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Engaging Middle School Emergent Bilinguals In Language Awareness: A Practitioner Researcher Study, Carol Lickenbrock

Dissertations

This practitioner research study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) traced the journey toward critical literacy of a group of seven emergent bilinguals and me, their teacher, over the course of a four-month unit on argument as part of our English for Speakers of Other Languages 3 (ESOL3) class. Many of these students, like many emergent bilinguals in the United States, had been disempowered because they had not had access to the academic texts of school. As part of this research, students worked with tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyze the interpersonal, ideational and textual metafunctions of argumentation in lessons …

"Oh Gosh! Am I Going To Be Like This For The Rest Of My Life?": Promoting Critical Literacy Among Latinx Students Through Youth Participatory Action Research, Thomas Angiello

Dissertations

The researcher implemented a Youth Participatory Action Research project within the context of a summer reading assignment for rising high school seniors. Meeting once a week over the summer leading into their senior year, the Latinx student researchers used their critical lenses and summer reading texts as a springboard for their YPAR investigations into sociopolitical issues relevant to their communities. in facilitating this project, the researcher set out to study the ways in Latinx high school students interact with critical literacy and YPAR and the ways in which these students incorporate the tenets of critical literacy into their literature discussions …

Engendering Empathy For Immigrants In Middle Grade Readers Through Culturally Relevant Young Adult Literature, Amy J. Cattapan

Dissertations

This dissertation uncovered the ways through which culturally relevant young adult literature (YAL) engenders empathy for immigrants in middle grade readers. Empathy was displayed through both affective and cognitive responses and resulted in mirror and window moments (Bishop, 1990) as well as crystallizing experiences. Their empathetic responses led students to apply critical literacy skills to issues related to stereotypes, racism, discrimination, and immigration policies.

I conducted a qualitative case study to examine the ways in which reading and discussing YAL about immigrants created empathy in eighth graders in a culturally and linguistically diverse middle school and in what ways it …