"Real Talk": The Participation of African American and Caribbean American Young Men in a Middle School Book Club

My dissertation research examines what happens when four middle school boys of African descent (African American and Caribbean American) gather to read a shared text in a series of classroom book clubs. I draw on sociocultural theories of literacy development (Rogoff, Gutierrez, Dyson) that present evidence of the importance of understanding literacy practices in relation to the sociocultural contexts in which literacy events occur. Based on data collected for five months (field notes, interviews, institutional and instructional documents), I consider the situated book club practices from ideological and pedagogical perspectives