Urban Sites 2010 Annotated Bibliography
Urban Sites 2010
Annotated Bibliography
Professional Development
Our work with Urban Schools has made us very aware of our own tendencies to “colonize” when we enter a school or classroom to talk about writing instruction, all the while handing out copies of NWP’s basic assumptions, one of which is “there is no one right way to teach writing.” Postcolonial theory reminds us to negotiate with and learn from the ideas and even ideologies present in the schools and classrooms we enter so that we might all learn from each other. The readings here are some that remind us to be consciously critical of our own practices as writers, teachers of writing, and Professional Developers, and be open to what the wonderful teachers and students we work with have to tell us. They remind us that no one should be passively “receiving” of these ideas, but actively engaged in productive dialogue together.
Lu, M. (1999). “The vitality of the ungrateful receiver: Making giving mutual between composition and postcolonial studies.” Journal of Advanced Composition, 19, 335-357.
Min-Zhan Lu parallels the relationship between Composition and Literary Studies in academia with the relationship between “third world” peoples and those wealthy countries that continue to colonize them economically. The relationship in both cases is asymmetrical. Composition continues to be subordinated in most English departments and its instructors are expected to do the lower-prestige work of teaching introductory and “basic” writing. Meanwhile, composition is also placed into uneven relationships with literary theory when the fields are brought into dialogue. Citing a special issue of the Journal of Advanced Composition focusing on postcolonial theory, Lu argues that composition is expected to receive literary theory without adding its own knowledges and frames of understanding to the conversation. In this way, those who teach and do writing in composition become the subject of literary theory that doesn’t speak back. Meanwhile, because introductory and “basic” writing classes are where one finds most working-class, minority, and immigrant students doing writing, these are the sites at which postcolonial tensions, struggles, and possibilities with language are being enacted. The knowledge that has come from this vital site of literate enactment is largely ignored within the disciplinary relationship. Mirroring a stance adopted by Gloria Anzaldua toward postcolonial studies, Lu recommends that compositionists be the “ungrateful receivers” of postcolonial theory, drawing on useful frames of understanding but also insistent upon asserting their own frames. This article points to the need to be aware of power dynamics as they relate to the sharing of research, ideas, and resources. It is important that those of us doing urban sites work draw on as diverse a body of research and theory as possible in order to make our work democratic and transformative. Neither students nor teachers should be the passive, “grateful” objects of research and theory; rather, the urban sites initiative should be a site at which research and theory evolves in reciprocal dialogue with teachers and writers in urban classrooms.
–Tony Scott
Lu, M., & Horner, B. (2009). “Composing in a global-local context: Careers, mobility, skills.” College English, 72(2), 113-133.
Lu and Horner seek to complicate the longstanding dichotomy between writing pedagogies that are considered “instrumentalist” and those that are considered “critical.” The instrumentalists claim to teach “real world” or applicable skills, but are criticized for uncritically promoting dominant ideologies and not fostering the reflexive dispositions toward language and literacy that lead to greater agency and social responsibility. Those who do critical pedagogy claim a transformative potential and locate language issues within larger struggles for social justice, but are criticized for being overly political and not mindful enough of the pragmatic literacy skills that students need to work and thrive. Lu and Horner argue that fast-capitalist economics require a “global-local” perspective that moves beyond skills-driven pedagogies precisely for the reasons (economic, adaptation, and survival) that instrumentalists often justify using. Writing is too varied, globally connected, and rapidly evolving for pedagogies centering on discreet sets of transferable skills to be effective. Urban educators often work in environments in which students’ literate possibilities are truncated by the pervasive belief that working class students need to be taught “the basics” in order to survive in “the real world.” This article points out that learning that there is a singular “standard” English can be more economically debilitating than empowering for students. Lu and Horner therefore advocate approaching literacy as it relates to global forces “from below,” focusing on the tensions, paradoxes, and opportunities for agency presented in the everyday world of work. They propose an equity-focused pedagogical stance that is mindful of the economic circumstances that students face and also pursues the goal of critique and transformation. Urban students can learn by studying the realities and possibilities present in the linguistically rich environments within which they already live.
–Tony Scott
Payne, C. M. (2008). “Missing the inner intent: The predictable failures of implementation.” So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. (pp. 153-190). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group.
