Literature Review #4

Darling-Hammond, L. (2007). Race, inequality and educational accountability: the irony of 'No Child Left Behind'(3), 245-260.

NCLB’s goal was to raise educational achievement. The implementation of NCLB and the continuation of ESSA have been to use standardized tests as a means to measure student growth. This one size fits all approach marginalizes many groups including ELLs. NCLB, according to Darling Hammond harmed students through “narrowed curriculum, focus on low level skills generally reflected on high stakes tests; in appropriate assessment of English language learners and students with special needs; and strong incentives to exclude low scoring students”. Certainly, teaching to the test hasn’t taught every student how to learn. The ELLs in our state continue to score below the 10% percentile. Education needs to move to addressing effective student engagement in literacy. My focus is effective engagement of Adolescent ELLs through stories. This could help with the history of the “why” we need change.

de los Ríos, C. V. (2017). Picturing ethnic studies: Photovoice and youth literacies of social action. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61(1), 15-24.

The de los Rios article discusses the literacy pedagogy of Photovoice. Photovoice is a visual literacy that encourages students to engage in literacy and make connections to social issues in their lives. The population is high school. This is a practitioner study working with adolescents. “Photovoice as both literacy pedagogy and research method can generate pathways for educators who seek to bridge the social and political realities of students into their writing instruction. This has “stretched the concept of literacy beyond its traditional understanding of print literacy to forge more nuanced, multimodal, and multilingual comprehensions of reading and writing for an increasingly globalized world.”