This study investigated principal leadership in building a culture of disciplinary literacy. Previous studies investigated and validated the uniqueness of disciplinary literacy (Moje, 2015; Shanahan and Shanahan, 2008; Spires et al., 2018). Case studies on individual schools looked at literacy within the context of a specific school community (Faulkner, 2012; Francois, 2014; Gilrane et al., 2008). These studies, although they touched on teacher and principal leadership, did not focus on leadership at the core of creating a community of literacy. This study focused on the essential actions and dispositions of principals who successfully built and maintained a culture of disciplinary literacy. Eight principals from a large, suburban Northeastern school district were interviewed to ascertain their actions. Open coding with constant comparative analysis yielded common themes, dispositions, and actions of principals. Common leadership themes emerged as principals discussed leading disciplinary literacy: demonstrate why change is needed, recognize that leading literacy requires a plan, link the district priorities to disciplinary literacy, distribute leadership, provide targeted professional development, and utilize established resources. What emerged from this study was that one person alone could not build a culture of literacy within a school. Rather, changing instructional practices to put literacy at the center of learning requires the community to embrace literacy. As school leaders look to improve equitable outcomes for all students, they must look at the variation in instructional practices across the disciplines and ensure that literacy research-based practices are being used across all content areas. Change of this magnitude is a multiyear shift with student learning at the center of all instructional decisions. The complex task of leading instructional change requires a principal to learn about disciplinary literacy. If schools want equitable education for all students, principals must understand and place priority on disciplinary literacy. / 5 / This study investigated principal leadership in building a culture of disciplinary literacy. Disciplinary literacy is the ability to read, write, think, and discuss like an expert in the field. For example, classes with disciplinary literacy at the core would ask students to read like a scientist or write an original score like a musician. Previous studies investigated and validated the uniqueness of disciplinary literacy (Moje, 2015; Shanahan and Shanahan, 2008; Spires et al., 2018). Case studies on individual schools looked at literacy within the context of a specific school community (Faulkner, 2012; Francois, 2014; Gilrane et al., 2008). These studies did not focus on principal leadership at the core of creating culture of disciplinary literacy. This study focused on the essential actions and dispositions of eight principals who built a culture of disciplinary literacy in each of their secondary schools. Common leadership themes emerged as principals discussed leading disciplinary literacy: demonstrate why change is needed, recognize that leading literacy requires a plan, link the district priorities to disciplinary literacy, distribute leadership, provide targeted professional development, and utilize established resources. As school leaders look to improve equitable outcomes for all students, they must look how literacy is taught in the disciplines and ensure that students have an opportunity to learn the real-life practices of professionals in the field. The complex task of leading instructional change requires a principal to learn about disciplinary literacy, so he or she can encourage teacher-experts to explicitly teach authentic disciplinary literacy skills in their classes.

Public education is a continually evolving field, with new research, policies, and practices explored by professionals who are driven to provide America’s youth with high-quality education. Research literature since 2000 has highlighted the importance of disciplinary literacy and its unfortunate neglect in a majority of secondary classrooms (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Students who are literate in a particular discipline, such as math, view themselves as fluent in the language of mathematics, comfortable with reading, discussing, and practicing complex mathematical concepts while using appropriate vocabulary (Buehl, 2017). As seasoned professionals and novice educators consider the role of disciplinary literacy in their own classrooms, it is necessary to ponder the practices that are implemented within classrooms. Do they align with current research on the matter? What role do motivation and culture play in the process of becoming mathematically literate? How do these ideas influence classroom literacy practices? These are the central questions that have guided the construction of this research study, which will seek to examine the phenomena that occur within a classroom as teachers implement practices which promote and teach mathematical literacy. The exploratory nature of this study dictates that no judgement on the effectiveness of observed and discussed instructional strategies is considered, rather, a comparison of the latter with those strategies recommended by current educational researchers and literature. Interviews and classroom observations will work in tandem with a review of the current publications that address the areas of motivation, mathematical literacy, and culture.

Thesis (M.I.T.)--The Evergreen State College, 2007. / Title from title screen viewed (6/23/2008). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-87).

