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Education Commons

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Teacher Education and Professional Development

Georgia State University

Series

Informational texts

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Education

Animating Talk And Texts: Culturally Relevant Teacher Read-Alouds Of Informational Texts, Laura A. May Jan 2011

Animating Talk And Texts: Culturally Relevant Teacher Read-Alouds Of Informational Texts, Laura A. May

Early Childhood and Elementary Education Faculty Publications

This article describes the classroom interactions surrounding teacher read-alouds of nonfiction texts in the classroom of a teacher who strived for cultural relevancy. Participants in this study were one European American teacher and her upper- elementary students who lived in the surrounding working-class neighborhood; all but two students identified as Latino or African American. Data were collected for two consecutive school years using ethnographic and discourse analytic methods. Analyses showed that the teacher took up three social positions (i.e., cultural advocate, facilitator of classroom interactions, and teacher of reading) by animating texts and students.


(Re)Storying Obama: An Examination Of Recently Published Informational Texts, Laura A. May, Teri Holbrook, Laura E. Meyers Jan 2010

(Re)Storying Obama: An Examination Of Recently Published Informational Texts, Laura A. May, Teri Holbrook, Laura E. Meyers

Early Childhood and Elementary Education Faculty Publications

American publishers have published numerous children’s books about Barack Obama over the past several years; most take the form of informational biographies. This article reports on a research project aimed at how these books incorporate sociohistorical narratives, particularly those related to the civil rights movement. Though the features of the books might cause the reader to presume political neutrality, the books link readers to distinct Discourses (Gee, 1996), suggesting particular ideologies. In this article, we identified the following differences: (1) specific happenings from Obama’s life were included in some texts while omitted in others; (2) when the events were included, …