Expectations, Relevance, and Relationships: Striving toward Ideals for Adolescent Literacy Instruction in an Urban Secondary School

Abstract

While research on adolescent literacy and urban education have jointly advocated for more evidence of dynamic practices that positively impact youths’ reading development, students in these settings typically receive instruction that focuses more on compliance and skill. In this article, I use a sociocultural perspective to present an ethnographic study of one urban middle and high school whose students were successful on multiple measures of reading. My analysis examines school and classroom practices, teacher and leader beliefs, and student perceptions to examine the relationship across school culture, classroom activity, and students’ reading experiences. Data analysis revealed that through professional routines such as shared planning, frequent dialogue, and the intention to know students personally, Grant Street staff embraced shared ideals about literacy. In turn, the school community applied these ideals to a way of teaching and learning literacy that invoked high expectations, relationships, and a relevant curriculum. Practices that facilitated this approach included independent reading, diverse representation in authors and stories, explicit discussions about social issues and power relationships, tracking individual student progress, and performance-based assessments. This research holds implications for coherent, schoolwide approaches for urban schools striving to support adolescents in literacy.