Given the importance of teaching and learning argumentation, across disciplines for participation in academic and civil discourse, this article examines how dialogic space is created and sustained in classrooms where argument is taught and learned and, when it is created, what affordances it brings to learning argumentation. Dialogic space is a…

Dialogic educators have designed strategies to facilitate dialogic teaching, such as establishing ground rules, employing talk moves, and structuring discussions. Though productive, such strategies rarely open dialogic space, in which shared meaning is created through an interaction that blurs the boundaries between participating voices. Dialogic…

This book can help you incorporate critical literacy pedagogy into your high school English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, so that your students can use what they study in class to work toward making a more just and equitable world. Through the acronym CHANGE, the book explores how critical literacy pedagogy can support students as they Challenge…

Purpose: This study aims to illustrate how one-sixth grade language arts teacher transforms the theory of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) into practice, an effort made visible through classroom discourse. Design/methodology/approach: This classroom discourse inquiry is guided by tools of reconstructive discourse analysis which encourage a…

This action research described how a middle school teacher integrated five discussion protocols including structured controversy, pair communication, triad protocol, personal experience panel, and Socratic seminar into her sixth-grade Language Arts classes. Collected data from three different sources indicated an overall improvement of both…

Many teachers state that disruptive behavior in their classroom is one of their main challenges, and it often results in a loss of instructional time. Teachers also have difficulty in providing opportunities for their students to be actively engaged in their own learning. This study used an ABAB reversal design to investigate the effects of…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of…

Critical conversations take on heightened importance with current tensions about issues involving race, income inequality, sexual orientation, and gender identity, both locally and globally. These tensions demonstrate a dire need for classroom discussions about literature to serve as a space where youth engage in rigorous, critical conversations…

This paper defines the notion of "dialogic local space" and highlights its importance to teaching and learning. A dialogic local space values multiple local realities as it invites us to listen to, take up, and have confidence in our own local everyday and personal realities, and to listen to, consider, and respond to other local…

This paper uses an assignment given to the authors' preservice teachers to address and push back against common arguments used to uphold canonical text selection in secondary ELA classrooms. Using the metaphor of canon defense as empire building first made by Toni Morrison in the canon debates of the 1980s, the authors examine the weaknesses in…

Much research on children's classroom drawing emerged from an interest in the relationships between drawing and early writing and focused on drawing as a pedagogical tool to engage young children in planning, generating, and illustrating story ideas. In an eight-month case study of children's drawing in a kindergarten language arts curriculum, the…

Background: Classroom discourse featuring meaning making supports students achieving discipline-specific learning. However, moving beyond recitation requires developing beliefs, skills, structures, and practices. Any theorizing we do about developing discussion practice must attend to realities of culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms.…

The current study reports on a large-scale quantitative analysis of classroom talk practices and links to different measures of reading achievement within upper elementary classrooms. Data involving 745 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers and 18,844 students from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study were used. Talk was quantified via…

A widespread instructional practice in the teaching of argumentative writing is the use of writing samples or models during instructional conversations about what counts as "good argumentative writing." In this article, we focus on a set of lessons in a high school English language arts classroom in order to gain insight into how a…

This paper discusses the purpose and content of the WIDA Framework for Equitable Instruction (FEI). The FEI is an instruction-focused resource designed to promote the equitable engagement in disciplinary learning and language development of multilingual learners. It complements the WIDA English Language Development Standards Framework in that it…