This thesis presents young British readers? engagement with manga regarding literary, aesthetic, social, and cultural dimensions. The study explores young readers? points of views of their reading preference ? manga. I investigated how children interpreted manga, with respect to the artistic techniques, the embedded ideologies, and the cultural elements therein. I also looked into children?s participation in manga fandom and its social meanings. This allowed me to explore what attracted British readers to this exotic text. This study involved 16 participants from two schools, aged between 10 and 15, with genders represented equally. The participants were grouped by gender in each school. Each group of students received three group interviews based on three manga that they were required to read in advance. Individual interviews with each student followed the group interviews, and all the students were asked to keep reading reflections. The findings show that the attraction of participants to manga includes at least five dimensions. First, manga is a visually rich text, which not only had great power in rendering vicarious experiences to the students, but also allowed the struggling students to grasp the meanings of the text better. Second, both the verbal and the visual storytelling were characterised as fragmentary, which inspired the students? imagination to join the creation of the story. Third, manga provided a temporary shelter where the participants could forget a stressful and frustrating reality. In addition, they felt that they gained renewed hope, refreshed energy, and insights to face potential challenges and difficulties in their lives. Fourth, the elements of Japaneseness and otherness made manga reading a rich experience of an exotic culture. Fifth, manga afforded collective pleasures in fan communities where the students could express their passion and gained a sense of identity.

Provincial town clerks and scriveners have hitherto been a neglected subject in the historiography of the legal profession, yet as this thesis demonstrates, they contributed significantly to medieval England’s legal and scribal culture. Arguing for a new definition of scriveners based on their legal and linguistic literacy, this fresh interpretation differentiates between scriveners, notaries, generic clerks and lawyers and modifies the existing tendency towards classifying scriveners purely on the basis of the work they did and the legal instruments they produced. The study not only rectifies a gap in our knowledge, but reconceptualises our understanding of the lower echelons of the legal profession by examining the work that scriveners did and the role that they played in the local legal administration of medieval England, and by extension, the ways in which they facilitated access to justice on several levels. Focussing primarily on Exeter, Bristol, Bridgwater and Southampton, this research for the first time reveals the identities of some of the many scriveners who worked outside of London and evaluates their activities in provincial England. In order to achieve this, the thesis considers the extent to which scriveners were an integral part of an urban legal service as members of the provincial secretariat. Underpinning the theoretical framework of this thesis are themes such as literacy, clerical identity and professionalization – all of which are examined through the prism of law, languages and access to justice. Grounded in a palaeographic and diplomatic approach to the manuscript sources, this research has yielded some surprising results regarding the essential role of provincial scriveners within the legal, political and administrative landscape of medieval England. Fundamentally, this thesis offers a new vision of provincial English scriveners and the influence of their work. Set against the backdrop of an increasingly ‘professional’ legal profession, the importance of provincial scriveners as the keepers and creators of legal memory is highlighted along with the impact that this had on the wider legal community of medieval England.

This thesis explores the Predicament of the Learner in an age during which an emergent Participatory Culture supported by networked computers is converging or colliding with a top-down Culture Industry model of education associated with centralised control and traditional learning media. Two case studies explore attempts to use advanced E-learning tools, the Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) and Revolution (a multiplayer role-playing game) to mediate learning activities in the digital classroom. Both reveal the shifting locus of agency for managing and regulating learning and identify a need to understand how learners are creatively appropriating a range of digital media to advance self-directed learning agendas. The main study, The Agency of the Learner in the Networked University, develops these insights through a cognitive anthropology, informed by post-Vygotskian theory, focussed on the digitally mediated practices of 16 post-graduate students who enjoyed unrestricted access to the Internet from their study rooms. The findings chapters explore i) learners designing personalised learning environments to support advanced knowledge work; ii) learners creatively appropriating web-based digital tools and resources for course related study and self education; iii) learners cultivating, nurturing and mobilising globally distributed funds of living knowledge; iv) learners breaking away from lifeworld communities and learning with others in online affinity spaces; and v) learners seeking out opportunities to bootstrap themselves towards the actualisation of a projective identity through serious play in virtually figured worlds. In each case, an attempt is made to innovate conceptual tools that can help us to identify and conceptualise the New Media Literacies (conceived of as expert-like digitally mediated practices) required to exploit the full potential of new media as a resource for course related study, independent learning and self-education.