In looking at the differences between Whole School Reform and Standards Based Reform there are several issues that must be considered. Historically, reform has been deeply rooted in a political and cultural web of failure and distrust. Historically, the reforms that have been implemented focus on finding the one reform model that will best meet the needs of the school—not the child. Unfortunately, both reform efforts have been marred by time constraints, the lack of appropriate levels of support, the level of fidelity established during implementation, and administrative stability. The desire to increase student achievement has created urgency for immediate results without the full implementation of either reform model. Time constraints require that curriculum and instructional changes result in immediate gains in student achievement, while major findings for Whole School Reform indicate that significant gains are not visible until the 4th or 5th year of implementing a program with fidelity. Likewise, Standards Based Reform provides some immediate gratification for failing schools through increasing curriculum standards and teacher accountability. However, within the 3rd and 4th years of implementation, efforts are sabotaged by increased levels of teacher turnover, program sustainability decreases, and teachers reverting back to their traditional methods of teaching, which all result in a spike in student achievement followed by a drop in student achievement. While each reform model historically claims to be research-based, we have to consider the depth and length of time provided for proper implementation of each program model before determining the overall effectiveness of instructional programming. Ultimately, as we continue to seek new methods of reform, it is most important that we open our minds to see school reform as a means in which administration, teacher leaders, community leaders, and family members can learn from our attempt at changing the current educational system. In doing so, we must first initiate an open dialogue about how to initiate these changes and what we do that makes a difference in the life of a child.
–Shaftina Allen
Stenberg, S. J., &Whealy, D.A. (2009). “Chaos is the poetry: From outcomes to inquiry in service-learning pedagogy. College Composition and Communication, 60(4), 683-706.
Stenberg and Whealy explore the tensions between desired, measurable outcomes and what actually happens as classes that engage writing in the world actually unfold. We need goals for courses. However, the efficiency models that are increasingly valued in higher education yoke coursework to predetermined, quantifiable outcomes. The authors draw on John Dewey and others to argue that learning is a rich, varied, embodied process that can counter expectations and lead to surprising outcomes that are much deeper and more crucial for students than those that are predetermined and quantifiable. Many of the assumptions of poststructuralist thought about learning, language and literate development—such as that power and context shape understanding and knowledge, and that identity is inextricably tied to language, socialization and articulation—are unpredictable and not subject to large-scale measurement. Not rejecting outcomes entirely, the authors argue for an “ends in view” perspective on outcomes. This perspective views outcomes as a rough guide, a means of planning, but not as a rigidly pursued mandate. Outcomes conceived with an “ends in view” perspective allow for the possibility of new goals and learning that exceeds or even transcends original expectations. This article is useful for urban educators, who often find themselves negotiating rigid mandates that are more driven by efficiency, standardization, and deficit models than what the best research tells us about literacy. Meanwhile, students are surrounded by exciting possibilities for growth and transformation through engagement with their local communities and surroundings. Stenberg and Whealy draw on both research and their own experience as teachers to make a powerful argument for a deeper, more experience-driven approach to students’ writing education.
–Tony Scott
Technology
As a site, we recognize the importance of incorporating the digital world into our notions of writing, composing, and writing instruction. The readings here help us to locate our thinking in the history of writing instruction in general, as well as the current disjuncture between what we know about the teaching of writing, what it actually means to write and compose, and its assessment. These readings also help us to imagine possibilities and avenues for bringing “the new writing” into our classrooms in this climate of assessment, and help others see why what we are attempting to explore is far more than whistles and bells and flashing lights to keep kids interested in “real” academic work. It is the academic work.
Herrington, A., Hodgson, K., & Moran, C. (Eds.). (2009). Teaching the new writing: Technology, change and assessment in the 21st-century classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Chapter 1
In this chapter, Herrington and Moran present a historic view of the relationships between technology, assessment, and the writing classroom. They present the ways that technology has become increasingly visible in schools and the ways that its functions have ranged and changed from word processing to a networked space for sharing and co-creating opening spaces for composing. In parallel development, the testing industry has proliferated and caused a constricting reaction in composition in schools, as teachers and students narrow their content and structure to meet the needs of the test. To exemplify the discord between the development of these two phenomena, Herrington and Moran discuss moments of intersection between this kind of testing and technology, specifically in the form of computer-evaluated writing assessment. We imagine that the Literacy and Learning Narratives students create as part of this project will present an alternative image in which technology works to create a space accessible to communities outside of schools for students to be seen as knowers and learners rather than as numbers.
