literate practice and form complex repertoires of semiotic and communicative practices. (p. 68)

I go on, now, to focus on a classroom in a typical, traditional US urban school district to analyze the key possibilities available when inclusion takes on these characteristics.

Ms. Mary Moran’s Classroom: An Exemplar of Inclusion as Social Justice Education My purpose in this chapter is to add to collective understandings about what counts in inclusive learning environments where children such as Jacob, a child designated as underperforming and disabled, exhibit genuine interest, engagement, and ownership along with his classmates, as they show growth in their academic literacy development. Taking up Luke’s (2012) challenge to develop conceptual understandings of inclusive pedagogy based on the “face-to-face material social relations” (pp. viii) in classrooms, I draw on three dimensions of a socially just inclusive curriculum that include: (1) “ensuring that children see their own language, values, ideologies, interests and communities reflected in the curriculum” (Fraser, 2003, cited in Woods et al., 2015, p. 50); (2) ensuring that they are included in what is “valued and assessed in that curriculum” (Fraser, 2009, cited in Woods et al., 2015, p. 50); and (3) attending to and advocating for the equitable distribution of resources both material, financial, and capital they need to access the dominant skills, knowledges, and broad understandings of educational and societal systems. In the following section, one aspect of Ms. Moran’s literacy curriculum—the teaching and learning of procedural writing—will provide a focus for my exploration of the first two dimensions, while connections to the final dimension will be included in the conclusion and discussion.

Classroom Context Ms. Moran’s third grade classroom was in an urban school that was subject to pressures of high stakes testing and repeated implementation of variously paced curricula that were intended to link student learning to results on the state’s achievement test. This major urban district had large numbers of students of color whose families had recently arrived in the country and/or were new to English, the required language of instruction. Large urban school districts in this state have a known history of being underfunded since they serve large numbers of low income/high poverty families whose incomes are inadequate to supplement school budgets as happens in wealthier communities. Despite the state’s high rankings on national measures of accountability there remain(ed) large differences in achievement results between white affluent

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students and students of color in the state. This differential was reflected in the city’s accountability systems as well. While Ms. Moran participated in professional development and taught reading and math centered on district-adopted curriculum materials, she also organized, on her own, units of study in her classroom that integrated literacy instruction with social studies and science topics, using many community resources such as public libraries, the historical association, and the local food bank. Each year she found spaces in her teaching to develop these units with her students. An experienced teacher, Ms. Moran worked to develop an inclusive curriculum within and around the existing institutional framework. Her positive reputation with parents and families in the school community provided social capital for her instructional program. I am a literacy educator in a public urban university teacher education program that is located in close proximity to the school district where Ms. Moran taught. Over the course of more than ten years we worked on a multi-year collaborative inquiry that investigated the potential of explicitly focused literacy pedagogy that is aligned with principles of social justice. Our collaborative research methods were shaped by ethnography, practitioner inquiry, and critical discourse analysis (see Paugh, 2015; Paugh & Moran, 2013). The examples offered below are two cases that emerged during that long-term inquiry, and they illustrate the value of Ms. Moran’s high expectations pedagogy on student learning. Student consent was obtained through the university’s institutional review board and pseudonyms have been used in the examples below.

Procedural Writing Within a Socio-Cultural Frame One area of ongoing inquiry for Ms. Moran was how best to help students develop as literacy practitioners in ways that extended their academic language as well as being related to their interests. She and I connected as classroom research collaborators interested in investigating the affordances of a social semiotic theory of language, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1975), for teaching students how language functions for specific purposes and audiences through instruction that developed their own meta-awareness of the concept of language as a social process (see Gibbons, 2014; Martin & Rose, 2008 for further information). In examining existing texts, such as the library books on gardening mentioned earlier or everyday artifacts such as seed packets, students discussed why the author of each text might have chosen the words or images found there. Ms. Moran scaffolded these discussions so that students were analyzing the language and visual aspects of a text while using that text for a purpose such as exploring a student’s question about the growth of seedlings, also described above (Paugh & Moran, 2013). In third grade, students were expected to expand reading and writing to work across narrative and informational genres. At this age, the students’ primary writing experiences had been with personal and fictional narratives, so adding to their academic language for more informational disciplines was important in the curriculum. In

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accordance with the second dimension of a socially just curriculum as described above (ensuring that her curriculum fit with existing content expectations), Ms. Moran herself felt the need for further professional learning about how to scaffold students’ reading and writing in the more informational literacies related to the science- and history-focused units she developed and taught. Together she and I chose two genres outlined in SFL pedagogy to begin our exploration of how to support students’ awareness of how language works when one is reading and writing information (Brisk, 2015). These were instructional/procedural genres and recounting experiences/recount genres. Below I provide examples of Ms. Moran’s introducing and supporting students’ procedural writing, the genre that informs the reader how to accomplish a goal.

The First Dimension: Ensuring That Academic Curriculum Reflects Students’ Expertise Ms. Moran believed that it was her responsibility to ensure that her students saw themselves as central in their learning community. For this reason, she continually tapped resources from the neighborhood and from families to contribute to their learning context. Several units celebrated the local neighborhood, a primarily lowincome urban setting that was often the subject of negative press that focused on crime or poverty. Ms. Moran’s units explored, instead, the value of living in the community in their investigations of a rich local history that included neighborhood walks to historical sites, research on the origins of the school’s namesake that resulted in a class publication, and the year-long focus on urban gardening that had students create a school garden as well as working with local volunteers in community gardens. She also tapped family and community activities, history, and routines. For example, during one writing unit, students were asked to interview a close family member or adult friend about their lives. Students worked collaboratively to brainstorm and develop interview questions, and then, after the interviews were completed, individual students shared the responses. Ms. Moran scaffolded student feedback sessions during which the entire class guided the sharer in locating a story in the responses to be developed into a narrative. Students’ writing celebrated individual histories and informed the class community through stories that told about journeys to the US from different countries, persistence in pursuing educational opportunities, and even one grandmother’s successful struggle with breast cancer (Paugh, 2018). During two of the years during which we worked together, Ms. Moran drew on this same resource—students’ interest and lives—to introduce them to the language features useful for writing procedures.

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The Second Dimension: Ensuring That All Students Learn What Is Valued and Assessed in the Curriculum As noted earlier, third graders were expected to expand their linguistic choices for reading and writing informational texts. Procedural texts provide an opportunity for students to write information in the form of instructions. After her class analyzed recipes and game instructions as mentor texts, Ms. Moran challenged each to write a procedure about something they knew about and were interested in sharing. Individual topic choice provided an authenticity that positioned students as experts who know about a subject to teach someone who does not (Duke et al., 2012). Students took this up with a variety of topics based on their interests. All were unique with a sampling that included How to Defend in Basketball, What to Do When You Get a Cat, How to Make a Tortilla, How to Do Ballet, and, How to Fix a Computer. Nyla, like Jacob, a student identified as learning disabled, left the class several times each day for special education services. A tall girl with brown skin, Nyla was excited to write about something she knew well—how to wash hair. Nyla’s mother and aunt ran a hair salon and Nyla spent a great deal of time there observing them washing and styling hair. After participating in the full class writing focus sessions, she confidently drafted her procedure “Washing Hair” (Fig. 2.1). Nyla’s draft reflects her pride in the expertise of women in her family, and her own knowledge that had, clearly, been gained through social participation with them. This expertise clearly influenced her focus as a writer whose choices of structure, grammar, and vocabulary all indicate that she applied language choices discussed in Washing Hair You will need: Sink Running Water Shampoo Conditioner Brush Comb 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Wet hair all over with water Put a generous amount of shampoo into palm of your hand and rub into hair Rub hair around in a circle until hair becomes soapy and scratch your scalp for 3 minutes With a small brush, brush hair from the scalp to the end of hair over the whole head Rinse shampoo out Repeat step 2, 3, 4 and 5 Rinse hair thoroughly making sure all of the shampoo is out Put a large amount of conditioner in the palm of hand and rub evenly all over the hair Leave in 1-5 minutes 9. Thoroughly rainse [sic] out the conditioner completely 10. Blow dry or towel dry your hair the [sic] comb hair out. (Now you are ready to style your hair)

Fig. 2.1 Nyla’s written procedure for how to wash hair

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her classroom to communicate her knowledge effectively. She used language features such as a list of materials and step by step directions clearly to guide the reader with the information necessary to achieve her goal. Nyla used imperative verbs, what the class termed command verbs to teach her readers how to. Most significantly, Nyla refined her instructions using adverbials (e.g., evenly, thoroughly, all over) and adjectives (e.g., a generous amount, a small brush). Her writing also extended information through dependent clauses that elaborated her meaning. For example, step #4 contains four prepositional phrases located around the main clause, “With a small brush, brush hair from the scalp, to the end of hair, over the whole head.” [punctuation added.] When assessed on a rubric created to reflect procedural writing expectations (Annandale et al., 2006; Brisk, 2015) Nyla’s writing demonstrated organization, consistent language that fit the purpose, and evidence of beginning language complexity. While her procedure was missing a goal statement, and some classmates’ writing provided more extensive levels of complex clauses, Nyla’s writing demonstrated independent application of expectations for the class. In fact, her procedure had more advanced features than several others, such as consistent use of the imperative, and specificity in the use of adverbs. Students identified for regular pull-out support often miss the opportunity to participate in whole class academic learning, such as this how to writing instruction that involved all the students. We ask, based on this evidence, “What academic learning might Nyla have missed without this integrated instruction?” and “What understandings about an aspect of the community would Nyla’s classmates have missed without her story?” Social participation that connected her interests with high level writing expectations clearly resulted in increased learning for her and a contribution to the classroom community for all.

Students’ Interests and Lives in Dialogue with High Academic Expectations As noted above, a high expectations curriculum that develops in dialogue with students’ expertise draws on contextual relationships in the classroom, as well as on students’ unique resources. In the following transcript, Ms. Moran engaged with Jacob and his classmates as they co-created an anchor chart to guide their writing of procedures related to the purpose of sharing knowledge they had gleaned from working in the urban gardens across the year. Ms. Moran used charting as a means of communicating explicitly the codes or features of a procedure in dialogue with her students. Her instructional focus on writing of procedural and recount genres, however, emerged after she elicited feedback from the students, asking, “How might we do some writing to share what we have learned about gardening?” Teaching others about various aspects of their garden project was one decision that many in the class chose to pursue. Jacob was one student who considered this focus and, at the time of writing the excerpt below, he had been working on teaching his readers how to plant seeds. As noted above, he had already been noticing how to language as he explored

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various mentor texts with his classmates. During the whole group charting session excerpted below, Jacob both sought guidance and contributed ideas to the collective conversation. The excerpt opens with Ms. Moran sitting at an easel with students gathered around her on the floor holding their garden notebooks. Turn Speaker Dialogue 1

Moran: [looks back at students after adding information about the title and opening statement to the chart] Everybody have that? [lowers voice, gentle tone] Anybody have a question? [students nearest Mary are looking at and writing in their notebooks] Are we okay? So on a “how to”// [turns back to write on the chart] So on a “how to” [points to chart] you have your title [resumes writing] and you have your OPENING STATEMENT [writing]

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Jacob:

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Moran: [pointing pen at him] Yes Jacob?

