Books by Lara J Handsfield
This comprehensive textbook introduces readers to the most influential theories and models of rea... more This comprehensive textbook introduces readers to the most influential theories and models of reading and literacy, ranging from behaviorism and early information processing theories to social constructionist and critical theories. Focusing on how these theories connect with different curricular approaches to literacy instruction from pre–K to grade 12, the author shows how these theories both shape and are shaped by everyday literacy practices in classrooms. Readers are invited to explore detailed vignettes that offer a practice-based view of theories as they are brought to life in classrooms. Unlike other books on literacy theories, Literacy Theory as Practice devotes substantial attention to linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms and 21st-century technologies. Published by Teachers College Press.
Papers by Lara J Handsfield
NABE Journal of Research and Practice, 2022
This study explores how three elementary teachers in the US South and Midwest leveraged translang... more This study explores how three elementary teachers in the US South and Midwest leveraged translanguaging pedagogies – or instruction that makes use of bilingual students’ full linguistic repertoires – to support participation in literacy instruction. Using qualitative methods of data collection and analysis, it explores how teachers and students gave voice to their identities, recognized resources, and reshaped classrooms to create, participate in, and sustain translanguaging pedagogies. It uses an ecological approach to describe these strategies as envoicing, entextualizing, and recontextualizing, foregrounding the relationship between identities, resources, and contexts in classrooms. The study concludes with strategies for educators who seek to make their classrooms more multilingual, as well as recommendations for sustaining translanguaging classroom ecologies.
En este estudio exploramos cómo tres maestras de escuela primaria en las regiones del sur y el medio-oeste de Estados Unidos implementaron pedagogías de translingüísmo — instrucción que hace uso de todo el repertorio lingüístico del estudiante—para fomentar su participación durante el proceso de enseñanza de la lectoescritura. Usando métodos cualitativos de investigación, examinamos cómo maestros y estudiantes utilizaron sus identidades, reconocieron varios recursos, y reorganizaron las clases para crear, participar, y sostener pedagogías translingüísticas. Utilizamos un esquema ecológico para describir estas estrategias como envocación, entextualización, y recontextualización, enfatizando la relación entre identidades, recursos, y contextos en aulas escolares. En este artículo proponemos estrategias para aquellos maestros que estén bucando maneras de hacer sus clases y su instrucción más multilingüal, así como sugerencias para promulgar ecologías educativas translingüísticas.
Harvard Educational Review, 2002
Abstract: This review of" Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversit... more Abstract: This review of" Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights?" by Tove Skutrabb-Kangas (Erlbaum 2002) finds the book a useful guide for examining language policies in education but suggests its argument is weakened by the invisibility of teachers in the analysis and the loaded and inflammatory language used.(Contains 40 references.)(SK)
Reading Research Quarterly, 2021
In this article, we contend that in media stories on the science of reading, journalists have rel... more In this article, we contend that in media stories on the science of reading, journalists have relied on strategic metaphorical framing to present reading education as a public crisis with a narrow and settled solution. Drawing on data from a critical metaphor analysis of 37 media stories, we demonstrate how frames used in recent media reporting have intensified the reading wars, promoting conflict and hampering conversation among stakeholders and across research paradigms and methodologies. The media have asserted a direct connection between basic research and instructional practice that, without sufficient translational research that attends to a variety of instructional contexts and student populations, may perpetuate inequities. We end with an example of collaboration and a challenge to reframe reading education in ways that center collaboration and conversation rather than conflict.
Journal of Literacy Research, 2019
The field of literacy research has seen a recent surge in scholarship focusing on how matter—both... more The field of literacy research has seen a recent surge in scholarship focusing on how matter—both human and nonhuman—comes to matter in literacy research and practice. This article explores how new materialist theories may be recruited for literacy research motivated by an anti-racist ethic. We present an illustrative intra-action analysis of a short autobiographical video produced by Malcolm, a Black male high school student, for a digital autobiography class assignment. Our analysis, informed by both new materialist and poststructuralist theories and emphasizing both discourse and materiality, produces varied interpretations of Malcolm and his literacy practices. Based on our multitheoretic analysis, we raise ethical concerns regarding analyses of racialized students’ literacy practices that emphasize materiality and affect without also retaining a critical eye toward powerful discourses of race and racism. We end with implications and recommendations for others engaging new materialisms in literacy research.
Journal of Literacy Research, 2019
In this Insight article, we look across the syntheses in this issue to consider how they help rea... more In this Insight article, we look across the syntheses in this issue to consider how they help readers notice dominant flows and identify sites for disruption within the field of literacy teacher preparation. We first consider the meaning of disruption with respect to the metaphor of flow. We then identify and discuss possible sites of disruption authors of research syntheses create, providing examples from the literature. Finally, we suggest how research syntheses might be framed and crafted for purposes of disrupting the flows of dominant discourses and power structures in the field of literacy teacher preparation.
