Teaching Adolescent Literacy in These Times: Resources for Generating Knowledge in a Teacher Study Group

• In Event: Poster Session 2
  In Poster Session: Analyzing In-Service and Preservice Teachers’ Knowledge, Identities, and Agency

Abstract

The past decade has been marked by a series of reform efforts that include increased standardization of the teaching profession and a proliferation of top-down professional development initiatives that position teachers as consumers, rather than producers, of knowledge. Based on a yearlong qualitative study that documents the work of a teacher study group on adolescent literacy education, this paper reveals and discusses four resources that the teachers used to make sense of their practice: Disciplinary expertise, school knowledge, autobiographical reflexivity, and conceptual frameworks. This study, which offers a complex and relational vision of teacher professional development and adolescent literacy, contributes to growing bodies of research on knowledge for teaching, teacher inquiry communities, and adolescent literacy education.

Author

• Kathleen Riley, University of Pennsylvania