–Lacy Manship
Chapter 7
In 2009, several members of our Urban Sites group saw Peter Kittle at the NWP Digital Is conference in Philadelphia. A key feature of Peter’s work with digital projects, as seen in this chapter and at the Digital Is conference, is the mixing of theoretical frameworks of learning (including the work of James Paul Gee) with learner narratives. His work heavily influenced the initial proposal of this project as we imagined how urban students in our area might also create digital stories about their learning. In this chapter, Kittle describes ways for teachers to think into the idea of digital composition assignments. He describes how his work with his student, connections to past teaching practices, reflection, work with other professionals, and student input all influence his moves toward working with new media in his classroom. We are interested in continuing and furthering the conversation of digital learning narratives as introduced to us by Pete Kittle.
–Lacy Manship
Hicks, Troy. (2009). The Digital Writing Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Chapter 3: “Conferring Through Blogs, Wikis, and Collaborative Word Processors.”
Hicks argues that digital writing tools add a new and functional dimension to the writing workshop experience. Blogs, wikis, collaborative word processors, etc., are spaces where student writers can explore their writing, seek advice from peers and teachers, and use archives to review drafts and changes to mark their own progress. Detailed descriptions of blogs as writers’ notebooks and places for revision and wikis as spaces for collaborative writing and comments on pieces of writing come from the author’s classroom experience. These descriptions offer positive effects of the projects, as well as the negative effects. Hicks further advocates for the use of voice recordings to respond to student writing. Students at first were shocked to hear his voice, he says, but began to like it more than other methods such as checks on a rubric. The cautions include that students can remix the teacher’s voice and teachers must exercise care in choice of words and voice inflection. How digital media is carefully woven into the cloth of the writing workshop makes a convincing argument for entering the digital world with students. For Urban Sites, making writing workshop digital opens new spaces for students and teachers to create, revise, publish, and communicate.
–Sally Griffin
Assessment
One of the major goals of the Learning Narrative Project is to re-present the children and teachers in so-called “failing schools” as “knowers” rather than people who “fail to know.” We wanted to show all the knowledge and learning that is happening, but not showing up on standardized tests. We also wanted to explore ways of connecting communities and homes to the understanding of what counts for “knowledge” in school and involve that community in the assessment of that knowledge. The readings below help us to position this work within the current assessment climate, think about what assessment actually means to us and what it is we are trying to assess, and imagine more alternatives.
Gallagher, C. W. (2007). Reclaiming Assessment. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Chapter 2: “Accountability and After”
In Chapter 2, Gallagher counted the cost of accountability under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and proposed another approach to school improvement beyond the use of standardized tests, whether federal, state, or local. Gallagher proposes school improvement by means of protecting and enhancing “dialogue-rich relationships” (p. 19) within the school and between the school and community. In this chapter, Gallagher reveals how NCLB “exemplifies and consolidates” (p. 19) the accountability agenda at the expense of teachers, students, and communities. After a brief history of NCLB, Gallagher details the educational, social, and human costs of relinquishing educational control to the accountability agenda. He concludes with an explanation of what teachers, students, and communities deserve: places where people want to be, where “human freedoms are protected and nourished” (p. 28), what people say, think, and feel matters to other people who in turn matter to one another, and where everyone learns “to work on and work out the most important questions and challenges we face” (p. 28). This is precisely what Urban Sites intends to do; we want to shift the accountability agenda to an agenda of dialogue-rich, expressive, interactive, critical classrooms where each person is a person free to express his or herself creatively, not simply via a test score.
–Jennifer Ward
Chapter 3: “Teachers at the Lead, Schools in the Center”
In Chapter 3, Gallagher details “The Nebraska Story,” which was an experiment in “School-based, Teacher-led Assessment and Reporting System,” or “STARS” (p. 33). This program sponsors connections, promotes teacher involvement and professional growth, is student-focused, encourages reflective, classroom-based assessment, is inclusive, is a validation of the teaching profession, and inspires ownership and pride among Nebraska educators (p. 34-35). Not only has this program been highly successful, but student data shows significant gains in student growth and performance, which is undoubtedly linked to the collaboration between administrators and teachers in the creation of assessments as well as a fundamental change in school culture. By developing teacher leadership and collaboration through this program, the assessments are no longer “a tool of surveillance in a high-stakes game of gotcha”
(p.51). Rather, teachers, administrators, and to some extent the community, have taken collective ownership of school improvement, including instruction, curriculum, and assessment. Gallagher is quick to point out that this change does not occur overnight; Urban Sites is well aware of this fact also. However, Urban Sites agrees with Gallagher; this “high-stakes game of gotcha” (p. 51) benefits no one. By enabling teachers and administrators to work together to create authentic assessment, Urban Sites will explore how change in “failing schools” is possible through collaboration and a change in school culture.