Code-meshing offers an instructional framework that incorporates multiple languages into classroo... more Code-meshing offers an instructional framework that incorporates multiple languages into classrooms, interrogates notions of which languages are " correct " or " appropriate " within those spaces, and broadens how to approach writing instruction for linguistically diverse students.
In this article, we describe how students were invited to write and publicly read their momentos ... more In this article, we describe how students were invited to write and publicly read their momentos de cambio (moments of change) stories—memoirs in which they recount moments of significant change, both joyful and traumatic, in their lives. Drawing from elements of Latino critical theory, we conceptualize these stories in part as testimonios—opportunities for the students to voice their own truths and experiences in the world. We describe how the concept of momentos de cambio served as a rhetorical resource for claiming epistemic privilege and interpretive authority across the school year.
We consider how research participants engage alongside researchers as choreographers of data gene... more We consider how research participants engage alongside researchers as choreographers of data generation and highlight the everyday practices of researchers and participants in motion within and across time and space. Data for this case analysis were generated during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and literacy teacher development. We utilized microethnographic discourse analysis to analyze a video excerpt from a classroom observation during writers workshop in a fourth-grade bilingual classroom. We sought to understand how the teacher’s and students’ discursive moves during the event tactically disrupted the researchers’ agenda in the moment and complicated attempts at data analysis. Our analyses illustrate how the teacher multiply situated herself in ways that trouble dichotomous framings of teachers’ work, such as traditional or nontraditional, as well as dominant conceptualizations of qualitative research, such as data “collection.” We end with implications for interpreting and representing research findings.
Reading Research Quarterly, Jan 1, 2010
In this article, the researchers use the theoretical constructs of Bakhtin and de Certeau to exam... more In this article, the researchers use the theoretical constructs of Bakhtin and de Certeau to examine how a fourth-grade teacher negotiated multiple and competing ideologies of literacy and teaching, and how these negotiations related to her professional identity. Data for this case study were collected during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and teacher development. The researchers used constant comparative analysis and microethnographic analysis of talk and visual data to investigate how the teacher positioned herself with respect to four different space-times impacting her literacy instruction (i.e., standardization, bilingual education, writers' workshop, novice teacher status). Findings demonstrate how her positioning involved the tactical recontextualization and creative adaptation of discourses across these space-times as she poached off institutional powers to refashion curriculum, classroom spaces, and her teacher identity. These negotiations illustrate the microscopic and everyday dimensions of power and how literacy instruction and teacher identities are coconstructed in the particulars of everyday practice. In tandem with the analyses, the researchers argue for a syncretic theoretical framing and micro-level analytic approach to literacy research to account for the particularities of discourse and classroom practice, and their potential to both reproduce and contest dominant ideologies of literacy and teaching.
In this article, the researchers use the theoretical constructs of Bakhtin and de Certeau to exam... more In this article, the researchers use the theoretical constructs of Bakhtin and de Certeau to examine how a fourth-grade teacher negotiated multiple and competing ideologies of literacy and teaching, and how these negotiations related to her professional identity. Data for this case study were collected during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and teacher development. The researchers used constant comparative analysis and microethnographic analysis of talk and visual data to investigate how the teacher positioned herself with respect to four different space-times impacting her literacy instruction (i.e., standardization, bilingual education, writers' workshop, novice teacher status). Findings demonstrate how her positioning involved the tactical recontextualization and creative adaptation of discourses across these space-times as she poached off institutional powers to refashion curriculum, classroom spaces, and her teacher identity. These negotiations illustrate the microscopic and everyday dimensions of power and how literacy instruction and teacher identities are coconstructed in the particulars of everyday practice. In tandem with the analyses, the researchers argue for a syncretic theoretical framing and micro-level analytic approach to literacy research to account for the particularities of discourse and classroom practice, and their potential to both reproduce and contest dominant ideologies of literacy and teaching.
Linguistics & Education, 2013
This study explored how ideologies of language and literacy and social and academic identities we... more This study explored how ideologies of language and literacy and social and academic identities were constructed and contested during a literature discussion. In the event, a group of five (and later six) boys in a fourth grade bilingual classroom attempt to identify an unknown word in their novel: booger. Microethnographic discourse analysis and analyses of participants’ movements across the classroom were conducted, and interpretations were informed by spatializing theories of social practice and identities. Findings illustrate how the students’ and teacher's physical and discursive moves involved the negotiation of multiple ideologies of language learning. Findings suggest the need for a deeper understanding of the micro-level processes in which academic and social identities and learning opportunities for students are forged.
