UC Berkeley

Most studies of so-called struggling readers and at-risk students talk about students but few account for students' perspectives on their own learning as part of the research design. In this year-long qualitative study of two different ninth-grade literacy intervention classes in two secondary schools in California, I incorporated students' perspectives into a larger study that examined how the two intervention models served students during their first year of high school. At the core of this study is the theoretical concept of re-mediation, a morphological derivation of mediation (Cole, 1996: Cole & Griffin, 1983), which provides an alternative to the deficit-oriented approach of remediation, a morphological derivation of remedy. This theoretical perspective allowed me to study intervention settings by focusing on activity systems and how they shape students' learning rather than focusing on remediating individual student deficits. I argue that an advantage of examining interventions from students' perspectives, as these perspectives emerged through the triangulation of multiple data sources, is that they provide a way to privilege students' personal histories and identities at this critical juncture in their academic careers.

I combined interviews with focal students, teachers, parents, and administrators with surveys of a larger population of students, and incorporated classroom observations and samples of student work in order to gain the broadest possible understanding of the institutional and pedagogical conditions under which teachers and students operated in the two classrooms. More specifically, I sought to understand how those conditions, combined with students' understandings of literacy and learning and their own academic identities, shaped and were shaped by the teaching and learning activities that occurred in the two classrooms. In my analysis, I paid particular attention to the teachers' and students' understandings of the objectives of the classes and how those perspectives shaped the reading and learning activities that occurred in them.

One of the central findings of this study is that the two literacy classes, Enhanced Reading and Reading Workshop, re-mediated students' reading in different ways. The objective of Enhanced Reading was to encourage students to read more in order to become better, more informed, readers, students, and people; the objective of Reading Workshop was to help students gain control over a series of strategies that they could use to be more effective readers who would do better in school and on tests. These objectives led to different outcomes, with students in Enhanced Reading becoming more personally engaged with the act of reading high-interest texts and students in Reading Workshop becoming more strategic in how they approached texts similar to those they might encounter in school. Other findings from this study reveal how the larger institutional and pedagogical contexts in which the two classrooms operated had a profound impact on what re-mediation looked like in the two spaces. At the same time, the findings indicate that students themselves had an equally important impact on teaching and learning activities in their classrooms. Perhaps the most compelling finding is that the success of the two approaches to re-mediation varied for individual students in light of their personal histories and identities as readers and as students.

The findings from this study have theoretical, empirical, and practical implications. At a theoretical level, they highlight the need to incorporate a theory of identity into future theorizations and applications of re-mediation in order to account for the ways in which re-mediation influences a subject's relationship to his or her environment at the same time that it changes the nature of the activity. At empirical and practical levels, the findings demonstrate the value of attending to the larger contexts in which teaching and learning interactions occur and the multiple factors that mediate literacy and learning in classrooms. Finally, the findings from this study are a challenge to teachers and researchers alike to take seriously the longer-term outcomes of what we teach and study and to take into account the symbiotic relationship between activities and identities and how each informs and shapes the other. Looking across the two classrooms, it was evident that neither ambitious instruction nor authentic activity could accomplish separately what the two might accomplish together if treated as symbiotic rather than separate enterprises.