–Jennifer Ward
Chapter 7: “Reclaiming Assessment”
In this chapter, Gallagher discusses how the accountability agenda has removed schools from the community. He also provides some ideas on what community-based models of school improvement can look like. Chris points to the way that NCLB acts to set schools and communities against one another. This piece of legislation, along with its line of rhetorical brethren (A Nation at Risk, Race to the Top) tell communities that their schools are failing and that schools and teachers are not to be trusted. NCLB sets up growth as competition between nations, states, districts, schools, teachers and students. The data and ways of talking about schools that comes out of this model are numbers and comparisons that leave out context and children.
Very relevant to the work we are engaging in with this Urban Sites project are Gallagher’s models from Nebraska for community-school engagement. He describes ways that communities can become integral to the development and implementation of content, curriculum and assessment. Community members might take part in active policy forums, reviewing student portfolios, and audience participation in the assessment of culminating student projects. Chris is careful to talk about how the “results” of models like these are difficult to interpret and take time to show growth, but he leaves a definite impression on the imagination of what broad level assessment that takes into account, and in fact counts on, what a community context might look like.
The work we are doing in the Literacy and Learning Narrative Project leans on the idea in Gallahger’s work of building both the learning processes and the assessment of those processes into acts of community engagement. Students will compose narratives out of their home and community lives, which will become places for learning at school. Part of the individual classroom assessments and the project assessment will come during the sharing and collaborative reflection of the process and ending works in individual and collective community experiences. We imagine that this work can become a site for continued exploration of how these acts of connection between home and school might create space for shared engagement between communities and schools by focusing on tangible moments of student learning.
–Lacy Manship
Moore, C., O’Neill, P., &Huot, B. (2009). “Creating a culture of assessment in writing programs and beyond.” College Composition and Communication61(1), W107-W132.
Moore, O’Neill, and Huot call for a fundamental paradigm shift in the development and evaluation of writing assessments at all levels of education. However, they do not insist upon an immediate transformation, but rather desire to “spark a gradual shift toward a more ideal assessment culture” (p. W128) that is not static or finite, but instead “ever-evolving and web-like, encompassing many interconnected values, practices, and people” (p. W125). One of their key points in the article discussed how assessment initiatives imposed “top down” are not relevant to all students or even all teaching styles; rather, these “top down” assessments value one type of writing over another, are not authentic writing assessments, and therefore are poor assessments of student writing ability and the teacher’s ability to teach writing. Moore, et al. believe that anyone charged with designing writing assessments should consider theory, the connection between high school and college writing, measurement errors, competing definitions of writers and writing, individual student histories, and cultural identities. In other words, “certain intellectual activities (i.e. writing) cannot be documented through standardized assessments” (pp. W121-W122). Instead, assessments should be locally controlled, site-based, rhetorically-based, and context-sensitive. Most importantly, not only should administrators be charged with creating assessments, but teachers should be also. Only those most closely associated with students know “who the students are and what they need to succeed in a particular environment” (p. W120). According to Moore, et al., incorporating all of these ideals into the culture of assessment in writing programs is the only way to begin a true paradigm shift in writing assessment.
–Jennifer Ward
Funds of Knowledge
Bartlett, L., & Holland, D. (2002). Theorizing the space of literacy practices. Ways of Knowing Journal, 2(1), 10–22.
Bartlett and Holland are working on the concept of figured worlds and how these worlds factor into our understanding of the way actors participate in literacy practices. Figured worlds are spaces in which actors (in this case teachers and students) perform based on the interpretation and implementation of the cultural artifacts at their disposal. The (in)ability to perform or move in and around these figured worlds is directly related to Gee’s notions of Discourse. Bartlett and Holland help the reader see that Gee’s Discourse is “a sort of identity kit” (p. 11)…ways of knowing and being that actors take with them into the many and varied figured worlds that require their per(form)ance. This “identity kit” enables actors to access funds of knowledge in which they can practice what it means to be in the particular figured world they inhabit at any given moment. By doing so, “actors form as well as perform” (p. 14) their identities. Over time, through this per(form)ance, accessing their “identity kit” to interpret and implement cultural artifacts, actors come to understand themselves and their position or standing within the figured world as it relates to the way in which power is distributed in that space. In order to better understand how actors per(form), Bartlett and Holland examine the figured world of a Brazilian classroom, providing a glimpse of how literacy practices revolving around what it means to be an “educated person” are negotiated by both students and teachers there. In the end, Bartlett and Holland offer a theoretical lens with which to re-see literacy practices.