[raises his hand to speak]

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Jacob:

5

Moran: If I was making …how tos? I would have to think about ‘What do I know how to do?’ and ‘What could I teach YOU or someone else how to do?’

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Jacob:

Ummm If you are writing. . . how tos what would they be about?

[looks at M] Like about gardening?

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Moran: About gardening

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Jacob:

About how to plant a seed?

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Moran: Could you do a how to about how to plant a seed?

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Jacob:

Actually, I’m doing a how to right now [glances at this notebook] about things you need

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Moran: Things you need to do what?

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Jacob:

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Moran: So, you’re going to help people // What’s the title of your how to?

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Jacob:

To plant the seeds [looks down at notebook reads] ‘A how to//how to plant//annny [decoding word] seeds.’

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Moran: How to plant ANY seed

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Jacob:

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Moran: INTERESTING. So you’re going to have like rules that apply for any kind of (inaudible) gardening?

[Looks down at notebook and then up to M and nods]

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Jacob:

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Moran: Like rules that every gardener needs to know for going out to their garden?

[nods]

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Jacob:

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Moran: OK so you are going to do a how to for a person who doesn’t know ANYTHING about gardening. So if they get seeds they are going to know what tools they need, what supplies they need and how to get the garden ready?

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Jacob:

[nodding] Yeah it might be someone who didn’t know how a seed [gestures by creating a finger to thumb circle] and if you had to plant it and if you didn’t know what supplies you needed [looks down at notebook] and if I made this a story then that person would KNOW

[looking at M nods] Yeah (continued)

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(continued) Turn Speaker Dialogue 23

Moran: Good idea//So Jacob you’re telling me right away, you just said you need supplies, a supply list or a materials list? Do you want that first? [Turns to write on chart] after we need our title and our opening statement [writing] goal and you just said your goal is to teach a person WHO DOESN’T know ANYTHING about planting seeds what they need and how to successfully plant seeds [continues writing]

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Jacob:

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Moran: And help them live through the winter [writing] so you need a materials and supplies. [continues writing]

And make them live through the winter

Jacob’s participation in this conversation reflects the dialogic participation of his entire class as they collectively learned literacy as a purposeful goal-focused set of practices. Throughout the year I observed students asking genuine questions and Ms. Moran building on these questions through explicit guidance and intentional instruction aimed at transfer toward students’ independence. In the above interaction, Jacob’s initiation of his question to Ms. Moran and his peers (Turns 1–4) differs from traditional teacher/student moves where teachers elicit expected responses from students. Ms. Moran’s exchanges with Jacob are a mix of responses that affirm his purpose (Turns 5–9; 13; 19–21), clarify the academic language of a procedure (Turn 23–25), and position him as the owner of, and expert on, his topic (Turn 20). As Ms. Moran responded to Jacob, she also engaged him and his classmates in creating another layer of explicitness through the co-creation of the anchor chart. As the discussion continued, other students initiated questions and comments as the class considered and added further language features such as step-by-step sequence and command verbs to the chart. Later, as students revised their procedures they consulted the chart they had created. Jacob’s procedure was entitled, “How to Plant Any Seeds.” His learning can be seen between his original notebook draft and his final draft (Fig. 2.2). In the first draft he had numbered all his items so that the materials were indistinguishable from the step-by-step directions. The appearance of the writing could also be described as scrambled across the page. After participating in whole and individual writing conferences such as the above, he created a final draft that now included an introductory opening statement as described above. He also separated a materials list from the procedure itself that was numbered and that contained both imperatives as well as information about what to expect. Although punctuation and spelling were areas in need of further editing and his materials were listed both vertically and horizontally, they were clearly identified and his steps were written with complete sentences in the second person. In addition, each section contained a heading and he also added a closing statement with a personal comment indicating himself as the expert to contact “if something goes wrong.” As with Nyla, Jacob had clear ownership of his writing. Similarly to the example offered in the introduction, he was aware that language could help him achieve his purpose. His written drafts indicate improved transfer of that language to his independent writing.

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How to Plant Any Seed Follow these directions and you’ll have a happy life full of plants. Here is a list of things you need. 1. a shovel 2. seeds 3. a place to Dig like a front or back yard 4. water 5. a hose 6. good soil in the garden 7. manure and fertizer [sic] Directions for plannting [sic] seeds: 1. make a hole to put the see [sic] in the garden. 2. once you put in [sic] the garden you water it. 3. you water it when it is thirsty [sic] 4. when you see something green popping up in your garden your seed has germinated. Fig. 2.2 Jacob’s final draft

Conclusion My purpose in this chapter was to consider the possibilities available when inclusive classrooms are structured through a socio-cultural view of learning and learning differences rather than from a medical or deficit perspective. The examples provided above, both from existing literature and from Mary Moran’s classroom, support a need to demonstrate “face-to-face material social relations” (Luke, 2012, p. viii) of pedagogies in which differences are central to instructional practices. I presented the participation and learning of two of Ms. Moran’s students, Nyla and Jacob, using a three-dimensional framework of socially-just inclusive education and a high expectations curriculum for all learners. Both cases illustrate rich learning when whole class instruction is designed to value their personal and community interests and provide them with authentic reasons for learning the expected academic language of procedural writing. In other words, Nyla and Jacob participated in collective learning, along with their peers, that retained the high expectations for both literacy and content learning. Their written work demonstrates achievement of these expectations. The dialogue presented above also demonstrates how collective rather than segregated instruction retained students’ identity as capable, autonomous, and smart. Importantly, this argument for centering difference in the creation of high expectations learning classrooms does not equate to ignoring learning diversity. Along with collective participation, students such as Jacob and Nyla benefit from “intensive, explicit, and individualized” instruction that is responsive to their specific learning needs (Dudley-Marling & Paugh, 2004, p. vi). However, within a socially inclusive classroom, such instruction supports rather than segregates. Responsive teachers, such as Ms. Thao Vo described above, often find that such specific support can benefit many or all students as well as small groups or individuals.

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Finally, as Woods et al. (2015) have argued, a third dimension of a socially just and inclusive education is attention to, and advocacy for, the equitable distribution of resources and capital. In lower income areas, typically large urban school districts and isolated rural areas, schools do not receive the financial and material capital necessary to provide proper access to knowledge for understanding and thriving in schools and society. For example, Ms. Moran’s school, like many in the district, lacked a school library. In addition, power dynamics in such communities do not always invite or recognize the needs of families with limited financial resources and/or cultural differences into the school environment. As a teacher, Ms. Moran frequented several city libraries and elicited permission to borrow large numbers of texts over longer periods of time for classroom use. Integral to her teaching was also eliciting support from local organizations to contribute resources such as field trips or gardening supplies. While she was willing to take up such initiatives, as well as tap family knowledge through her curriculum design, it is imperative that inclusion includes the distribution of such capital for less resourced schools as integral to larger reform policies. As this chapter argues, the greatest possibilities for inclusive education exist when all resources—individual and community—are invited into classrooms in ways that interrupt the existing invisible segregation of diverse learners.

References Alim, H. S., Baglieri, S., Ladson-Billings, G., Paris, D., Rose, D. H., & Valente, J. M. (2017). A Harvard Educational Review forum responding to “cross-pollinating culturally sustaining pedagogy and universal design for learning: Toward an inclusive pedagogy that accounts for dis/ability.” Harvard Educational Review, 87(1), 4–25. Annandale, K., Bindon, R., Broz, J., Dougan, J., Handley, K., Johnston, A., Lockett, L., Lynch, P., & Rourke, R. (2006). First steps writing resource book: Addressing current literacy challenges. Heinemann. Brisk, M. (2015). Engaging students in academic literacies: Genre-based pedagogy for K-5 classrooms. Routledge. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164–195. Davis, L. J. (1995). Enforcing normalcy: Disability, deafness, and the body. Verso. Davis, L. J. (2013). The end of identity politics: On disability as an unstable category. In L. J. Davis (Ed.), The disability studies reader (pp. 263–277). Routledge. Dudley-Marling, C. (2015). The resilience of deficit thinking. Journal of Teaching and Learning, 10(1), 1–12. Dudley-Marling, C., & Burns, M. B. (2014). Two perspectives on inclusion in the United States. Global Education Review, 1(1), 14–31. Dudley-Marling, C., & Gurn, A. (2010). Introduction: Living on the boundaries of normal. In C. Dudley-Marling & A. Gurn (Eds.), The myth of the normal curve (pp. 1–8). Peter Lang. Dudley-Marling, C., & Michaels, S. (2012). Introduction. In C. Dudley-Marling & S. Michaels (Eds.), The power of high expectations curricula: Helping all students succeed with powerful learning (pp. 1–11). Teachers College Press. Dudley-Marling, C., & Paugh, P. (2004). A classroom teacher’s guide to struggling readers. Heinemann. Duke, N., Caughlan, S., Juzwik, M., & Martin, N. (2012). Reading and writing GENRE with purpose in K-8 Classrooms. Heinemann.

