Sarah Beck | New York University (original) (raw)
Papers by Sarah Beck
Pedagogies, Feb 14, 2024
In order to better understand how the full range of students’ semiotic resources may be marshalle... more In order to better understand how the full range of students’ semiotic resources may be marshalled for learning, we analyse the role of interpretive claim-making across fandom and disciplinary communities. Using a framework of syncretic literacies with a focus on navigation, we analyse data from a series of writing conferences in a U.S.-based, fandoms-themed English course serving diverse high school students. Our analysis attends to shifts in convergent and divergent intersubjectivity to trace students’ navigation of interpretive practices as they talked with their peers and their instructor. Discursive claims emerged as an important tool functioning differently across these interactions. Specifically, the claim-making practices of one focal student demonstrate an emerging understanding of the distinctly different functions that claims serve as tools for navigating between, and hybridizing, discursive communities. Our findings highlight the importance of using discourse to analyse the presence of multiple or conflicting discursive practices, and designing learning environments in ways that support students’ use of hybrid discursive tools.
Education sciences, May 7, 2024
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
English Journal
The authors explain how performing the roles of reader, assessor, and instructor can empower stud... more The authors explain how performing the roles of reader, assessor, and instructor can empower students of diverse skill levels to develop their writing.
English Journal
A group of teacher researchers used dialogic assessment in parallel conferences to help students ... more A group of teacher researchers used dialogic assessment in parallel conferences to help students get more writing onto the page during conferences.
Teaching and Teacher Education
English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2022
Purpose This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaborativ... more Purpose This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality. Findings The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community. Originality/value This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literac...
A. (in press). Beyond the rubric: Think-alouds as a diagnostic assessment tool for high school wr... more A. (in press). Beyond the rubric: Think-alouds as a diagnostic assessment tool for high school writing teachers.
Purpose This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simu... more Purpose This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simultaneously support students’ literary reading and analytic writing through dialogic assessment, an approach to conferencing with writers that foregrounds process and integrates assessment and instruction. Design/methodology/approach This study uses qualitative research methods of three high school teachers’ dialogic assessment sessions with individual students to investigate how these teachers both assessed and taught literary reading moves as they observed and supported the students’ writing. An expanded version of Rainey’s (2017) scheme for coding literary reading practices was used. Findings The three teachers varied in the range and extent of literary reading practices they taught and supported. The practices that they most commonly modeled or otherwise supported were making claims, seeking patterns and articulating puzzles. The variation we observed in their literary reading practic...
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
Linguistics and Education
Abstract Though student writers work within socially-determined constraints on self-expression wh... more Abstract Though student writers work within socially-determined constraints on self-expression when writing for school purposes, they also have the power to reshape those constraints and thereby define an authorial identity. In this article we analyze data from three teacher-student conversations about student writing through the lens of figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998) to explore how these figured worlds are implicated in students’ positioning as contributing authors of their own work. In the first two cases, the teacher sustains the figured world of teacher-as-authority by failing to recognize students’ bids for authorship and resistance to teacher suggestions. The third case suggests an alternative figured world (Holland et al., 1998) of teacher-student relationships around writing: through repeated mitigated displays of authorship and resistance the student gains the teacher’s recognition for his contribution and thereby exercises control over his positioning as an author. Implications for student agency in writing instruction are discussed.
Harvard Educational Review, 2001
Studies of cognition in education continue to suggest that learners acquire and internalize knowl... more Studies of cognition in education continue to suggest that learners acquire and internalize knowledge through social interaction with others. A term often used to describe this model of knowledge acquisition is inquiry, as in "inquiry-based learning." This model assumes that knowledge results from a process of constructing answers to questions about which learners are genuinely curious and in which they have some personal or professional investment. Two recent books from prominent literacy researchers illustrate the value of inquiry as an analytic approach to understanding how people learn about literacy. Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research: Constructing Meaning through Collaborative Inquiry, edited by Carol Lee and Peter Smagorinsky, expands upon and illustrates the theories of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky through analysis of literacy learning and literacy research in communities of practice.
Culture, Cognition, and Emotion, 2008
Cambridge Journal of Education, 2009
... lower and middle levels in both grades. The number of students who performed at the highest l... more ... lower and middle levels in both grades. The number of students who performed at the highest level ('Advanced') did *Email: sarah.beck@nyu.edu Page 2. 312 SW Beck not increase. While an upward trend is always encouraging ...
Journal of Literacy Research, 2009
English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2022
Purpose-This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaborativ... more Purpose-This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach-Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality. Findings-The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community. Originality/value-This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive wholeclass text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.
