Teaching Argumentative Writing in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Secondary English Classrooms: Adaptive Expertise and Epistemologies

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 1:45 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Teachers' Attention to Inquiry, Healing, and Possible Selves in English and Social Studies Classroom Contexts (Table 9)

Abstract

This paper examines five high school English language arts (ELA) teachers’ epistemologies for teaching argumentative writing in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms (CLD) in four urban high school. Our central concern was how the teachers’ instructional units unfolded within the affordances, constraints and adaptations of their argumentative epistemologies. Taking a sociocultural perspective, we describe a range of approaches to argumentative epistemologies and levels of expertise. Two findings emerged from an microethnographic approach that included classroom observations and teacher interviews: First, during classroom events teachers drew on and adapted two or more epistemologies in a complex interanimation; second, adaptive teachers were able to rely on dialogic practices while more routine teacher employed more structuralist approaches.

Authors

• George E. Newell, The Ohio State University

• Tzu-Jung Lin, The Ohio State University

• Kevin Fulton, The Ohio State University

• Meghan Dougherty Kuehnle, University of Notre Dame