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Dyson, A. H. (2015). The search for inclusion: Deficit discourse and the erasure of childhoods. Language Arts, 92(3), 199–207. Every Student Succeeds Act, 20 U.S.C. § 6301. (2015). https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-con gress/senate-bill/1177 Gibbons, P. (2014). Scaffolding language: Scaffolding learning (2nd ed.). Heinemann. Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to mean. In E. Lenneberg & E. Lenneberg (Eds.), Foundations of language development: A multidisciplinary approach (pp. 239–265). Academic Press. Hehir, T. (2002). Eliminating ableism in education. Harvard Educational Review, 72(1), 1–33. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1400. (2004). Luke, A. (2012). Forward. In C. Dudley-Marling & S. Michaels (Eds.), High-expectation curricula: Helping all students engage in powerful learning (pp. vii–x). Teachers College Press. Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2008). Genre relations: Mapping culture. Equinox. McDermott, R. P. (1993). The acquisition of a child by a learning disability. In S. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context (pp. 269–305). Cambridge University Press. McDermott, R., & Varenne, H. (1995). Culture as disability. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 26(3), 324–348. McMillon, G. T., & Edwards, P. A. (2000). Why does Joshua “hate” school . . . but love Sunday school? Language Arts, 78(2), 111–120. Michaels, S. (1981). “Sharing time”: Children’s narrative styles and differential access to literacy. Language in Society, 10(3), 423–442. Moje, E. B. (2000). Circles of kinship, friendship, position and power: Examining the community in community-based literacy research. Journal of Literacy Research, 32(1), 77–112. National Center on Inclusive Education. (2011). Rationale for and research on inclusive education. Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire. http://iod.unh.edu/PriorityAreas/inc lusive-education/about_NCIE.aspx Paugh, P. (2002). Collaborative conversations: A systematic inquiry into students who struggle in school [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Boston College. Paugh, P. (2015). Discourses as resources: Active literacy practices and a microculture of rich meaning making in an urban elementary classroom. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 64(1), 132–148. Paugh, P. (2018). Trusting the students and each other: A story of critical collaborative praxis and critical literacy practice in an urban U.S. classroom. Interfaces Científicas-Educação, 7(1), 37–46. Paugh, P., & Moran, M. (2013). Growing language awareness in the classroom garden. Language Arts, 90(4), 253–267. Waitoller, F. R., & Artiles, A. J. (2013). A decade of professional development research for inclusive education: A critical review and notes for research program. Review of Educational Research, 83(3), 319–356. Waitholler, F., & Thorius, K. (2016). Cross pollinating culturally sustaining pedagogy and universal design for learning: Toward an inclusive pedagogy that accounts for dis/ability. Harvard Educational Review, 86(3), 366–389. Woods, A., Comber, B., & Iyer, R. (2015). Literacy learning: Designing and enacting inclusive pedagogical practices in classrooms. In J. M. Deppeler, T., R. Smith & L. Florian (Eds.), Inclusive pedagogy across the curriculum. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/93658/

Patricia C. Paugh Ph.D. is a professor in the department of curriculum & instruction at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests include literacy education, critical pedagogy, teacher inquiry, and disciplinary literacies in urban elementary classrooms. A former elementary teacher, she is committed to promoting high challenge, anti-racist, asset-based policies and practices for public education.

Chapter 3

Collaboration in Career and Technical Education to Support All Learners: Reflections and Practices from the Field Marta Albert, Cindy Ciaralli, and Nancy Pitman

Introduction Mrs. P., we do not dye hair! We color hair! Hey! Kyle is exhibiting progress in his cognitive skills! He can count to 20 now and recognized 15 letters today! Mrs. Selzer has prehypertension; her systolic number was 135 and her diastolic number was 89 this morning.

These were the conversations Nancy heard as she wandered through the building during her first year as an Academic Integration Specialist in Madison-Oneida Career and Technical Center (M–O), a regional Career Technical Education (CTE) school in New York State. A secondary English teacher, Nancy pushes into career-technical program classrooms to teach academic concepts that are related to the material being taught by the program instructor. The advanced vocabulary and professional tone being used by juniors and seniors in high school stood out immediately when she began to explore her role as a language arts specialist. Fourteen years have passed, and she has learned that these student–teacher conversations are the norm, not anomalies, in her school. Higher level or industry- (career-) specific vocabulary rolls off the lips of students as if they have been comfortable with these terms since birth. M. Albert (B) The State University of New York, Potsdam, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Ciaralli · N. Pitman Madison-Oneida BOCES, Verona, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] N. Pitman e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 T. Abodeeb-Gentile and D. A. Conrad (eds.), Intersections of Diversity, Literacy, and Learner Difficulties, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3532-9_3

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Observations and experiences such as these have been formative for Nancy in defining what it means to bring what is known as an academic perspective to careertechnical studies among students with diverse learning strengths and challenges. A novice in the CTE environment when she began working at M–O, her stance regarding both the goals and practices of teaching English Language Arts (ELA) has been transformed, and her membership in a workplace culture that emphasizes cross-boundary effort among teachers has changed how she thinks about high school education generally. Indeed, the three of us came into our work related to CTE from traditional teacher education pathways in academic subject areas and through community-based youth work with a strong career exploration component. For several years, we have been collaborating to create mutually beneficial experiences to support Nancy’s and Cindy’s secondary students as writers and readers, while also increasing knowledge of CTE among Marta’s teacher education students who are preparing to teach mathematics, science, and social studies or to earn advanced degrees and additional certification as literacy specialists. In this chapter, we share examples of integration through descriptions of teaching in M–O, as well as details of a project we developed to link M–O and college students. We relate brief stories of students who gained skills and developed new literacy practices during their final year or two of school to draw attention to processes and practices that support the learning goals of the Academic Integration Team (AIT) approach. Secondary CTE is a generative site for concept and technical knowledge growth among students who may or may not excel in traditional school settings. Further, CTE is a productive site in which pre-service teachers can build knowledge of diverse learners and purposes for learning that can resist persistent academicvocational divides (Rose, 2016). Our aim is twofold: we shine a light on CTE and offer ideas that practitioners might replicate in their own sites of practice, and we provide researchers with perspectives from which they can draw to broaden their thinking about adolescent literacies and CTE’s academic-technical integration emphasis as a resource for positive youth development.

Career and Technical Education, Academic-Technical Integration, and Literacy Since the 1990s, there has been concerted effort nationally to reform secondary-level CTE, resulting in pronounced institutional and curricular changes. Carl D. Perkins legislation from 2006 to the present has required CTE programs receiving federal funds to demonstrate, among other goals, how they prepare students for postsecondary education, as well as workforce participation; ways in which they address high-demand and high-wage potential career fields; approaches to equity and access; student performance on statewide academic achievement indicators, and more (Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006; Advance CTE & Association for Career and Technical Education, 2018). CTE programs and courses now

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routinely integrate technical and academic concepts and practices in both traditional and emerging areas of study in trades, services, and technology fields (Park et al., 2017). Many programs enable students to earn both academic and technical high school credit through CTE participation, and systemic changes have strengthened partnerships between schools and colleges, and, to an extent, among education, labor, and community sectors in an unprecedented manner (Stone & Lewis, 2012; Visher & Stern, 2015). Although research about the sustained impact or causal nature of CTE on students’ academic postsecondary education and employment outcomes remains scarce (compared with descriptive studies that are plentiful), findings from recent impact and evaluation research point clearly to the important role of CTE in advancing high school graduation and post-secondary employment for many youth, particularly when students pursue intensive or advanced CTE study, rather than taking only introductory courses. Positive effects have been noted, in particular, among low-income students (Dougherty, 2016; Kreisman & Stange, 2019); students with disabilities (Dougherty et al., 2018; Theobald et al., 2017) and rural male students (Kreisman & Stange, 2019). Nationally, CTE courses and programs are offered in comprehensive and specialized high schools, as well as through shared-service structures that provide technical education to students from many school districts. Technical Center-based schools sponsored through the area-wide Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) are common across New York State (though not in New York City, which has its own system for offering CTE (see Jacoby & Dougherty, 2016). Nearly 25% of all secondary students in New York State enroll in CTE, with more than half designated as concentrators who complete a structured set of at least two year-long courses, sequenced as career programs that have been vetted for approval by the State Education Department and are aligned with national CTE and industry standards. Students who are CTE concentrators in New York have a 92% graduation rate; this is higher than the overall graduation rate (Association for Career & Technical Education, 2019). Furthermore, secondary students had the opportunity to earn college credit in 67% of the approved programs offered statewide in 2017–2018 (Perkins Collaborative Resource Network, n.d.). According to Advocates for Children of New York (2016), in comparison with their non-CTE counterparts, students with disabilities in New York State appear to fare particularly well when they are CTE concentrators. These students have significantly higher rates of graduation and fewer pronounced gaps in graduation compared with general education students overall. Despite these positive outcomes, variations exist statewide in terms of the rates of concentrator-level participation among students with disabilities. This is in relation to the overall participation of these students in CTE (roughly 15%) and to the proportion of students with disabilities in a Technical Center’s component school districts. Taken together, these conditions suggest a need to strengthen pipelines into CTE and improve support throughout schooling and postsecondary transitions for students with disabilities.

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The types of collaborative teaching approaches for academic-technical integration reflected in Nancy’s and Cindy’s accounts below emerged around 2001 in New York as a primary method to achieve transformation of CTE, and to position it as a partner in policy reform mandating successful completion of academic Regents courses and exit exams as a condition of graduation for all students, including those who previously would have earned a so-called local diploma (frequently including students in CTE programs and students with disabilities). Early in the high school reform process, the state’s collaborative teaching policy gained national recognition as a model for academic-technical integration. The policy had emerged as a central element of CTE as programs sought State Education approval in response to the new graduation requirements. More than fifteen years after high school and the CTE reform took root, a 2017 study spearheaded by the New York State Career and Technical Education Technical Assistance provided a fresh perspective on academictechnical integration. In their report, Shafer et al. (2017) noted the pervasiveness of collaborative teaching and of differentiated curricula and instruction that meant that “students with disabilities are provided with the same academic content as their general education peers” (p. 24). To build on these achievements, they emphasized the need to strengthen the presence and role of consultant special education teachers to collaborate and co-teach with technical and academic teachers. Flexible school structures, professional learning communities, strategic teacher induction, pre-service teacher education aligned with the aims of academic-technical integration, and support for diverse CTE learners are all needed to advance the vision of collaboration that appears to be the bedrock of CTE today. Kline et al. (2015) reported on the success of an online professional development program in Missouri using National Writing Project approaches. The program aimed to build a community of practice across a range of educators (CTE teachers, academic subject teachers, and university faculty) who explored literacy in CTE and teaching methods. Central to this effort was the positioning of “participants with opportunities to be writers and readers and to reflect on their experiences as writers and readers” (p. 29). This ethos was viewed as essential because it meant that all participants experienced being part of “a culture of literacy” (p. 28) that could be extended into their own teaching. Rather than cookie-cutter approaches to literacy integration, this model focused on mutual support to promote teacher agency. The model’s thrust was to allow teachers’ varied and unique teaching philosophies to guide the uptake, use, and character of the literacy practices they used in their pedagogy (Kohnen, 2015). In Connecticut, Diaz and Visone (2018) described the success of the Literacy Growth Pilot Program in a technical high school. The initiative brought together several technical teachers with English, English language, and literacy intervention teachers to address the needs of secondary CTE students who were reading below fifth-grade level. Coordinated planning time to develop supportive curricula, pedagogy, and interventions that occurred in technical courses, as well as weekly team sessions of all educators to analyze literacy data and use findings for the refinement of approaches, contributed to the growth of students’ reading skills. Student use of literacy strategies across academic and technical classes also expanded.

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Academic-technical integration in CTE is not governed by a single theory or model of literacy; the approaches influencing a great deal of curriculum development and pedagogy reflect sociocultural and situated practice views of literacy. From these perspectives, literacy is viewed in terms of socialization into particular uses of language for specific purposes. Gee et al. (1996, p. 3) described literacy as “ways of being and uses of language and text to reach particular goals within Discourse communities.” These ways of being and uses of language foster identities in and through practice (Wenger, 1999). To gain expertise as a language user is to gain footing in the activities and associated identities for which language is used. Many types of interactions with texts comprised of many modes, forms, and genres prove useful to advance literacy development, empowering learners with skills and practices for work and further learning, active citizenship, and personal and social growth (Darvin, 2006; Ivanic et al., 2009; Jocson, 2018).

