Play in the school setting is a highly contested issue in today's restrictive academic environment. Although many early childhood educators advocate the use of play in their classrooms and emphasize the importance of play for children's learning and development, children beyond the preschool and kindergarten years are not often afforded opportunities to learn through play in their classrooms. This eight-month study, conducted in a first grade classroom in the outskirts of the Phoenix Metropolitan area of Arizona, analyzed young children's playful responses to literature as they read various books together in the classroom context. The purpose of this study was to develop deep understandings about the affordances of play in response to text within a first grade classroom and to investigate the ways that children utilize play to respond to literature and to construct meaning. This dissertation is informed by these guiding research questions: What are the affordances of play for responding to text in a first grade classroom? 1. What are the sociocultural resources that children use to respond to text? 2. In what ways do first graders incorporate and utilize play to make meaning with texts and each other in the classroom? In order to answer these research questions, I utilized several theoretical frameworks including: sociocultural theories of learning and literacy, the role of play and imagination in development, funds of knowledge, and reader response theories. This study was also informed by recent research findings in the areas of play and culture and play and literacy. I implemented a classroom Reading Center wherein I studied children's cooperative reading transactions and play as reader response. I collected data through classroom observations and field notes, videotaped and transcribed transactions, audiotaped and transcribed conversations and interviews, artifact collection, teacher observations of responsive play, family home visits and interviews, and the use of family story backpacks. This data, analyzed through thematic analysis, the constant comparative method, and grounded theory, revealed rich information about the ways that children utilize play to respond to literature in the classroom setting. The findings of this study provide evidence to suggest that through their play as reader response, their responsive play, children create a social space in the classroom which connects official school literacy practices and academic instruction with their social play practices. In this new space, children's play and talk take central roles in their explorations and uses of literacy. Findings further suggest that play can be seen as a generative source of academic learning, that the notion of response in research and practice be reconceived in the field to include play as a valid and valued form of reader response, and suggest that further research be conducted on children's responsive play.

In this multiple case study, I examined what types of sociocultural resources adult English learners brought with them from their previous contexts and what new resources they drew upon in the U.S. while learning to write in the essay genre. The study also identified how the participants chose to use previous and new sociocultural resources as mediated by the essay genre in the U.S. The following research foci shaped this study: (1) What types of sociocultural resources do adult English learners use while learning to write in the essay genre prior to and after their arrival in the U.S.? (2) How does the essay genre mediate adult English learners’ choices about sociocultural resources in the U.S.? Data collection involved semi-structured interviews, in-class and out-of-class participant observations and collection of artifacts over a period of seven weeks. Six weeks were dedicated to essay writing in an English composition course and English workshop, and one week was used to conduct a final in-depth interview with each participant. Analysis of data included coding and theme analysis. Four refugee students with diverse cultural backgrounds and who had different contacts within the educational system in the U.S. participated in the study. Results indicate that the participants relied upon seven categories of social, symbolic, and material resources when they learned to write in the essay genre. The categories are not mutually exclusive, but they do capture the variety of resources participants drew upon as writers in the essay genre prior to and after their arrival in the U.S. To draw upon their resources in the U.S., the participants also made choices that resulted in three types of actions. Those actions included losses, retentions, and gains. The essay genre mediated some retentions and gains. Those choices were driven by the essay genre demands of the participants’ new sociocultural context and, consequently, were rooted in their interaction within the new environment. Not all of the participants’ choices were mediated by the essay genre; some of them were shaped by contextual influences. Contextual influences shaped losses, as well as some of their retentions and gains. Those were general choices that were situated within particular contextual realities. As my study shows, the essay genre along with context played a significant role in contributing to shaping participant’s agentive capacity. The essay genre, in particular, shaped the kind of competencies they had to demonstrate; contextual influences shaped the types of resources and their access to them. Understanding this interaction and, in particular, how genre helps students make purposeful choices and act as competent writers contributes to a more holistic understanding of learning to write as a sociocultural act. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.

The aim of the thesis is to explore socially shared ideas about mental illness in everyday contexts. Drawing on social representation theory, organizations for users of mental health services and self-help groups are regarded as communities where social knowledge is constructed that makes intersubjective understanding of illness experiences possible. In order to investigate such knowledge as a resource in joint construction of meaning, a theoretical model is introduced where a distinction is made between a discursive level of situated ‘representational work’ and an underlying level of sociocultural resources. A focus group study was carried out with 27 participants who label their health problems as anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder, and were members of service user organizations. The focus group conversations were analysed with regard to thematic, interactional and discursive features to answer the questions: 1) how is mental illness represented, 2) how is the mentally ill person represented, and 3) how are others’ views on mental illness represented. The results show how mental illness is represented as a complex phenomenon that is contextualised to a number of frames of reference. Further, the analysis identified different types of resources that are utilized in representational work: local knowledge of the communities, medical concepts, different explanatory models, narrative structures, metaphors and conceptual dichotomies. It also revealed dialogical properties of the representational work that have rhetorical functions for self-presentation as a team performance. The discussion suggests that widely shared resources are put to use in group- and situation-specific representational projects, and that representations that are produced in group discourse can be characterised as ‘polemical social representations’ that respond to a double stigma of mental illness in everyday life where mental illness is regarded as a sign of ‘weakness’ as well as ‘otherness’.