Abstract of

The Remaking of a High School Reader

Lesley A. Rex

There is ample evidence that students frequently move unsuccessfully from a lower to a higher academic track, but little research into how students successfully make that transition. This investigation builds on scholarship in literacy and teaching and learning suggesting that to be successful, students' identities as readers, writers, and speakers need to be remade within classrooms whose practices are conducive to integration. This study analyzes ethnographically collected classroom discussions and student work to provide telling cases of the conditions that support the remaking of a reader. Focusing on a classroom that positioned general students to engage discursively like gifted and talented students, the study describes a general student's emergent gifted and talented reading practices, the classroom's collective discursive resources, and the teacher's shifting pedagogical role and actions as readings and student identities were undergoing reconstruction. The case analyses illustrate the central relationship between individual readers and their membership in a reading culture they are coconstructing. They demonstrate the importance of orientation in students' and teachers' construction of what constitutes membership. In doing so, the analyses illuminate a concept of reading and of being a reader, and a method for studying it, that is sociocultural.

Abstract from Rex, L.A. (2001). The Remaking of a High School Reader. Reading Research Quarterly, 36(3), 288–314. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.36.3.3