Background, Purpose, and Method: School Contexts and Partnership M–O is located in central New York, with students coming from rural, small town, and small city component districts. In 2017–2018, 910 students attended M–O, where they took classes and/or participated in worksite internships for half of each school day. Approximately 21% were classified as students with disabilities. The school offers 21 programs in a range of career pathway fields. These are primarily sequenced, two-year programs, although students may also take one-year New Visions Professions programs that offer dual high school and college credit or pursue special education-focused instruction. The student population of M–O represents 43% of all juniors and seniors in the M–O component districts in the region, an increase in participation of 5% since 2015–2016 (Madison-Oneida BOCES School Report Card, n.d.). According to statewide school report card data, this level of participation in CTE by young people can be seen across rural regions of New York, suggesting that CTE plays an important role in rural youth development. Nancy and Cindy have each been faculty members on M–O’s AIT for more than 14 years; the team also includes science and mathematics teachers. Marta has been a college faculty member in the rural North Country of New York for 13 years, teaching literacy education courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her background includes work with youth at risk of school dropout, the administration of youth programs, and curriculum and teaching related to career development and gender equity at high school and community college levels. We developed a connection initially through Marta’s research about methods used in rural CTE Centers to define and address literacy needs. M–O’s AIT stood out as a unique approach, and Marta wanted to learn more about how AIT developed, the organizational practices supporting it, and the design and impact of AIT-style teaching on learners. Nancy and Cindy took an interest in helping Marta learn about

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AIT as a feature of their school culture by participating in her ethnographic study and then through collaborating to develop curriculum-oriented projects. Details of the latter are featured in this chapter. All student and teacher names mentioned in the accounts are pseudonyms. A hallmark of our work together has been a commitment to creating experiences to support secondary students, while also increasing knowledge of CTE among Marta’s teacher education students. We have used friendly letter exchanges to facilitate student-to-student dialogue to encourage questions and promote the exchange of information and ideas related to career learning, and to instigate conversations about transitions to work, extended training, and college. In addition, we have developed curriculum projects with an emphasis on writing, positioning Marta’s college students as writing coaches to assist secondary students as they compose essays and develop oral presentations. For example, college writing coaches provide feedback to CTE student authors as they planned and composed the informational children’s books that Marta introduces later in this chapter. While one aim of these projects is to broaden CTE students’ literacy practices and enhance their “college knowledge” (Conley, 2010, p. 18), they are designed also to expose teacher candidates to an ecology of learning and teaching that Marta has found to be largely invisible in their teacher education experiences. Without direct exposure to CTE, teacher candidates may develop limited knowledge about the interests and capabilities of many of their future students. They also miss out on opportunities to explore ways of bridging their subject-area focus with concepts and practices embedded in CTE fields, and to investigate the approaches used in CTE that foster the student resilience in learning that Nancy and Cindy frequently witness through their work as AIT instructors. M–O’s AIT approach and the collaborations it involves offer preservice educators new viewpoints about how high school coursebased teaching can be organized, working against silo approaches (Pearson, 2015). Moreover, knowledge of CTE at the level of pre-service teacher educators can help deconstruct stigmas they may harbor about CTE which, despite decades of effort by educators, policymakers, and advocates, persist and often reinforce an academictechnical divide (Gammill, 2015).

Positioning Our Work: Related Methodologies Interpretive epistemologies offer a valuable outlook on the study of schools as complex dynamic cultures. In educational research, examples abound of the use of narrative, portraiture, and case study analytic frameworks to gain insight into how schools operate at macro and micro levels. For instance, systematic examination of narratives about teaching practice has helped to build a vital source of knowledge about learners, learning, and teacher identity as Sisk-Hilton and Meier (2016) have pointed out. The use of portraiture strategies deepens practical and theoretical knowledge of schools as organizations and can bring to light the operations and effects of complex decision-making structures on ordinary experiences of school

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life (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2005). Further, as Thomas (2017) explained, case study methods offer “explanation through in-depth inquiry and insider accounts, producing ‘little theories’ and ‘miniature theories’ via the ‘multiple realities’ of Berger and Luckmann (1979). These prove to be the life-blood of serious, transformative inquiry in education” (p. 260). Conducting formal research has not been the aim of the partnership activities we present, yet the stance we have adopted resonates with interpretive frames that characterize qualitative methodologies, and our work certainly benefits from the insights of such research. Using approaches consistent with narrative, portraiture, and case study, we regularly exchange and analyze stories of our teaching processes to construct goals for our collaborative work, gather and analyze data that can help us make sense of integration efforts in situated contexts of practice, search for patterns of value and meaningfulness, and craft projects that can enhance experiences of learning and knowledge of youth literacy for our varied student populations. As AIT instructors, for example, Nancy’s and Cindy’s process for lesson development involves classroom observation, interviews with career-technical colleagues, and artifact analysis to gain emic perspective about course concepts and pedagogies in the classes they will co-teach. At the college level, Marta constructs narrative cases based on Nancy’s and Cindy’s work to serve as inquiry tools for students in her courses as they work to map theory and methods about literacy development and teaching. In developing the accounts we present below, we selected stories that highlight a range of ways in which academic-technical integration fosters concept and literacy development among the diverse learners representative of M–O’s student body. We also share our thinking about the significance and potential for integration to foster student resilience, especially in relation to challenges in literacy many students bring to CTE studies.

Portraits of Practice In this section, we share first-person teaching accounts that complement the research base related to literacy and academic-technical integration in CTE. To begin, Nancy and Cindy introduce some of the features of school culture and organizational design in M–O that help integration to thrive there. We conclude with an example based on our school-college collaborations.

Nancy and Cindy: Welcome to M–O! The song “Celebrate” is queued to play, and a box of handheld instruments and “Welcome” signs are ready to be put to use. It is the first day of school at M–O, and a group of teachers and administrators waits for the buses to arrive. Once the first bus

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comes down the driveway, the music blares and the welcome celebration begins! For senior students, this is a welcome back to their second year—a transition year on the path to college, the military, or work. The juniors are brand new to our school and do not have any idea what the two years ahead have in store. Some first-years get off the bus with smiles of delight, others avoid eye contact and rush for the school entry doors, and others just look in bewilderment not daring to ask, “Do you do this every day?” Our school hopes that this first-day greeting will set the tone for students in showing them that they have arrived at a school that is glad they chose to come and participate in a unique learning environment. In our experience, CTE is a place where many students make a start at seeing their own potential. Although we are part of AIT, a specific team identified as academic, we see all teachers in M–O as academic teachers. The vocabulary of our CTE programs is academic; students have to know it to do the work. Our specific role is to make visible and enhance concepts that might be labeled academic in career-oriented studies since we view these concepts as naturally occurring in such studies. This way of thinking about academic and career-technical connections is a mindset. Through ongoing conversations and connections with our colleagues, we are provided with a conduit to develop projects that use our subject area knowledge to enhance and deepen student learning in diverse career fields. We are well aware of the need for supportive CTE experiences that fully address commencement-level learning standards in both academic and career domains. In partnership with our CTE colleagues, our job is to figure out how we can help all students meet these standards. For us, the mindset supporting AIT is a direct result of the commitment to promote a collaborative model of teaching and learning in all our differing classes, covering a wide variety of learners and content. Collaboration is promoted and evident every day through our use of a project-based learning model to link teachers on the AIT with Career-Tech counterparts. School directors established this team as part of extending what we think of the philosophy of support that lies at the core of the school’s culture. Family-like is an apt way to describe the atmosphere and the practices that enable this spirit to thrive and is seen in activities as diverse as developing a clothing closet and food pantry, to sliding into and out of each other’s rooms when last-minute help or substitutes are needed. School members focus on meeting the needs of students and ensuring their success by consciously modeling supportive caring relationships and teachers’ continual learning. An after-school group called Meeting of the Minds, where any staff person can discuss ideas, concerns, or issues to benefit students, exemplifies the collaborative ethos of M–O. Spearheaded by a longtime teacher-leader and rooted in the idea that cultivating collegial conversations about practice can foster professional growth, this informal-feeling group became the foundation for our school’s beginning to honor the expertise of our own faculty enough to offer in-service workshops on teacher training days. Meeting of the Minds promotes the model of classes working with other classes, and students mentoring other students to cultivate a culture of support. In recent years we have adopted a teacher-suggested annual theme to sustain and extend the goals of Meeting of the Minds. One such theme, “Operation Collaboration”

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inspired cross-curricular connections linking teachers and students in new ways. For instance, health careers students designed modules related to safety, first aid, and hygiene that they customized and taught in a variety of other career classes, and graphic design students collaborated with the New Visions Professions to design business logos, business cards, and posters for their small business plan simulation projects. Experiences such as these support our focus on student professionalism and reinforce our goal of involving students in productive student-to-student connections to address real-world relevant purposes in the everyday life of our school. Use of literacy and communication practices are part and parcel of putting these collaborations in place and getting necessary work accomplished.

Nancy: Talk, Tools, Tasks—The Literacy Trifecta At M–O, we plan literacy strategies in both formal and informal ways. The Academic Team instructors meet once a month with all CTE teachers. We also have numerous casual meetings in the hallways, while sharing lunch, or in the parking lot. These formal and informal meetings frequently result in deliberately planned lessons. However, literacy skills are also learned many times, through naturally occurring avenues in CTE lessons that are actually focused on teaching CTE skills. Despite this design, examples of student–teacher conversations such as those we shared at the start of this chapter seemed odd to me when I first began my M–O career. I had served as a Board of Education Member for M–O prior to crossing the table to become an employee. In that position, I learned that many of the students we serve have Independent Education Plans (IEPs), 504 Plans, are learning disabled, or have simply struggled with school because of a lack of interest, family support, or personal focus. A recent cohort included roughly 20% who were identified formally as students with learning disabilities. However, many other students demonstrated significantly lower-than-grade-level reading skills. These students may have had undiagnosed learning disabilities or were struggling because of gaps in their education such as, for example, moving from school to school, absenteeism, or other issues. So, I was not expecting so many students to be as professionally articulate as they were when they were discussing their fields of study. I have learned that CTE adds to students’ vocabulary in a natural and authentic way. Although we may play an occasional word game or have a quiz as a vocabulary strategy, more often than not students build their vocabulary because they have a strong interest in their program of study as McCarthy (2014) has observed. Students are also invested in learning vocabulary because they need to be able to communicate in an authentic situation in which they are or will be participating. These can include a salon, nursery setting, or clinical rotation. The teenagers I have interacted with and observed over my tenure at M–O appear to crave hands-on experiences—not simply playing with manipulatives. They anticipate real work that produces products or services that real clients, customers, and patients want, need, and seek. These students

