Dr. Elizabeth Dutro
University of Colorado at Boulder
Research Projects
Literacy, Identity and Children’s Experiences in Classrooms
My interest in the relationship between the social identities of gender, race and class and reading and writing practices grew from my master’s work in English literature and my desire to draw on the theories that inform critical, poststructuralist and feminist literary criticism to consider issues of equity in children’s experiences with official and unofficial literacy practices. My interest in children’s literacy grew from my experiences as an elementary teacher and my observations of how children used reading and writing to position themselves socially and intellectually, even as school literacy practices worked to position them in ways that had very real social and academic consequences. Below, I describe current and past studies from this strand of my research agenda.
“Hard times is something that you have”: Reconsidering the difficult stories in children’s lives and literacies
Although much research in high-poverty urban neighborhoods, including my own, illustrates the rich literacies and vast resources that exist for children and youth, this study purposefully places students’ difficult experiences at the center of inquiry. As 9-year-old Diante emphasizes in the quote that titles this project, we all experience hard times and, indeed, challenging life circumstances are an important aspect of some students’ relationships to schooling. Yet, those difficult experiences are not easy to locate within the metaphors and frameworks through which educators most often discuss the intersections between students’ lives and literacy classrooms. Rather, issues such as transiency, unemployment, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, eviction, or incarceration are often viewed as obstacles to teaching and evidence of deviance or deficiency in narratives conveyed by middle-class interpreters of urban poverty in both formal (e.g., media accounts) and informal (e.g., “watercooler” talk) venues. I argue that difficult experiences demand frameworks that acknowledge their emotional and material stakes, while also identifying and critiquing the narratives about urban families that such circumstances can perpetuate. Such lenses, like those of “testimony,” “witness” and others I draw from the field of literary trauma studies, provide insights into crucial issues of relationship and relevance in urban students’ schooling experience, as well as a productive supplement to the ledger metaphors of “resources” or “funds” that have been so important to understanding the intersections of students’ lives and classrooms. I examine these ideas through research with children and teachers in racially and linguistically diverse classrooms serving socioeconomically struggling students and analyses of curricular and media texts.
I am investigating these questions with K-12 teacher colleagues through the grant-funded project Teacher Research for Equity and Opportunity (TREO). This project is designed to support research collaborations between teacher alumni of CU’s masters program and my university-based research team to explore questions of mutual interest related to equity and opportunity in classrooms. In its first year, the project has involved three teachers across a range of grade levels (2nd, 5th, and 10th) to examine first, how, by whom, and to what effects understandings of students’ lives are documented and interpreted in schools serving socioeconomically struggling students and families and second, how teachers attempt to serve as advocates for students whose ties to school are tenuous. Through data collected as part of that larger project, I am also pursuing the questions below that specifically address questions related to the intersections of challenging life experiences and school literacies.
Although “hard times” are certainly experienced by individual students, challenges are also sometimes experienced collectively. These shared experiences—such as September 11, Hurricane Katrina, or school shootings—certainly impact the lived realities of students and teachers in schools and classrooms, but also inform narratives that are woven around schools and their role in times of shared crisis. Thus, another aspect of this project examines media and narrative accounts of shared crises and the ways that students and schooling are positioned within them.
This research is guided by the following questions:
· What are the relationships between the difficult experiences that some children and youth bring to school and what they encounter in literacy classrooms? How are students positioned in relation to curriculum, instruction, and policy mandates?
· How, by whom, and to what effects are narratives of students’ lives documented and interpreted in schools? Through what texts and discourses are understandings of and/or assumptions about young people’s lives built? How are those narratives interpreted by adults who encounter and work with students and their families and to what effects? How are those narratives located within assumptions about class, race, and gender?
· What are the implications, for curriculum, instruction, and policy, of viewing the intersections of students’ lives and literacy classrooms through new frameworks and metaphors (e.g., testimony and witness) that account for difficult experiences?
Manuscripts
Dutro, E. (2009). Children’s Testimony and the Necessity of Critical Witness in Urban Classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 48, 231-238.
Dutro, E. (2008). “That’s why I was crying on this book”: Trauma as testimony in children’s responses to literature. Changing English, 15, 423-434.
Dutro, E., Zenkov, K. (2008). Urban students testifying to their own stories: Talking back to deficit perspectives. 57thYearbook of the National Reading Conference, 172-218.
Dutro, E. (under review). The Wounded Witness: Attending to Difficult Testimony in Research and Teaching.
Dutro, E., Kantor, J. (under review). Witnessing students’ lives and literacies on screen: Reading a pedagogy of Testimony and Witness in The Wire.
Dutro, E., Bien, A. (2009, December). Listening to the “Speaking Wound”: Tracing the Difficult in Children’s and Teachers’ Lives and Literacies.
Dutro, E. (in preparation). Toward a pedagogy of testimony and witness: The entrenchment of deficit perspectives and the need for new metaphors.
Dutro, E. (book prospectus). “Hard times is something that you have”: Reconsidering the difficult stories in children’s lives and literacies.
Presentations
Dutro, E., Zenkov, K. (2009, April). Including Urban Students’ Perspectives in the “Circle of Knowledge”: The Voices of City Youth in What and How We Know in Education Research. Interactive symposium presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, California.
Dutro, E. (2008, December). Literacies of Loss: Heeding the Unbearable in the Literacy Classroom. In S. Meacham (chair), Visceral literacies: Emotion and Imaginative Engagement in the Classroom. Symposium presented at the National Reading Conference, Orlando, Florida.
