Reading and writing for real: Co-researching literacy with urban high school students.

This dissertation chronicles an ethnographic/action research study investigating what counts as literacy for urban high school students, and examines the impact of co-researching on the students and researcher involved. In particular, it describes the interweaving of mechanisms of change and transformations in action research, documenting the aspects of this project which triggered change, and analyzing the nature of these resulting transformations. Ten students from a comprehensive, urban high school were hired as co-researchers. They engaged in interviewing peers, collecting artifacts, and analyzing and interpreting data. Taken together, these practices and interactions lead to resulting transformations which in turn became mechanisms for change. Working together in these ways allowed our group to become a community engaged in the process of research. Not an end in itself, however, community became a mechanism for change, allowing students to take on the identity of researchers and to explore other possible selves (Marcus & Nurius, 1989). As researchers, students were, again, engaged in practices which were mechanisms for change. As they explored how their peers and others defined literacy, they came to see how literacy is bound up with issues of race and identity. They began to critically examine how society viewed them and their peers as Black urban youths and through their writings and public presentations, asserted a transformed sense of literacy and identity. Furthermore, as co-researchers, students often redirected this study, forcing me to reconsider the ethical and epistemological implications of our work and the nature of research in general. This study should inform educators interested in reconceptualizing what it means to engage students in literacy learning, providing a model for making literacy, inquiry and interpretation more central to their teaching. It also provides a model for other educational researchers interested in repeating such collaborative work. Finally, as a project undertaken with students as co-researchers, it provides an outlet for these students--and their peers who were interviewed--to voice their perspectives on schooling, to offer accounts of their own literacy experiences, to construct themselves and their identities in relation to one another, and potentially to (re)construct the way the world sees them.PhDEducationLanguage artsSecondary educationSocial SciencesSocial researchUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129963/2/9711942.pd