Literacy and Schooling in One Family across Time
Abstract
Most research involving the analyses of discourses targets particular points in time or relatively short durations (i.e., one semester, one year). Failure to recognize the ways discourses operate over long periods of time limits the ability of educators and researchers to recognize the temporal nature of meaning construction. Through this longitudinal research project, I tracked discourses about literacy and schooling to document how events at multiple timescales (Lemke, 2000, 2001) converged in the literacy and schooling experiences of one student. Specifically, I asked how one African American middle-school student and members of her family drew upon and negotiated discourses related to past and ongoing experiences as well as larger social histories as they made sense of literacy and schooling. Based on data from an eight-year study, I applied grounded coding methods to identify and track discourses voiced in interview transcripts and field notes. Findings from the study suggest that discourses were taken up, challenged, modified, negotiated, and abandoned by participants across time. Participants drew on multiple, intertextual language resources within families and other social contexts to make sense of themselves and their experiences recursively as they recalled, neglected, revisited, and forgot particular stories and eventsand identified familiar social types.
- Journal
- Research in the Teaching of English
- Published
- 2011-02-01
- DOI
- 10.58680/rte201113465
- CompPile
- Open Access
- Closed
- Topics
-
- Export
- BibTeX RIS
Citation context
Cited by in this index (2)
-
Wang (2019)Computers and Composition
-
Olsen et al. (2018)Written Communication
References (0)
No references on file for this article.
Related articles
-
Assessing Writing Jul 2026Louie Giray; Kershnee Sevnarayan; Kgabo Bridget Maphoto
-
The Peer Review Sep 2025The Writing Center as a Rebel Space: Stories of Tutoring and Writing with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ↗Ghada Seifeddine
-
The Peer Review Sep 2025Ana Raquel Fialho Ferreira Campos; João Tiago Gaspar Cozechen; Elaine Pereira Lustosa; Marcos Angel De Carvalho Eing; Leonardo Schimiloski
-
Written Communication Jul 2025Synthesizing Professional Knowledge and Racial Literacy Content Through Explicit Composing Instruction: A Discourse Synthesis Study ↗Jenifer Jasinski Schneider; James R. King; Gretchen Dodson
-
Teaching English in the Two-Year College Sep 2024Stephanie A. Herrera