Article Database

When It’s More Than You, Jesus, and the Pencil: Reflections on an Academic Writing Mentorship.

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What makes academic writing so challenging, and what might be done to help graduate students who struggle with it? The authors explore answers to these questions by reflecting upon their own experiences in graduate school and highlighting their collaboration as African American literacy scholars. They use the term academic writing mentorship to characterize their writing relationship and discuss how collaborative work transformed their perceptions of and experiences with academic writing. They also offer academic writing mentorships as a possible strategy for supporting graduate students struggling with academic writing.

“I Want to Meet My Students Where They Are!”: Preservice Teachers’ Visions of Culturally Responsive Reading Instruction

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Crossing over to Canaan: Engaging Distinguished Women and/or Minority Literacy Scholars in Critical Tenure Conversations

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Learning about Building Literacy Communities in Multicultural and Multilingual Communities from Effective Elementary Teachers

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Over the past decade, the concept of “community” has been at the center of reform in literacy education. Most literacy educators agree that community-oriented environments are critical for students’ literacy learning, yet many have difficulty building these communities in multicultural and multilingual classrooms. In this article we draw upon the expertise of successful community builders by highlighting the instructional and classroom practices of two literacy teachers who are effective with culturally and linguistically diverse students. Using qualitative case study methodologies we explore how these exemplary teachers created vibrant multicultural and multilingual literacy communities. Analyses revealed four practices both teachers used to build literacy communities: (a) building relationships amongst community members, (b) fostering collective responsibility within the community, (c) promoting ownership of literacy for all community members, and (d) reflecting on community learning. The findings demonstrate that while teachers used these four common practices to establish successful literacy communities, they also developed specific community-building strategies that were congruent with the strengths and needs of the culturally and linguistically diverse students in their classrooms. Implications for literacy educators are also discussed

Orchestrating Success for African American Readers: The Case of an Effective Third-grade Teacher

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Through building on and extending the metaphor of “orchestration,” forwarded by reading scholars, this case study research describes and examines how an effective third‐grade teacher organizes and facilitates high‐quality reading instruction for African American students. Findings suggested that the teacher used three pedagogical strategies to meet African American students’ social and literacy needs: (a) enacting a “border crossing curriculum” (b) making the strategies and skills of good readers “transparent” and (c) making cross‐cultural connections to students through literature. Implications for classroom reading instruction and reading research are discussed.

Who Are You Teaching? Coordinating Instructional Networks Around the Students and Parents You Serve

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Making Kids Winners: New Perspectives in Literacy from Urban Elementary School Principals

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Two school principals share the stories of how they have used nontraditional administrative approaches as strategies for connecting home and school and for improving the literacy achievement of their culturally diverse students.

Are We All on the Same Page? Investigating Teachers’ and Administrators’ Conceptions of At-riskness in an Urban School

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Managing Performance Expectations of Industrial Symbiosis

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Firms collaborate on environmental management issues for number of reasons, including cost reduction, risk sharing and managing competition. Industrial symbiosis represents a voluntary collaborative approach among firms in geographic proximity. Companies participating in industrial symbiosis have been found to improve their individual economic and environmental performance, while the regions where they are located are thought to benefit through enhanced environmental quality. However, too few studies have actually investigated whether this is always the case. This paper considers a single case on the island of Puerto Rico, where several firms in a predominantly pharmaceutical manufacturing cluster participated in symbiosis initiatives for several decades. It examines whether early stage symbiotic activities, specifically a shared utility, met technical performance and community expectations for improved environmental quality. Results suggest that collaboration does not necessarily lead to expected environmental performance goals. The paper details the circumstances that led to under‐performance of the initiative and the lessons for symbiosis projects in general.

Industrial Symbiosis at the Facility Scale

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Industrial symbiosis (IS), as a subfield of industrial ecology, is concerned with cooperation among industrial firms in managing resources, particularly by‐products, such that the waste of one firm becomes the input of another. This “closed‐loop” pattern also lies at the heart of the concept of the circular economy (CE). Both concepts are typically considered at scales ranging from industrial parks to global supply chains, but rarely at the scale of a single facility housing multiple firms. Moreover, both concepts have requirements and implications that reach beyond the tracking and coordination of material flows. These additional requirements include the cultivation of new business models and political support, as well as engagement of local communities and cultures. Thus, both IS and the CE face the challenge of bridging the gap between the technical and sociocultural aspects of industrial development and adapting to the facility scale. We address this challenge by proposing a framework for the development of facility‐scale industrial symbiosis (Facility‐IS). Facility‐IS accounts for the presence of symbiotic interfirm relationships—including, but not limited to, material and knowledge exchange—within a single physical facility. The conditions for planning, facilitating, and growing Facility‐IS are outlined, as well as three approaches to implement such projects. Overall, this research forms a Facility‐IS framework rooted in existing best practices for understanding the CE at the local scale, tracking business sustainability factors and assessing viable strategies that facilitate IS.