Reading Family Discourses: Literacy in urban families

Catherine Compton-Lilly

Abstract For fourteen years I have been teaching urban students how to read and write. Year after year, I find myself faced with the same unrelenting challenge; too many of my intelligent and engaged students struggle with school literacy. Simple answers (i.e., changes in instructional practices, inservicing teachers, raising academic standards) have proven ineffective and substantive change elusive; Berliner and Biddle (1995) identify the real problems of public education as related to inequities in income, poverty, unaddressed diversity, prejudice, and discrimination. During the 2002-2003 school year, I will take a leave of absence from my elementary teaching position to be employed as either an adult literacy teacher or as a volunteer/researcher in an adult literacy classroom; 10 adults students who have children between the ages of four and seven will be my subjects. I will expand the scope of my prior research by assessing the reading ability of my adult subjects and examining the discourses that adults' teachers and children's teachers use to describe and position their students as literacy learners. Level 1 - Home-Based Data: Data collected from ten adult literacy students and their children between the ages of four and seven will include audiotaped interviews with adults and children, and videotapes of adults and children participating in literacy activities. Level 2 - School-Based Data: Data collected from both the adults' and children's classrooms and teachers will include audiotaped interviews with teachers, fieldnotes collected in classrooms, children/adult classroom assessments, children and adult writing samples, three retrospective miscue analysis sessions with adults, and classroom program related data. Level 3 - Cumulative Data Reports: Home and school data will be integrated to create case study reports for each family. Theme-based reports from across family case studies, and a theoretical model that describes the ways home discourses and official discourses about literacy operate within this community will be developed. During the final phase of this proposed research, I plan to spend a semester at the University of South Australia to collaborating with colleagues who have similar research interests.

About Catherine Compton-Lilly

Catherine Compton-Lilly is a first grade teacher and Reading Recovery teacher in Rochester, New York and a visiting associate professor at Saint John Fisher College. She has taught in the public schools of New York State since 1985. Catherine Compton-Lilly received her Ed.D. in Curriculum and Human Development from the University of Rochester in 2000. She is the writer of several articles and book reviews and serves on the editorial boards of Networks, a teacher research internet journal, and The Reading Teacher. Dr. Compton-Lilly's first book, Reading Families: The Literate Lives of Urban Children, will be available from Teachers College Press in November of 2002. Using teacher research to learn more about literacy, urban education, and diversity is the focus of her most recent work.