Herner Saeverot begins this article with an example: how Soren Kierkegaard used deceit as a means to educate. In one of his biographical texts, it turns out that Kierkegaard's objective was to deceive his readers into a totalized and universal truth. According to Saeverot, Kierkegaard's approach shows that he was a "demystifier," someone who wants…

School is sometimes framed as a place for preparing, a place for becoming college and career ready. At times this approach positions school as an important space "within" the world of college and careers, envisioned perhaps as Dewey imagined it, as a safe place to try things, a space where real work of participation in society could be done but in…

Argues that technical writers must construct proper contexts for readers' understanding. Discusses reader-oriented syntax, rhetorical confidence, and three kinds of context qualifiers. Offers various examples. (SR)

Describes the effects (both positive and negative) personal knowledge about students has on student writing conferences. (MM)

Scholars have celebrated the spoken word in King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," but they have overlooked the significance of the Letter's writing. In this essay I closely read King's act of writing the Letter, along with the figures of speech he employs in it, and I show how both--by enacting the mass media's ability to cross contexts--are…

Decontextualization, referring to the abstraction of a written text from all of its contexts, is a flawed concept. Rather than viewing writing as an isolated abstraction, a text's involvement with the human world should be acknowledged. Two major questions arise when dealing with the concept of decontextualization: (1) Can written discourse be…

The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of adolescent use of instant messaging. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies stance that literacy is a social practice embedded in local contexts and informed by global ideologies (Street, 1995), I argue that participation in digital literacies such as instant messaging has implications for…

Suggests that teachers should foster situations where text, readers, and teacher can meet in collaborative ways. Identifies four reading research categories focusing on different contexts that surround the reading act. (MM)

Examines how researchers can study children's interaction with literature, discussing various perspectives that can be taken on children's literary responses and suggesting lines of inquiry and concepts that might be useful for the continued examination of children's responses. Focuses on the author, the literary text itself, the reader, and the…

By having students use their knowledge of real-world cultural contexts to construct text-world contexts, teachers help them understand how cultural forces within those contexts shape characters' actions. This paper describes the process of linking real- and text-world contexts, offering examples from one college class. Implications for helping…

Any model of reading must take into account the role of the language system in reading. Readers' subjectivities and the reading position taken up in a text can be explicated by demonstrating how texts function in context and how readers function in social situations to construct possible meanings. Components of this model include text and context…

An important research paradigm applied to the study of adolescent resistance to reading--listening to student voice--has yielded rich information regarding adolescent literacy practices, adolescent agency, and adolescent identity as components of resistance to reading. Instructional perspectives of teachers and researchers also serve to shed light…