Bartlett and Holland’s work is significant to our Urban Sites project in that it helps us to consider the impact figured worlds, artifacts, and identities of practice have on our understanding of what it means to engage in literacy practices. Through the composition of artifacts (digital narratives), it is our hope to initiate with our students a re-visioning of the figured world of learning—entering into a dialogue that critiques what it means to learn that, like the classrooms Bartlett studied in Brazil, is sanctioned by the violence of literacy shaming. Unlike the NGO teachers Bartlett worked with who were content with a sociable approach in and of itself with their students, we seek to expand from this approach to include a more political critique that examines the way in which students are re-positioned within their respective figured worlds. In order to do so, Bartlett and Holland suggest that we move away from Freirean programs that are based on a celebration of the local and/or examination of the distribution of money and power towards a “critique [of] the speech and literacy hierarchies upon which shaming rests” (p. 20). This critique will come in the form of our digital narratives project.
There is great potential in that the narratives can become powerful cultural artifacts within the figured worlds of learning and school as the actors (teachers and students) explore and reflect on new and old identities. In this particular case, the new identities would emerge through the creation of the digital narratives—mining older identities during the composing phase. The narratives may also open up new possibilities, helping actors (teachers and students) re-position themselves, in relation to what it means to be an educated person as they move from the figured world of school in and around new and existing communities of practice.
–Tony Iannone
Gutierrez, K., Baquedano-Lopez, P., &Tejeda, C. (1999). Rethinking diversity: Hybridity and hybrid language practices in the third space. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 6(4), 286-303.
Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, andTejeda argue that learning communities can develop in an environment where literacy learners are challenged to participate in competing discourses and positioning that exist together to facilitate expanded activity (i.e. zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978)). The authors suggest this “third space” may develop when educators expose the social, political, material, cognitive, and linguistic conflicts that develop between home and school communities in order to create “sites of rupture, innovation, and change” (p. 287) that engage learners. Maintaining that hybridity and diversity are the “building blocks of Third Spaces” (p. 287), the authors present the narrative of one dual immersion elementary urban classroom where children are encouraged to collaborate in order to create spaces where transformation occurs. The teacher’s role in this third space is to negotiate the space between local knowledge and unofficial curriculum, using “both registers and forms of knowledge as mediating tools for language and content development” (p. 297). In this particular model, the teacher uses a Freireian approach to pedagogy and offers students access to each other’s linguistic, cultural, and cognitive backgrounds, which initiates the development of a hybrid space where all students are empowered to use their voices and value the voices of others. The authors suggest “hybridity” is both a lens and a theoretical tool for “understanding the inherent diversity and heterogeneity of activity systems and learning events, as well as a principle for organizing learning” (p. 288). Maintaining that hybridity offers teachers the opportunity to recognize the transformative nature of challenging oppositional discourses and social practices, Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez, &Tejeda recommend educators move away from selecting normative practices that enable the privileging of mainstream dominant discourses. In this article, the authors describe the transformative practices of this one diverse elementary classroom that engaged the learners and the teacher in normalizing discussion and activities that may not be acceptable in the classroom that functions around traditional pedagogical methods. In a classroom that develops this hybrid third space, the authors note that no single language or register is privileged and suggest that interpretive practices might include “humor, local knowledge, personal experience, and narrative” (p. 293). These practices may work to bridge the space between the home and school and official and unofficial expectations.
–Heather Coffey
Moje, E.B. (2000). “To be a part of the story”: The literacy practices of gangsta adolescents. Teachers College Record, 103(3), 651-690.
