“Nothing Will Work Unless You Do”: Secondary Language Arts Students’ Noticings of Their Important Texts

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 5:25 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Repairing Harm in Literacy Classrooms (Table 4)

Abstract

In this study, the researcher explores how secondary language arts (LA) students in 11th-12th grade English engaged with a noticing assignment that asked them to notice pieces of writing that were interesting to them. The researcher examines how participants’ noticings and writing offer a more humanizing literacy framework for secondary contexts (Muhammad, 2023; Salazar, 2013). Borrowing from multiliteracies and humanizing pedagogies (Johnson & Sullivan, 2020; Hendrix-Soto & LeeKeenan, 2023), the researcher examined students’ reflections across three noticing assignments, finding that students’ noticings reflected the societal and academic pressures they faced as well as the comfort and relief writing and noticing can offer. This project has implications for more humanizing literacy pedagogies rooted in student interests rather than formulaic curricula.

Author

• Mary Neville, Wayne State University