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take great pride in being responsible and carrying out the tasks of a professional. This pride often fuels their desire to learn the talk, the tools, and the tasks of the trade all of which informs how I define and shape literacy experiences in collaboration with their technical education instructors. All students in CTE programs begin with the talk about their trade and are then introduced to the tools used in their field of interest, followed by practice of their uses, or tasks. Most students arrive at M–O with a strong desire to begin the true work of their chosen trade. Some students are horrified when they realize that they will not be creating a soufflé, flushing an exhaust system, or building a staircase on the first day, in the first week, month, marking period, or perhaps even year of their program. This horror, in most cases, turns to interest and, subsequently, hard work once the students realize that they must learn a new language, safety precautions, proper procedures, laws, and very specific skills before they can carry out the tasks that they so hope to be able to complete. This interest coupled with the need to learn sparks motivation and makes reading, writing, listening, and speaking in their chosen classes less of a chore and more of a means to a desirable and transparent end. A specific example of this type of domino effect occurs each year in our Early Childhood Education Program (ECE). My colleagues who teach ECE make it very clear at the start of each year that the Year 1 students will need to get up to speed quickly with the way that children under the age of five learn and develop. They expose their teenage students to new vocabulary and require them to use professional language at all times both in the classroom and when they are interacting with the young children who attend the student-run nursery. I have observed that the teens catch on very quickly regarding the language expectations that are modelled by their instructors. Just a few weeks into their program, the students begin to use terms such as cognitive development, social and emotional behavior, fine and gross motor skills as well as many others. It is one thing to simply use terms but to have a deep understanding of them is quite another. Students who listen to lectures, read textbooks, and/or participate in class discussions on these topics may be able to use them properly when speaking. However, those who are able to interact with young children and actually observe the concepts in practice truly gain a deeper understanding of the vocabulary. ECE students at M–O are required to use professional language when communicating with their teachers, children in the nursery, and the parents of these children. They are also required to keep Observation Journals throughout their first year in this program. Toward the end of the year, they write a detailed report based on extensive observations and they develop well thought-out and planned recommendations about strengthening children’s areas of weakness. The report must detail how their observations led them to draw conclusions about children’s strengths and weaknesses in four key areas of growth and development. This project incorporates both ELA and mathematical skills. Although the teens observe the children in the student-run nursery and write factual statements about the children and their behavior, they must also calculate the amount of time children spend in their learning centers.

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They use these mathematical calculations to create a graph, and then analyze the graph for patterns about observed behavior related to children’s level of interest in certain activities. ECE students then make inferences and formulate ideas, based on the graph and the child’s overall behavior, about how to spark the child’s interest in new valuable activities or those that were previously more difficult for the child to complete. My work several years ago with ECE teachers and a struggling student, Shayla, gave rise to ECE’s Observation Report and to the idea of combining academic areas (ELA and math) to deepen and strengthen literacy through contextualized activity. Shayla was a first-year ECE student with an IEP. She struggled with reading and required testing modifications that included having text read to her and being granted extended time. She came to M–O with a reading level far below what is expected of her age and grade. During the first marking period, she often complained about having to read and write, saying that she “couldn’t” or “didn’t want” to complete work. She often spoke out of turn during lessons stating that she was “dumb” and just wanted to “babysit kids” not do all this “school stuff.” Her instructor gently let her know that what she called just babysitting takes a great deal of work and that children must be kept safe and must be cared for properly. The instructor zeroed-in on her love of children and used that to get and keep her attention. When Shayla complained about having to learn what she thought of “difficult” and “confusing” information related to child development, she was reminded that to take care of a child properly, she must know the stages of development. She was reluctant to join class discussions and answer questions during lectures although she did appear to be paying attention. There was a turning point for Shayla when the reality of the student-run nursery set in. After only a month of classroom instruction, the ECE students began interacting with children under the age of five who visited their classroom three times a week for a nursery school experience. It was evident almost immediately that Shayla had a knack for working with young children. She was able to calm those who cried when their parents left and get them to participate in learning activities even when they resisted at first. Not only her instructors but also her peers recognized her talents and gave her many compliments and much encouragement. This appeared to give her confidence a boost and her behavior during times of instruction and lecture began to change. She listened more intently and began to use higher level vocabulary and pride herself on noticing when the young children showed improvement in the four developmental areas. When I observed her progress a few years back, I approached the math integration specialist, who suggested that we create a project together that would showcase our students’ ability to observe young children, describe their behavior factually, then draw conclusions and create a plan for these children to improve upon skills that were weak or learn new skills. This was the genesis of the Observation Report that integrated both mathematics and ELA. Every year that we give this assignment, the instructions, directions, and, ultimately, the end products improve considerably. This example illustrates the beauty of the academic integration process: the academic team works together to create the very best plan possible, and unlike a

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traditional high school, we have the luxury of interacting with our students each day for longer periods of time than do typical teachers. We also achieve a looping effect by teaching most of our students for two years in a row. The uniqueness of our situation lends itself to the natural strengthening of literacy skills among learners with diverse literacy strengths, weaknesses, and practices under their belts.

Cindy: Building Context, Not Compartments—Social Studies Teaching and Civic Learning For the last fifteen years, I have taught Social Studies 12 Economics, the Enterprise System and Finance, and Participation in Government and Civics to students in traditional two-year CTE courses and one-year New Visions programs. Working with the career instructors, I develop lessons that instruct, highlight, and enhance the social studies standards in the given career topic. As Nancy describes, the process of academic integration involves a careful analysis of the career curriculum, working with the career educator to develop ideas, and, lastly, teaching and/or co-teaching the designed lessons or projects. Above all, this model relies on the collaboration and support of all staff. Although component district leaders make the decision about whether to award academic credit in these integrated courses, in the model of M–O, all CTE students experience the same curriculum and integrated approach. Having time to plan with colleagues is an integral component of academic integration success. Career-technical teachers and the academic integration team meet regularly to plan, providing the CTE teachers with an opportunity to lay out the direction of their classes for the near future. The academic team offers lesson ideas where applicable. Sometimes these meetings are a simple confirmation of tried-andtrue lessons, but often a new idea is born from discussions. For example, in a recent school year the Early Childhood Education classes wished to expand upon the topic of government-run food programs, a topic covered for first-year students. All students are required to understand the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), a federal government-sponsored program that provides nutritional planning support for daycare centers serving children and elders. During our co-planning meeting discussion, the question arose of whether we should include in our lesson why certain foods are required by CACFP. The lesson then evolved to include the science teacher who offered to teach the nutritional makeup of the food options promoted by CACFP. This evolution broadened the lesson from a focus on government agencies and their purpose, such as the United States Department of Agriculture, to create a deeper learning experience. In one lesson, students were taught the government regulations. Students also examined how, when, and why the regulations were developed and were also treated to a tasting menu of CACFP- recommended foods. To explain protein sources, students tasted samples of meat alternatives to compare with meat products and to explore alternative sources of protein, such as soy. Students who opted to try the

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food provided verbal feedback regarding not just the taste but whether the preschool students they work with would enjoy eating the food. They also learned to compare saturated and unsaturated fats, and many other nutritional features of food. Through collaborative planning and teaching, this lesson was elevated from a simple lecture to an experiential investigation that elicited strong verbal responses and academic engagement. The conclusion of the lesson asked students to reflect on how they would incorporate the CACFP food guidelines into the onsite nursery program. The civics question of this inquiry asked the students to argue whether the government should be involved in regulating nutritional choices. The students provided positive feedback regarding this lesson, and assessments showed that nearly every student remembered the CACFP guidelines, the science-based nutritional reasons for the guidelines, and the federal government’s role in creating food and its nutrition standards. In addition, this is information that each student will use in their internship sites in the senior year. Even the most reluctant learners participated in the lesson. This lesson was born of discussion and steeped in what makes CTE learning so powerful—its relevance! To teach academics in CTE means to employ the pedagogical tools used by educational professionals to ensure that the lesson material is delivered with the greatest likelihood of success. As an academic teacher at a CTE school, my job is to uphold the educational standards of my discipline but, more importantly, to impart the relevance of the standards to CTE learners. It is the relevance of the lesson topics that opens the gateway for learners to become more invested in their learning and, in turn, to become more resilient when they experience learning challenges. CTE students come to a program hoping to explore and develop professional skills for life. Our students seek practical knowledge to become carpenters, electricians, preschool teachers, law enforcement professionals, and more, and along the way, they gain conceptual knowledge, often without even knowing it. CTE can capture the curiosity of students because the material is not compartmentalized and is, instead, contextualized. For example, in a school where classrooms allow students to operate heavy equipment, weld, use a variety of hand tools, work with electricity and learn knife skills—real-world skills and risks associated with skilled careers—safety is a priority. Of serious significance is chemical safety. The first few weeks of the firstyear programs are spent on safety instruction that incorporates understanding the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). My science colleague and I teach lessons about the origins of OSHA and the Hazard Communication Standard governing chemicals. Lesson activities include learning Right to Know Laws that govern workplace chemicals. These lessons prove valuable in CTE and outside of school because many students work part-time and have experience handling chemicals at work. The vast majority admit they do not know what chemicals they are working with. We position them as experienced in their careers and explore relevant texts together as resources to strengthen their professional knowledge. Students who can identify the chemicals with which they work are an asset to the lesson because they represent a peer acknowledgement of the significance of the lesson material. My goal is to ensure that the students understand the laws that exist

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to protect them. This back-door approach to the topic of how laws are created and implemented is how all learners are reached. Understanding the role government plays in their lives is a learning standard but relating it to their career field can help remove the stigma attached to a subject. The function and structure of government are much more relevant in the context of employment and personal safety. Echoing Nancy’s account, my students learn the scientific vocabulary necessary to read a Safety Data Sheet (SDS) that is required to accompany any chemical in the workplace. Students are provided with a scaffolded learning experience during which they practice reading SDS sheets to use the previously taught vocabulary. The culminating activity is reading an SDS for a chemical used frequently in the classroom lab. In all the years I have supported this lesson I have never heard a student say, “Why do I need to know this?” The relevance of this safety topic is clear, the role that the US government plays to protect the health and safety of the American worker is understood, and how such legislation was enacted is explained and the educational expectations of being safe are cemented over the course of a three-day lesson.

