Teaching English/Language and Literacy in Middle and Secondary Schools

Catalog description

This course is a collaborative inquiry into the dynamic concept of adolescent literacy and its potential as an organizing construct for improving teaching and learning. It provides opportunities to investigate a variety of resources including our own histories as well as a range of print, digital and visual texts and to conduct fieldwork in various middle and secondary school classrooms where youth are being positioned (and positioning themselves) as literacy learners and literacy is being defined, performed, practiced, interrogated, and interpreted, within and beyond the school curricula. By engaging with youth, in various texts and contexts and for a range of purposes, participants will try to make sense of how adolescents negotiate their worlds, in school and out. The approach to literacy is interdisciplinary, drawing from the domains of literature, composition, linguistics, curriculum theory, anthropology and psychology and from theory, research and practice of both university-based and school-based teachers, writers and researchers. The intent is to pose and refine questions about what it means to teach literacy in ways that take seriously what youth bring to school as their own knowledge and passions, cultural and linguistic resources.