Research in The Teaching of English, 2018
Pedagogies, Feb 14, 2024
In order to better understand how the full range of students’ semiotic resources may be marshalle... more In order to better understand how the full range of students’ semiotic resources may be marshalled for learning, we analyse the role of interpretive claim-making across fandom and disciplinary communities. Using a framework of syncretic literacies with a focus on navigation, we analyse data from a series of writing conferences in a U.S.-based, fandoms-themed English course serving diverse high school students. Our analysis attends to shifts in convergent and divergent intersubjectivity to trace students’ navigation of interpretive practices as they talked with their peers and their instructor. Discursive claims emerged as an important tool functioning differently across these interactions. Specifically, the claim-making practices of one focal student demonstrate an emerging understanding of the distinctly different functions that claims serve as tools for navigating between, and hybridizing, discursive communities. Our findings highlight the importance of using discourse to analyse the presence of multiple or conflicting discursive practices, and designing learning environments in ways that support students’ use of hybrid discursive tools.
Education sciences, May 7, 2024
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
English Journal
The authors explain how performing the roles of reader, assessor, and instructor can empower stud... more The authors explain how performing the roles of reader, assessor, and instructor can empower students of diverse skill levels to develop their writing.
English Journal
A group of teacher researchers used dialogic assessment in parallel conferences to help students ... more A group of teacher researchers used dialogic assessment in parallel conferences to help students get more writing onto the page during conferences.
Teaching and Teacher Education
English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2022
Purpose This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaborativ... more Purpose This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality. Findings The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community. Originality/value This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literac...
A. (in press). Beyond the rubric: Think-alouds as a diagnostic assessment tool for high school wr... more A. (in press). Beyond the rubric: Think-alouds as a diagnostic assessment tool for high school writing teachers.
Purpose This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simu... more Purpose This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simultaneously support students’ literary reading and analytic writing through dialogic assessment, an approach to conferencing with writers that foregrounds process and integrates assessment and instruction. Design/methodology/approach This study uses qualitative research methods of three high school teachers’ dialogic assessment sessions with individual students to investigate how these teachers both assessed and taught literary reading moves as they observed and supported the students’ writing. An expanded version of Rainey’s (2017) scheme for coding literary reading practices was used. Findings The three teachers varied in the range and extent of literary reading practices they taught and supported. The practices that they most commonly modeled or otherwise supported were making claims, seeking patterns and articulating puzzles. The variation we observed in their literary reading practic...
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
Linguistics and Education
Abstract Though student writers work within socially-determined constraints on self-expression wh... more Abstract Though student writers work within socially-determined constraints on self-expression when writing for school purposes, they also have the power to reshape those constraints and thereby define an authorial identity. In this article we analyze data from three teacher-student conversations about student writing through the lens of figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998) to explore how these figured worlds are implicated in students’ positioning as contributing authors of their own work. In the first two cases, the teacher sustains the figured world of teacher-as-authority by failing to recognize students’ bids for authorship and resistance to teacher suggestions. The third case suggests an alternative figured world (Holland et al., 1998) of teacher-student relationships around writing: through repeated mitigated displays of authorship and resistance the student gains the teacher’s recognition for his contribution and thereby exercises control over his positioning as an author. Implications for student agency in writing instruction are discussed.
Harvard Educational Review, 2001
Studies of cognition in education continue to suggest that learners acquire and internalize knowl... more Studies of cognition in education continue to suggest that learners acquire and internalize knowledge through social interaction with others. A term often used to describe this model of knowledge acquisition is inquiry, as in "inquiry-based learning." This model assumes that knowledge results from a process of constructing answers to questions about which learners are genuinely curious and in which they have some personal or professional investment. Two recent books from prominent literacy researchers illustrate the value of inquiry as an analytic approach to understanding how people learn about literacy. Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research: Constructing Meaning through Collaborative Inquiry, edited by Carol Lee and Peter Smagorinsky, expands upon and illustrates the theories of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky through analysis of literacy learning and literacy research in communities of practice.
Culture, Cognition, and Emotion, 2008
Cambridge Journal of Education, 2009
... lower and middle levels in both grades. The number of students who performed at the highest l... more ... lower and middle levels in both grades. The number of students who performed at the highest level ('Advanced') did *Email: sarah.beck@nyu.edu Page 2. 312 SW Beck not increase. While an upward trend is always encouraging ...
Journal of Literacy Research, 2009
English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 2022
Purpose-This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaborativ... more Purpose-This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach-Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality. Findings-The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community. Originality/value-This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive wholeclass text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.
Research in The Teaching of English, 2018