Integrating the Integration Project- and activity-based teaching and learning have a long history in the field of education. Our approach is to design projects in which we “integrate the integration”; in other words, we explore how all academic subjects relate to a given topic. Our best projects/lessons involve all academic subjects. The AIT model helps to drive home the understanding that academics are embedded in their career-technical courses. As a former M–O Technical Center Director used to say about academics in career-tech, “It’s in there.” Our job is to create authentic learning opportunities that best bring forth the academics. A Health Occupations course project exemplifies AIT-based collective planning to “integrate the integration” and its impact on learners with literacy challenges. The topic was one taken from news headlines when a recent resurgence of measles in the United States put childhood immunizations in the spotlight. A Health Professions teacher and I considered how the topic of immunization controversy could be taught. Using our typical cross-disciplinary planning approach, we first developed learning goals and objectives that would address both disciplinary standards, and our interdisciplinary aims. We then determined the learning products to be created by the students and the methods of evaluation to be used. This topic provided us with a treasure trove of learning opportunities: the history of epidemics; the government’s role in requiring vaccines; the role of social media and how questionable sources have informed public opinion; and the exploration of how vaccines work and what diseases children are typically immunized against. Each instructor took responsibility for creating their own teaching materials to cover their assigned objectives. We developed mini-lessons to guide students to their final product that was a scientific

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poster to be presented to classmates on one of the diseases against which children are immunized. The entire instructional process was based on a modified university-developed case study question, rooted in a scenario involving a young mother who was struggling with the dilemma of whether she should have her child vaccinated. Our students were challenged to research their assigned disease to explain its pathophysiology, symptoms, treatments, and how the vaccine worked. To conclude the learning experience, students wrote a letter to the mother providing a comprehensive answer to her dilemma about vaccination. A picture of resilience. Fran was a reluctant Health Occupations student with learning and behavior issues. Her career-technical teacher needed to remind her frequently of the need to act and behave like a nursing professional. Among Fran’s biggest concerns was public speaking. Imagine the delight of her teachers when Fran participated in the class presentation day during which she wore her clinical uniform and set up her professional poster explaining the childhood vaccine for diphtheria. She stood proudly with her classmates to present her research not only to her teachers but also to her peers from another health professions class. This represented an academic achievement for her like no other. To get Fran to this point took a team effort of teachers collaborating and guiding her and her classmates. With the support and guidance of her teachers, all grounded in the same instructional focus and learning goals, Fran was able to conduct the necessary research and create a professional scientific poster. Even more impressive was the fact that she knew the material well enough to teach it to her peers. An achievement like this was possible because she saw the relevance of the assignment, she embraced the rigor of the work, and she was coached along the way by a variety of teachers.

Marta: Extending Integration Through School-College Collaboration “It seems incongruous”, I think to myself as I struggle to get the rolling cart filled with children’s literature out of the trunk of my car. “How will 12th grade CTE Conservation Studies students receive this flood of books and the writing project their teachers have initiated?” I have curated this book collection carefully to get us going, and the cart is brimming with titles I love such as The Monster at the End of This Book; Goodnight Goon: A Petrifying Parody; Stronger Than Steel: Spider Silk DNA; Rose’s Journal: The Story of a Girl in the Great Depression making up two dozen books in total with dog-eared pages and sticky notes throughout. These are books I use to explore writing craft with graduate literacy education students and undergraduates preparing to teach mathematics, science, and social studies. We discuss what makes these books tick, developing our vocabulary about writing by speculating together over the decisions writers seem to make as they work to make a

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point, to write in ways that delight us and invite us into their imagined worlds or as they explore topics from unique vantage points. We analyze word choice, metaphor and imagery, literary elements, visual dimensions of texts, design and layout, ideas and perspectives, and on and on, using these accessible texts as a starting point for more intensive study of the language of writing, especially in the disciplines of these students’ prospective fields of teaching. What kinds of conversations can these books spark among CTE students? More to the point, will they spark any conversation, and will they work the way I hope they will today as vehicles to inspire students in our yearlong project to create a Conservation Studies-themed informational book suitable for elementary-level readers? In this project, our focus is a bit different from the typical integration approach. We aim to engage youth in creative and rhetorical writing about their CTE program and career area, topics of high interest to them. We tell students about their prospective readers and ask them to imagine younger readers as benefiting from their guidance and mentoring, since they are children with shared curiosities and interests. We suggest children’s reading needs will be addressed well through the distinctive perspectives and voices of slightly older, knowledgeable CTE peers. I check my tote bag for our first writing workshop lesson and the writing craft worksheets students will complete, and roll along to the school’s entrance to get started. Once in the classroom, I set up in a space characterized by movement and by highs-and-lows. A small hallway in the rear of the room opens into a lab/shop with home-made hydroponic/aquaculture growing environments, a Bobcat front loader, and a wall lined with climbing gear whose proper names and uses I will come to know over time. Most days, students meet first in the regular classroom and then move to lab spaces, inside and outside. In the classroom, students choose where to sit and whether to sit at all. There’s a high-top bar table just inside the door, beanbag chairs and lap desks near the front, and a smattering of traditional desks and chairs. It is a welcoming space for a writing workshop, and I ask students to unload the book cart and cover a low-slung coffee table with the texts. Our time together starts slowly but builds steam and ends on a high note, with one student skillfully defining for others the meaning of parody (the petrifying one in Goodnight Goon). We have about 90 min to work, a luxury in a secondary school context but one regularly put to good use here for classroom-specific work, as well as the types of cross- and co-curricular projects Nancy and Cindy have described. This extended time also provides all educators in the room, from the classroom teacher to assistants and aides, with an opportunity to address students’ specific interests and support those with IEPs or 504 plans. For our first lesson, students work in pairs with a text or two. They must critically dissect language features, layout and design, illustrations, details of genre, and more so that, when we wrap up, they can introduce texts to the group through a rhetorical lens. What can they tell us about the intended audience and how different forms of evidence, such as features of language, ideas, and design, support their analyses? Once these seniors have our writing project goal in mind, they spend a few minutes brainstorming ideas for a final point they will share: How might they make use of what they have read and experienced to tell their own story?

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What kind of story do they want to share? What can their book look and sound like, and how will they get there over the coming months? These students know each other pretty well. They are CTE concentrators in Year Two of their program. They also are primed and prepped by the classroom teacher, assistant teacher, and teaching aide, who are invested because the book project was their idea and is based on previous projects in their program. In her English Academic Integration role, Nancy will work on the details required to structure each part of the project and determine how it fits with the literacy standards for these students and within their program. I visit monthly to conference with students and provide mini-lessons to keep them on track. Similar to the Writing Project goals of Kline et al. (2015), we aim to engage students in practices that say clearly, “We are a community of writers.” The writing group is mentored through exchange of their drafts with literacy education graduate students, who provide supportive feedback and share drafts with their own elementary-age readers, the intended audience for the book. Fast-forward to late May, when I visit a final time for book launch day. Breakfast pizza and sweets occupy the tables near the classroom door. Occupying my rolling cart today is a large carton filled to the top with 100 full color, glossy books, Conservation: Month by Month. I designed the text using a comic book theme to reflect the action-packed, outdoorsy outlook so central to these students’ interests and identities. At first, there is a hush as students pick up a book and search for their individual pages. Many then express surprise about how well their entries read, how professional it all looks and sounds. One student asks if he can have extra copies to share with younger cousins, while another, after reading and re-reading, offers marketing advice and a vision for a schoolwide, book-making project. He suggests creating a full set reflecting all of M–O’s CTE programs, and then providing all middle schools with a set to keep in the school library and one for guidance counselors. In his opinion, these books would help younger students learn about CTE and make informed decisions about their own high school pathways. As we continue exploring the culmination of their year-long writing effort, I make a mental note to keep this excellent suggestion in mind for the next project.

Discussion Carl D. Perkins legislation, known as Perkins V in its current form, is the key source of federal funding support for secondary and post-secondary CTE. Perkins has long prioritized the need for academic integration in career-technical studies. From 2005– 2010, a commitment to this aim led researchers with the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education (NRCCTE) to create, implement, and analyze the impact of professional development initiatives. In two of these projects, Mathin-CTE and Authentic Literacy in CTE, researchers taught CTE instructors how to use strategic approaches to develop academic skills through the context of everyday CTE materials and activities, experiences, and real-world problems. In both math

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and reading, the researchers found positive effects on student achievement that they attributed to the specific approaches to teacher knowledge-building used. Whereas other contextualized approaches may take the form of curricula, the NRCCTE integration models are not curriculum-bound. They provide a process and pedagogy through which CTE teachers enhance the academics in any CTE curriculum. Refuting the notion of integration as a static effort or an event, we hypothesize that these tested models will generate enduring and sustainable changes in teaching practice (see Pearson et al., 2010). Nancy’s and Cindy’s accounts of integration echo the NRCCTE focus on process and pedagogy rather than on a one-size-fits-all curriculum approach. They assume a stance as learners to facilitate processes that reveal, as well as construct, opportunities for academic literacies to be developed through CTE contexts. Their work highlights the importance of having on-site academic specialists to support emergent, and promote more developed “changes in teaching practice” that Pearson et al., (2010, p. 10) highlight as necessary for integration to flourish. M–O’s unique AIT approach is notable, as well, since it is the vehicle through which “integrating the integration” (as Cindy refers to it) arises, enabling rigorous, creative, cross- and interdisciplinary curricula to take shape through the coordinated action of academic and CTE teachers. Lessons and projects coming out of these collaborations position diverse learners to engage in critical exploration of multifaceted topics and problems requiring many perspectives to grasp, explore, and solve. Planning time, flexibility, and autonomy are essential ingredients needed for this work to succeed. CTE teachers and administrators who are eager to expand integration practices may find that elements of the AIT approach can be adapted in their schools. Our work also holds useful lessons about the rich and mutually beneficial possibilities inherent in linking CTE youth with college mentors, particularly teacher education candidates. We design collaborative activities with CTE students’ needs and interests in mind, but we also consider carefully how our connections can benefit their college partners. We situate CTE as a subject of inquiry to foster critical thinking about purposes and forms of learning in and outside of schools, as well as historical and sociological issues related to school structures, curriculum, (dis)abilities, and, echoing Gillis et al. (2016), what it means to actively focus on the career dimension of helping young people become college and career ready. Through coaching CTE writers, we investigate how older youths’ identities, skills, and practices related to writing continue to grow through their participation in new writing activities, collaborative writing processes, and through the mentoring offered by more experienced college writers. Finally, we explore the potential to help education candidates learn to motivate and harness these students’ capabilities in the subject areas in which they are preparing to teach. These are the classes where adolescents spend significant time but their knowledge, interests, and experiences related to worlds of work and working people may remain invisible. To avoid this, teachers must become intentional about engaging and making use of subject areas as vehicles for conceptual and personal development.

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Conclusion It moved us to watch many of the M–O Conservation students express pride as they discovered themselves in the pages of a book they had collaboratively authored. Their responses, placed alongside examples of engagement and resilience in Nancy’s and Cindy’s narratives, hold important lessons for anyone interested in rethinking contexts for effective, responsive literacy instruction to support diverse learners, especially older youth. CTE programs are spaces in which many secondary students in our region begin to be seen for the abilities and potential they possess. Academictechnical integration is a process, not a product, one that requires consistent attention to relationships across many levels, structural flexibility and support, genuine interest in ongoing learning beyond one’s area of teaching expertise, and understanding of the complexities of differentiation to meet learners’ needs. As they do in any dynamic learning environment, gaps remain, but our hope is that the account we have shared communicates clearly how we view the link between research and evidence-based practices guiding teachers’ work, the cultural milieu required for such practice to have meaning, and the value of forging vibrant connections that can nurture generative thinking about adolescent literacies, including among pre-service secondary educators who may be “seeing” CTE students for the very first time (Rose, 2018, para. 2).

