This action research study explored if changes in the reading curriculum, specifically implementation of critical literacy approaches that acknowledge bicultural students, increase student learning as perceived by teachers and students in a Catholic elementary school, where students have been chronically performing at the lowest level in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. By using critical pedagogy (Darder, 1991; Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1983; Macedo, 1994; McLaren, 1988) as a theoretical framework, this action research project investigated the effective elements of critical literacy (Cadiero-Kaplan, 2004; Shor & Pari, 1999) that promote academic learning for Latino middle school students in a low-income Catholic elementary school. This study explored the approaches and perceptions of novel studies, as a form of literacy, to increase student learning in reading at a low-income, urban, Catholic elementary school. Classroom observations, teacher interviews, teacher lesson plans, student work, student focus groups, and a teacher focus group validated the findings that critical literacy approaches positively impacted student learning in reading. Changes in the school and reading curriculum, specifically the implementation of literacy approaches that acknowledge bicultural students, increased learning for Latino middle school students as perceived by teachers and students in this low-income, urban Catholic elementary school. Teachers implemented effective elements of critical literacy, including direct vocabulary and grammar instruction, analysis of literary tools, incorporation of Spanish, varying forms of assessment, and inclusion of student voice, through the use of novel studies. The school and classroom environments further promoted academic learning for Latino middle school students with high expectations, strict humor, and predictability where teachers, who viewed their students with promising futures, taught as a form of service. Although the school and teachers incorporated literacy practices, teachers fell short of practicing critical literacy because they failed to examine the underlying social ramifications of hegemonic forces.

Intricate Fictions: Cartography and the Contemporary African Novel examines the relationship between narrative and mapping practices in recent African novels. Considering the continent's well-documented history as a site of cartographical projection, I ask how its literary output remaps this space in the years following colonial rule. This project responds to calls for increased attentiveness to space in African literature, employing an interdisciplinary methodology that puts critical cartography into conversation with African literary criticism and globalization studies. I trace a trajectory from post-independence novels writing against colonial depictions of the continent to contemporary novels interested in engaging the instability concomitant with globalization and its attendant diasporas, migrations, and challenges to epistemological categories such as the nation. These novels develop what I term dynamic cartography, a mode of space-writing characterized by fluidity, disjunction, and mobility. This study brings to the fore a corpus of works that embody the spatial tensions of the contemporary era, raising provocative questions about our metageographical and cartographical tendencies. As absolute frameworks of time and space give way, new modes of space-writing continue to blur the boundaries between the map and the novel, offering further avenues of analysis. Ultimately, I pursue these avenues in order to contend that as global space becomes increasingly dynamic, so too do the genres that represent that global space. Contemporary African novels, composed with a profound awareness of geographical transformation, are thus also positioned at the forefront of generic transformation. / English

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