Journal of Literacy Research, Jan 11, 2013
In this article, the researchers use positioning theory and de Certeau’s theoretical insights int... more In this article, the researchers use positioning theory and de Certeau’s theoretical insights into cultural production in everyday life to examine how first-year literacy coaches negotiate issues of power, positioning, and identity during their professional development. Data were collected during a yearlong qualitative study of literacy coaches participating in a district–university partnership to provide professional development to first-year literacy coaches. The researchers used positioning analysis of three small stories drawn from interviews with literacy coaches and one vignette from a professional development session to investigate how the literacy coaches positioned themselves within the moral order of the district’s literacy and professional development model. Findings demonstrate how the literacy coaches both shaped and were shaped by the institutional spaces through which they moved as they tactically negotiated conflicting expectations and discourses about coaching. These negotiations highlight the emotional nature of literacy coaches’ work as they co-constructed their identities and negotiated understandings of how school spaces are used and the purposes of literacy coaching. The researchers argue that it is necessary to move beyond current conceptions of literacy coaching as a series of roles and tasks to recognize the complexities of literacy coaching and to offer more meaningful professional development for literacy coaches.
In this paper, I illustrate how a fourth grade bilingual teacher engaged and blended multiple and... more In this paper, I illustrate how a fourth grade bilingual teacher engaged and blended multiple and sometimes competing curricular approaches and discourse patterns during a science unit on plant life to support her students’ English language and academic content development. Illustrative examples are drawn from a two-year qualitative study exploring multilingualism, multiliteracies, and K-8 teacher development. Using critical sociocultural theory and microethnographic discourse analysis, I highlight how the teacher mediated students’ language and learning through meaningful contextualization and careful linguistic scaffolding while simultaneously tactically negotiated multiple ideologies of teaching and learning. She accomplished this by moving between different teacher roles within and across learning events. Findings provide helpful lessons for other teachers who find themselves pulled in multiple directions with respect to curricular expectations in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms.
Journal of Literacy Research, Jan 1, 2009
A critical analysis of traditional reading comprehension instruction and potential effects for cu... more A critical analysis of traditional reading comprehension instruction and potential effects for culturally and linguistically diverse students.
In this study we take up challenges regarding researcher positionality, representation, and the c... more In this study we take up challenges regarding researcher positionality, representation, and the construction of difference as a launching point to reflexively analyze our own practices within a research project exploring multilingualism, multiliteracies, and teacher development. Our data were drawn from a teacher study group we facilitated during the first phase of a two-year study.We draw on poststructuralist understandings of discourse, power, and performativity and use elements of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to conduct a close thematic reading of two moments of discomfort in one study group meeting, and we critique our own complicity in the discursive production of difference. Further, we engage tools of process drama to theorize how we might have structured and responded to interactions differently during one of these same moments in order to address these challenges more successfully. We conclude by arguing for approaches and interpretive tools for researchers that could help to reimagine as well as respond both ethically and analytically to issues of representation in language and literacy research.
In this article, we propose five interrelated dimensions of global literacy instruction. Specific... more In this article, we propose five interrelated dimensions of global literacy instruction. Specifically, we argue that global literacy instruction is critical, multimodal, multilingual, dialogic, and networked. We present vignettes from three classrooms (3rd, 4th, and 12th grades) to illustrate how these dimensions may be engaged in pedagogical moments that are responsive to new media and the lived experiences of students growing up in a globalized world. We then connect these practices to the Common Core Standards, and follow with key questions and suggestions for teachers to consider as they seek to engage the global in their own classroom literacy instruction.
56th Yearbook of the National Reading …, Jan 1, 2007
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Books by Lara J Handsfield
Papers by Lara J Handsfield
En este estudio exploramos cómo tres maestras de escuela primaria en las regiones del sur y el medio-oeste de Estados Unidos implementaron pedagogías de translingüísmo — instrucción que hace uso de todo el repertorio lingüístico del estudiante—para fomentar su participación durante el proceso de enseñanza de la lectoescritura. Usando métodos cualitativos de investigación, examinamos cómo maestros y estudiantes utilizaron sus identidades, reconocieron varios recursos, y reorganizaron las clases para crear, participar, y sostener pedagogías translingüísticas. Utilizamos un esquema ecológico para describir estas estrategias como envocación, entextualización, y recontextualización, enfatizando la relación entre identidades, recursos, y contextos en aulas escolares. En este artículo proponemos estrategias para aquellos maestros que estén bucando maneras de hacer sus clases y su instrucción más multilingüal, así como sugerencias para promulgar ecologías educativas translingüísticas.
En este estudio exploramos cómo tres maestras de escuela primaria en las regiones del sur y el medio-oeste de Estados Unidos implementaron pedagogías de translingüísmo — instrucción que hace uso de todo el repertorio lingüístico del estudiante—para fomentar su participación durante el proceso de enseñanza de la lectoescritura. Usando métodos cualitativos de investigación, examinamos cómo maestros y estudiantes utilizaron sus identidades, reconocieron varios recursos, y reorganizaron las clases para crear, participar, y sostener pedagogías translingüísticas. Utilizamos un esquema ecológico para describir estas estrategias como envocación, entextualización, y recontextualización, enfatizando la relación entre identidades, recursos, y contextos en aulas escolares. En este artículo proponemos estrategias para aquellos maestros que estén bucando maneras de hacer sus clases y su instrucción más multilingüal, así como sugerencias para promulgar ecologías educativas translingüísticas.