References Advance CTE & Association for Career and Technical Education. (2018, August 6). Legislative summary and analysis: Strengthening career and technical education for the 21st Century Act (Perkins V). https://www.acteonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/AdvanceCTE_ACTE_P.L. 115-224Summary_Updated080618.pdf Advocates for Children of New York. (2016). Obstacles and opportunities: Creating career and technical education pathways for students with disabilities. https://www.advocatesforchildren.org Association for Career and Technical Education. (2019). State profile: New York. https://www.act eonline.org/why-cte/state-profiles/ Berger, P., & Luckman, T. (1979). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Penguin. Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006. Pub. L. No. 109–270. https://www2. ed.gov/policy/sectech/leg/perkins/index.html Conley, D. T. (2010). Eligible & ready for college. Principal Leadership, 11(4), 18–22. Darvin, J. (2006). “On reading recipes and racing forms”: The literacy practices and perceptions of vocational educators. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50(1), 10–18. Diaz, A., & Visone, J. (2018). Relationships matter: The impact of collegial collaboration on adolescent literacy. Techniques, 93(2), 12–17. Dougherty, S. M. (2016). Career and technical education in high school: Does it improve student outcomes? Thomas B. Fordham Institute. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED570132.pdf Dougherty, S., Grindall, T., & Hehir, T. (2018). The impact of career and technical education on students with disabilities. Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 29(2), 108–118. Gammill, D. M. (2015). Time to give CTE what it deserves—R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Phi Delta Kappan, 96(6), 17–20.

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Gee, J., Hull, G., & Lankshear, C. (1996). The new work order: Behind the language of the new capitalism. Westview Press. Gillis, V. R., Jones-Moore, L., Haynes, C. J., & Van Wig, A. (2016). Let’s not forget the career in college and career ready. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(6), 637–641. Ivanic, R., Edwards, R., Barton, D., Martin-Jones, M., Fowler, Z., Hughes, B., & Smith, J. (2009). Improving learning in college: Rethinking literacies across the curriculum. Routledge. Jacoby, T., & Dougherty, S. M. (2016). The new CTE: New York City as laboratory for America. The Manhattan Institute. https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/new-cte-new-york-city-lab oratory-america-8688.html Jocson, K. M. (2018). Youth media matters: Participatory cultures and literacies in education. University of Minnesota Press. Kline, K., Payne, H., & Sheerman, J. (2015). Literacy at work in Missouri: Embedding literacy strategies into the curriculum. Techniques, 90(8), 27–29. Kreisman, D. & Stange, K. (2019). Depth over breadth: The value of vocational education in U.S. high schools. EducationNext, 19(4). https://www.educationnext.org/depth-over-breadth-valuevocational-education-u-s-high-schools/ Kohnen, A. M. (2015). “They’re not keeping a journal of feelings”: Literacy initiatives and career and technical education. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(8), 660–669. Lawrence-Lightfoot, S. (2005). Reflections on portraiture: A dialogue between art and science. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(1), 3–15. Madison-Oneida BOCES. (n.d.). Board of cooperative educational services report card, 2017–2018. https://www.moboces.org/quick_links/parent_resources/moboces_state_report_cards McCarthy, J. (2014, August 25). Learner interest matters: Strategies for empowering student choice [Blog post]. www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-learner-interest-mattersjohn-mccarthy Park, T., Pearson, D., & Richardson, G. B. (2017). Curriculum integration: Helping career and technical education students truly develop college and career readiness. Peabody Journal of Education, 92(2), 192–208. Pearson, D. (2015). CTE and the common core can address the problem of silos. Phi Delta Kappan, 96(6), 12–16. Pearson, D., Sawyer, J., Park, T., Santamaria, L., Van der Mandele, E., Keene, B., & Taylor, M. (2010). Capitalizing on context: Curriculum integration in career and technical education. National Research Center for Career and Technical Education. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ ED510267.pdf Perkins Collaborative Resource Network. (n.d.). Consolidated annual program report program year 2017–2018, New York. U.S. Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, Division of Academic and Technical Education. https://s3.amazonaws.com/ PCRN/docs/CARNarrative/NY_narrative_2017-2018.pdf Rose, M. (2016). Vocational education and the new world of work. The Hedgehog Review, 18(1), 96–103. Rose, M. (2018, July 31). Teaching as a way of seeing [Blog post]. https://mikerosebooks.blogspot. com/2018/07/teaching-as-way-of-seeing.html Shafer, E., Leavens, D. & Arnsten, D. (2017). A report on research and a proposal to enhance integration of academics in New York State Career & Technical Education. Career & Technical Education Technical Assistance Center (CTE TAC) of NY. https://nyctecenter.org/instruction/aca demic-integration Sisk-Hilton, S., & Meier, D. R. (2016). Narrative inquiry in early childhood and elementary school: Learning to teach, teaching well. Routledge. Stone, J. & Lewis, M. (2012). College and career ready in the 21st century: Making high school matter. Teachers College Press. Theobald, R., Goldhaber, D., Gratz, T., and Holden, K. L. (2017). Career and Technical Education, inclusion, and postsecondary outcomes for students with disabilities (CEDR Working Paper 2017). University of Washington. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED583616.pdf

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Thomas, G. (2017). Progress in social and educational inquiry through case study: Generalization or explanation? Clinical Social Work Journal, 45(3), 253–260. Visher, M. & Stern, D. (April 2015). New pathways to careers and college: Examples, evidence, and prospects. MDRC. https://www.mdrc.org/sites/default/files/New_Pathways.pdf Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Marta Albert is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the State University of New York—Potsdam. She has worked in school and community settings as a youth educator, advocate, and administrator of youth programs in rural New York State. Her research interests focus on adolescent literacy development and support; creative collaborations with educators; and with college students for mutual learning and growth. Cindy Ciaralli is the Social Studies Academic Integration Specialist from Madison-Oneida BOCES. Cindy received her BA in History from Wells College and an MA in History from the State University of New York at Cortland. Having served as an educator for more than 30 years she continues to focus on developing best practices in teaching with a passion to mentor new teachers entering the profession. Nancy Pitman is an English Language Arts Academic Integration Specialist at Madison-Oneida BOCES. She has a Bachelor’s degree in English Education from LeMoyne College and a Master’s degree in reading from SUNY Cortland. Nancy served as an adjunct at Morrisville State College for 9 years and is in her 17th year of teaching at Madison-Oneida BOCES. She is always looking for new ways to teach writing and boost the literacy skills of her students.

Chapter 4

Effective Planning and Revising Strategies for Meeting the Needs of Students with Learning Difficulties and Literacy Needs Mei Shen

Introduction The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) (2010) place significant emphasis on developing literacy proficiency and using writing as an effective tool to facilitate content area learning. However, compared to their typically developing peers, students with learning difficulties tend to experience great challenges when they are working to meet these high expectations. Prior research has well documented the effectiveness of strategy instruction for improving the literacy outcomes of struggling learners, particularly those with disabilities. Writing, as a critical literacy skill, plays an important role in almost every aspect of students’ lives. They need to demonstrate writing proficiency to meet the school curriculum standards, use writing as a tool to facilitate learning about different subjects, and engage in social activities and interactions through written communications (Graham & Perin, 2007; Shanahan, 2009). However, writing has always been a complex and challenging task. According to the CCSS (2010), students need to be able to write across different genres, among which expository writing has been held to the same high standards as the other two genres, narratives and opinion essays. When they are writing, students need to take into consideration the specific tasks, writing purposes, potential audiences, and engage in the effective use of writing processes (including planning, composing, editing, and revising). In addition, students are also expected to use writing as an effective tool to analyze texts, recall information, build topical knowledge, and facilitate learning of different content areas. In addition to all these high expectations of students in relation to writing, they need to be able to use appropriate vocabulary and the correct standard English conventions of grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling in their writing. M. Shen (B) State University of New York at Potsdam, Potsdam, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 T. Abodeeb-Gentile and D. A. Conrad (eds.), Intersections of Diversity, Literacy, and Learner Difficulties, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3532-9_4

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Overall, the CCSS has established high expectations for students with the goal of teaching them to be more proficient and goal-oriented writers as Graham and Harris (2013) have pointed out. In this chapter, I begin with a brief review of prior research evidence of the effectiveness of teaching planning and revising strategies and will then present details of a writing intervention study that effectively improved the writing (i.e., planning and revising) behaviors and writing performance (i.e., text length, writing accuracy, text structure elements, and overall text quality) of students with language-based learning difficulties.

Writing Characteristics of Struggling Students with Learning and Literacy Difficulties Students who experience learning and literacy difficulties, particularly in the area of writing, tend to find writing to be particularly challenging. These struggling writers tend to compose shorter texts compared to their typically developing peers (Mackie & Dockrell, 2004). They also have been found to not engage in planning during writing, even when prompted to do so (De La Paz, 2001; MacArthur & Graham, 1987; Saddler, 2006). This means that their writing usually shows little evidence of elaborated ideas and adequate organization. In addition, their written texts frequently demonstrate many mechanical errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, all of which lead to poor overall writing quality (Cuenca-Carlino et al., 2018; Fey et al., 2004; MacArthur & Philippakos, 2010). Therefore, it is critical that we, as educators, understand how to facilitate writing processes for the struggling students who are expected to apply cognitive resources to the production of varied types of texts, employ specific writing strategies and techniques, use adequate meta-cognitive skills to monitor and regulate their writing behaviors, and maintain a positive attitude towards writing (Harris et al., 2003; Troia, 2006).

Documented Effectiveness of Writing Strategy Instruction Prior research has shown that teaching struggling writers (particularly those with learning disabilities) to plan, compose, and revise could contribute to significantly improved writing outcomes (De La Paz & Sherman, 2013; Graham & Perin, 2007; MacArthur et al., 2015). In other writing intervention studies, the students were taught explicitly and systematically how to use specific strategies to generate ideas pertaining to the topics, organize content to reflect certain text structure, compose longer texts, and include more story elements or functional essay elements (MacArthur & Lembo, 2009; Saddler & Asaro, 2007). Other students also learned to

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use strategies to edit and revise their written drafts that enabled them to make substantial revisions at not only the local level of writing mechanics but also at the global one of content and organization (Graham & MacArthur, 1988; Graham et al., 1995). Overall, strategy instruction focused on planning and revising has been found to help students with learning difficulties write qualitatively and quantitatively better papers. This finding has applied across different genres such as stories and personal narratives (Saddler, 2006; Tracy et al., 2009), expository papers (MacArthur & Philippakos, 2010; Miller & Little, 2018), and persuasive essays (Mason et al., 2017; Midgette et al., 2008).

Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD): An Effective Instructional Framework When they are teaching planning to the struggling writers and/or revising strategies with them, it is important that teachers effectively model the strategy they are using. This approach allows students to practice the taught strategy together with a peer or in a group, and, finally, to apply the strategy appropriately during independent practice. It is worth mentioning that prior research has found that struggling students tend to experience difficulties understanding how to self-monitor and self-regulate their writing processes (Graham et al., 2016; Reid et al., 2012). Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), an instructional program that combines teaching writing strategies and self-regulation skills was designed by Harris and Graham (2018) to help students with learning difficulties develop knowledge about writing processes, understand how to apply strategies effectively, use self- regulation skills to facilitate their writing, and maintain positive attitudes toward writing (Graham & Harris, 1993; Harris et al., 2003). Four major self-regulation skills, i.e., goal setting, self-monitoring, self-instruction, and self-reinforcement are embedded in the SRSD instructional model. These self-regulation strategies enable students to establish, evaluate, and revise their writing goals and sub-goals. The strategies also facilitate close monitoring of their writing behaviors and performance, encourage positivity that reinforces their writing efforts and performance, and follows the prescribed strategy steps when they encounter writing difficulties. Typically, six stages are included in the SRSD instructional framework: (1) the teacher helps students activate background knowledge that facilitates the learning of writing and self-regulation strategies; (2) the teacher and students discuss in detail the strategies in terms of what they are, how and when to use them, and why it is important to use them; (3) the teacher models using the strategies with the mnemonic charts, graphic organizer, or planning sheet, and related instructional materials in actual writing activities; (4) students memorize the strategy mnemonics and steps; (5) the teacher supports students’ practices using the taught strategy; and (6) students are given opportunities to practice independently.

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Existing research has consistently shown that the SRSD instructional model can help struggling learners gain more knowledge about writing, produce qualitatively and quantitatively better essays, and can boost their writing self-efficacy (Jacobson & Reid, 2010; Lienemann & Reid, 2008; Mason & Graham, 2008; Miller & Little, 2018). SRSD also targets the maintenance and generalization of the taught strategy by engaging students in thoughtful discussion about how to continue to use the strategy as well as how to adapt strategies across different writing tasks and settings (Harris et al., 2006). A series of meta-analyses conducted by Graham and colleagues (see Graham & Harris, 2018; Graham et al., 2012; Rogers & Graham, 2008) have shown that the average weighted effect for writing instruction that adopted the SRSD framework is significantly larger. This difference, as compared with non-SRSD interventions, indicates that writing interventions following the SRSD approach yield more significant improvement in the writing performance of struggling students.

Teaching Effective Writing Strategies Below I present two planning strategies (one each for narrative and opinion essays) and two revising strategies as examples. It is highly recommended that teachers engage their students in deep discussion of these strategies. Furthermore, teachers should provide direct modeling of the strategy used, and give students enough time and opportunities to practice the taught strategies with peers and independently across different settings and writing tasks (Graham & Harris, 2013; Shen & Troia, 2018).

Planning Strategies POW + WWW What = 2 How = 2 (Narrative Writing) POW + WWW What = 2 How = 2 is a strategy mnemonic developed by Harris and Graham (see Graham et al., 2005; Rogers & Graham, 2020) that aims to improve story writing for struggling students. POW stands for “Pick my idea, Organize my notes, and Write and say more”, and the WWW What = 2 How = 2 components help students to generate ideas and organize them in their stories (see Fig. 4.1 for the POW + WWW What = 2 How = 2 mnemonic chart). This strategy also includes a graphic organizer that serves as a reminder to students to include all seven story elements in their writing (see Fig. 4.2 for POW + WWW What = 2 How = 2 graphic organizer). It is worth noting that students should not write full sentences on their planning sheets but only single words or simple phrases that will help them compose their stories. In addition, students also learn to write down their self-talk statements on their graphic organizer. For example, if students find writing difficult, they can write down, “This is challenging, but I can use my strategy to write my story.” A student could also record, “Okay, I have completed the WWW part. What should I

4 Effective Planning and Revising Strategies for Meeting … Fig. 4.1 POW + WWW What = 2 How = 2 mnemonic chart

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P

Pick an idea for my story

O Organize mynotes Who is the main character? When does the story take place? Where does the story take place? What does the main character do or want to do? What do other characters do? What happens then? What happens to the other characters? How does the story end? How does the main character feel? How do the other characters feel? W Write and say more

do next? I need to work on the What = 2.” These are all ways of self-instructing their use of the strategy.

DARE to DEFEND (Opinion Essay Writing) The DARE to DEFEND strategy (Troia, 2013) helps struggling students to write persuasive essays. This strategy includes both the text structure of persuasion (i.e., DARE) and the steps of planning and composing good opinion essays (i.e., DEFEND). See Fig. 4.3 for DARE to DEFEND mnemonic chart. This strategy also includes a planning sheet (see Fig. 4.4) that helps students not only to set goals for their opinion papers, but also to generate ideas that support their position as opposed to those that counter the position. Students are encouraged to write down supporting details or evidence that they could use for elaboration when they are composing their essays. The students also write down effective self-talk statements on the planning sheet.

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When - When does the story take place?

Where - Where does the story take place?

What=2 What - What does the main character do or want to do? What do other characters do?

What - What happens then? What happens to the other characters?

How=2 How - How does the story end? How - How does the main character feel? How do the other characters feel?

Self-talk statements:

Fig. 4.2 POW + WWW What = 2 How = 2 graphic organizer (Adapted from Powerful writing strategies for all students, by K. R. Harris, S. Graham, L. Mason, and B. Friedlander, 2008)

4 Effective Planning and Revising Strategies for Meeting … Fig. 4.3 DARE to DEFEND mnemonic chart

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DARE to DEFEND The parts of a good opinion paper include: D Develop a position statement A Add supporting arguments R Report and refute counterarguments E End with a strong conclusion The steps to write a good opinion paper are: D Develop a list of idea words for my essay E Evaluate their importance F Find even more ways to convince my readers E Encourage myself through selftalk N Now write an essay with clear ideas, sharp sentences, and great impact D Decide if I met my writing goals

Revising Strategies COLA COLA (Singer & Bashir, 1999) is a comprehensive checklist that has been developed to facilitate the revising processes for older students or more advanced writers (see Fig. 4.5). This checklist is better suited to editing and revising expository and persuasive essays rather than narratives. Teachers can make, modify, or simplify the checklist by reducing the items younger students could use. Teachers can also change or revise items so that the checklist can help with revising narrative texts.

SEARCH The SEARCH strategy, designed by Ellis and Friend (1991), uses a checklist (Set goals, Examine paper to see if it makes sense, Ask if you said what you meant to say, Reveal picky errors, Copy over neatly, and Have a last look at errors) to revise at the level of both content and writing mechanics (see Fig. 4.6). The unique value

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Author:

Date:

My quality goal for this essay is: My quantity goal for this essay is: Generate idea words to build arguments: For my position

Against my position

Self-talk statements:

Fig. 4.4 DARE to DEFEND planning sheet

of the SEARCH checklist is that it engages students in the goal setting process at the very beginning. The checklist also prompts students to evaluate their papers after they have finishing editing and revising to determine whether their writing goals have

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COLA Content: □ Does my introduction establish the purpose and topic? □ Does the paper have a definite beginning, middle, and end? □ Do all the ideas relate to the topic? Organization: □ Do the ideas follow each other in a logical order? □ Do all paragraphs have a main idea sentence and at least two supporting details? □ Are transitions between paragraphs and ideas clear? □ Is there enough information to support m main ideas? Language: □ Does each sentence sound right when I read it out loud? □ Does each sentence say what I mean? □ Do I use unusual words that make my writing interesting? Appearance: □ Does each sentence start with a capital letter and end with correct punctuation? □ Did I capitalize names, specific places, and titles? □ Are all words spelled correctly when I check by reading out loud backwards? □ Have I carefully examined my demon words and used a spelling guide? □ Is the overall appearance of the paper neat and clean? Fig. 4.5 COLA checklist

been met. This checklist also involves a peer in the revising process to help check the student’s writing mechanics and overall writing performance.

Current Study Studies have shown that strategy instruction can help typically developing students, English language learners, and students with more general learning disabilities to write better narrative, informational, and persuasive essays (MacArthur & Philippakos, 2010; Miller & Little, 2018; Rogers & Graham, 2020). However, few studies have examined how students with language-learning disabilities (LLD), could

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M. Shen

SEARCH Set goals □ I’ve thought about who the audience is and the impression I want to give them; I want them to think… (e.g., my essay is good and informative) □ My quality goal is… (e.g., including all parts of TREE) □ My quantity goal is… (e.g, including three important traits) Examine paper to see if it makes sense □ I’ve read my paper out loud □ Each sentence and the whole paper make sense □ No words have been omitted □ I’ve combined sentences that are too short and broken up ones that are too long Ask if you said what you meant □ My ideas are clear and related to the topic □ The order of my ideas is logical Reveal picky errors □ I’ve corrected all errors in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation that I found □ Someone else has double checked my work Copy over neatly Have a last look for errors □ I made sure my final copy doesn’t have any new or remaining errors in it □ Someone else has checked my work one last time □ I did/did not meet my goals Fig. 4.6 SEARCH checklist

possibly benefit from strategy instruction. This study aimed to address the research gap and it examined the efficacy of planning and revising strategy instruction using the SRSD instructional framework for compare-contrast text writing by students with LLD in grades 4–6. It is worth noting that compare-contrast as one of the five major expository text structures is relatively more difficult than the other expository structures of collection, description, causation, and problem–solution (Englert & Hiebert, 1984; Englert & Thomas, 1987; Meyer & Freedle, 1984). Since CCSS places greater emphasis on expository writing as well as using writing as a tool to facilitate learning (Graham & Harris, 2013), compare-contrast writing is a high-leverage genre that helps students better understand content area information by asking them to highlight key information, generate categories for that information, and make comparisons of attributes within the categories (MacArthur & Philippakos, 2010).

4 Effective Planning and Revising Strategies for Meeting …

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Method Participants Three students in grades 4–6 who met the following stepwise screening criteria of having LLD were included in this study. (a)

(b)

(c)

Displayed normal nonverbal cognitive ability, defined as a nonverbal intelligence score at or above 90 on the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence—Third Edition (TONI-3); demonstrated an oral language impairment, defined as scores on either the Listening Comprehension or Oral Expression subtest of the Oral and Written Language Scales—Second Edition (OWLS-II) falling at least 1.25 standard deviations below mean (i.e.,