Moje’s study about the literacy practices of five gang connected youth urges readers to consider what is important, even powerful about these literacy practices for the students who participate in them. She then points to the need to find ways to support students as they form their stories and work with the students to find ways to reconstruct the story society tells about them. Moje notes that the students’ literacy practices are empowering yet marginalizing at the same time. On one hand, the students are carving out a place for themselves in the story of society that works to shut them out. On the other hand, that very act is forcing them out of the center of society and onto the margins. Moje ends her article with a call for critical literacy in classrooms serving adolescent students. She explains that romanticized notions of gang-related literacy practices are as dangerous to youth as the vilified notions of the same practices. Leaning on Lisa Delpit (1988) and the body of work critiquing expressivist notions of literacy instruction that simply invite students to express themselves freely based on their own experiences, Moje asks us to envision classrooms where students and teachers examine their literacy tools and learn to use them across multiple contexts and conversations and ultimately transform the dominant discourse that marginalizes them. Envisioning and enacting such a classroom is the core of the work of the Learning Narratives project.
–Cindy Urbanski
Moje, E.B., Ciechanowski, K.K., Kramer, K., Ellis, L., Carrillo, R., &Collazo, T. (2004). “Working toward third space in content area literacy: An examination of everyday funds of knowledge and discourse.” Reading Research Quarterly, 39 (1), 38-70.
Moje, Ciechanowski, Kramer, Ellis, Carillo, andCallazo studied the various funds of knowledge and Discourses (Gee, 1996) available to a group of 7th and 8th grade Latino students in Detroit. They used their findings to suggest possibilities for using the competing home and academic Discourses, funds of knowledge, and literacy practices to work with content area texts in public schools. They offer an intensive review of the literature on third space and point to three understandings of the term: one as a building of bridges between home and school knowledge, another as a way of navigating across and being successful in varied discourse communities, and a third as a way of creating new knowledge and Discourses by bringing together competing ways of knowing and being. From here, they position themselves as drawing on all three understandings of third space in order to be change agents by using third space as a scaffold that will help students better negotiate different discursive spaces and then focus that on a model in which competing Discourses are used to create “new texts and new literacy practices” (p. 39). In each section, they give examples of the funds of knowledge the students bring with them and then offer ideas for how these funds might become a part of the science classroom. In their conclusion, they examine the difficulty of creating a third space that is alluded to in their findings. The students they study did not naturally bring their non-school Discourses to bear in science class, unless it was in a quiet aside to another student, though they were quite able to articulate them when directly asked. They point to the fact that though a third space always exists, students must be invited to bring those Discourses into the classroom, that teachers need to be aware that they exist, and then welcome and value them when they enter. They then move on to point to globalization and urbanization and the vast number of Discourses students are operating in because of those phenomena as a reason to continue working to make third spaces explicit in classrooms. The researchers end the piece with a call for further research and experiments in classroom practices that draw on and merge the funds of knowledge their students bring with them. Our Learning Narratives project is our inquiry into third space creating classroom practices.
–Cindy Urbanski
Moje, E.B., Collazo, T, Carrillo, R., &. Marx, W. (2001). “Maestro, what is ‘quality’: Language, literacy, and discourse in project-based science.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38 (4), 469-498.
In this piece, Moje, Collazo, Carillo and Marx look closely at the discursive demands project-based learning in a middle school science classroom make on students from marginalized populations. In thinking about discursive demands, Moje et al. draw on the concept of funds of knowledge and give a definition of the term that is hugely important to our Learning Narratives project in that it points to the fact that these funds are produced in “specific home, work and community interactions” (Location 53). For us, the purpose of these learning narratives is to make the knowledge that stems from each of these interactions, particularly the non-school interactions, more visible. The article illustrates the complexity of all of these funds coming together in a classroom by pointing out that the funds of knowledge drawn upon by scientists, science teachers, and an urban middle school student are mostly likely ALL different. Project-based learning asks students and their teachers to negotiate all of those funds of knowledge, and Moje et al. call for teachers to create “instructional congruence” or “third space” in which to negotiate all of these competing Discourses. When we ask students to create these digital learning narratives, we will be asking them to negotiate yet another Discourse. Moje et al. point to the significance of this added Discourse when they talk about how the science material isn’t coming out in students’ fiction writing, writing in science, or even in a play written to introduce a science concept, because it assumes a technical knowledge of science vocabulary/Science Discourse that the students don’t yet have. Moje et al. end with a point that feels significant to what we want to accomplish in terms of building a third space through these literacy narratives with students: “ . . . constructing a third space is not about letting students run with their everyday Discourses. . . Rather, third space is constructed only when disciplinary, classroom, and everyday Discourses inform one another and build new knowledge and Discourse” (Location 546).
–Cindy Urbanski