Dutro, E., Kantor, J. (2008, December). Witnessing students’ lives and literacies on screen: Reading a pedagogy of Testimony and Witness in The Wire. In S. Jones (chair), “If they’ll listen to us about life, we’ll listen to them about school”: The literacies of urban students and families in life, schools, and popular media. Symposium presented at the National Research Conference, Orlando, Florida.
Dutro, E. (2008, March). Writing Wounded: An Autoethnography of Trauma in the Writing Classroom. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York, NY.
Dutro, E. (2007, December). Responding to “hard times” in a mandated literacy curriculum: Children’s stories of poverty confront middle-class assumptions. In E. Dutro (chair), Stories of poverty in the literacy classroom: Supporting preservice teachers’ responses to the realities of students’ lives. Symposium presented at the National Reading Conference, Austin. Texas.
Dutro, E., Marquez-Zenkov, K. (2007, December). Urban students testifying to their own stories: Talking back to deficit perspectives. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Reading Conference, Austin, Texas.
Dutro, E. (2006, December). Children writing trauma in an urban elementary classroom. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Reading Conference, Los Angeles, California.
Dutro, E. (2006, November). What ‘hard times’ means: Mandated curricula, middle-class assumptions, and the lives of poor children. In S. Greene (chair), Freedom to Teach and Freedom to Learn: What Gets Lost in the Scripted Writing Curriculum. Invited symposium at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Nashville, Tennessee
Dutro, E. (2001, December). “That’s why I was crying on this book”: Trauma and testimony in children’s responses to literature. Paper presented at the National Reading Conference, San Antonio, Texas.
Dutro, E. (2000, November). Stories exposed: Attending to trauma in researching, writing and representing children’s lives. In L. Torda (chair), Consuming students’ stories in research and teaching. Symposium presented at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Literacy, Identity and Achievement in an Urban Elementary Classroom
The primary objective of this project is to expand understanding of the relationship between children’s classroom experiences in literacy and their personal and intellectual identities. I am particularly interested in children’s negotiations of state and federally mandated curricula and assessments and the equity issues raised by those negotiations. Toward this end, the research is fueled by three areas of inquiry related to how children are both intellectually and socially positioned in classrooms in relation to literacy. The study draws on ethnographic methods and is situated in one third grade classroom in a high-poverty, racially diverse urban school.
1) What is the relationship between these children’s identities and their literacy practices?
Questions to guide analysis include:
· How do children describe their relationship to reading and writing?
· How do children construct themselves and others as competent or incompetent in the subject area?
· How do children’s social identities (gender, race, and class) seem to impact their classroom literacy experiences?
· How do children’s out-of-school experiences with literacy support or challenge their school literacy experiences?
2) What are the patterns of participation in reading and writing in this classroom?
Questions to guide analysis include:
· Who participates in literacy discussions and activities, how do they participate, and what appears to influence participation?
· What seems to be the relationship between various aspects of the teaching and learning (e.g., teaching methods, mandated curricula, types of text, writing genres) of literacy and children’s ways of participating?
· Does children’s participation in literacy change over time?
3) How are children in this classroom positioned around issues of learning and achievement within literacy (as evidenced by teachers’ evaluation of student progress, my own observations of students’ work, and scores on district and state literacy assessments)?
Questions to guide analysis include:
· What seems to be the relationship between instructional methods in literacy and children’s interactions, patterns of participation, and abilities to use reading and writing as a resource for literacy learning?
· What is the relationship between children’s learning as measured by teacher evaluations and level of participation and their performance on standardized assessments?
· What is the relationship between children’s learning as measured by standardized assessments and the literacy practices in which they engage both in and out of school?
This work was supported by an EFFRD grant (Cleveland State University) and a CSU College of Education Research Support grant.
Manuscripts
(some of these manuscripts overlap with the previous project due to shared data)
Dutro, E. (in preparation). “I like to read, but I know I’m not good at it”: Children’s experiences with high-stakes assessment in an urban elementary classroom.
Dutro, E. (2009). Children’s Testimony and the Necessity of Critical Witness in Urban Classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 48, 231-238.
Dutro, E. (2008). “That’s why I was crying on this book”: Trauma as testimony in children’s responses to literature. Changing English, 15, 423-434.
Dutro, E., Zenkov, K. (2008). Urban students testifying to their own stories: Talking back to deficit perspectives. 57thYearbook of the National Reading Conference, 172-218.
Dutro, E. (under review). The Wounded Witness: Attending to Difficult Testimony in Research and Teaching.
Dutro, E. (in press). What ‘hard times’ means: Mandated curricula, middle-class assumptions, and the lives of poor children. Research in the Teaching of English.
Dutro, E. (in press). Children Writing ‘Hard Times’: Lived Experiences of Poverty and the Class-Privileged Assumptions of a Mandated Curriculum. Language Arts
Marquez-Zenkov, K., Dutro, E., (Eds.) (2009). Urban Students’ Perspectives on School, Teachers, Pedagogy, and Curricula. Themed issue for Theory into Practice, 48.
Stories Count: Children's Experiences Across
Mathematics and Literacy
Collaborator: Elham Kazemi, University of Washington
This project focused on understanding the relationship between children's experiences in literacy and mathematics through an in depth study in one 4th/5th grade classroom. As we studied the relationships between children's identities and their classroom experiences within and across subject areas, issues of race and how children took up topics of race and racism became one key focus of analysis.
Research Questions include:
Publications:
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (forthcoming). The shredding of a district survey on race and racism: Following children into relevance in an urban elementary classroom.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E, Balf, R., Lin, Y. (2008). ‘What are you and where are you from?’ Race, identity, and the vicissitudes of cultural relevance in an urban elementary classroom. Urban Education, 43, 269-300.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (2006). Making sense of “The Boy Who Died”: Tales of a struggling successful writer. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 22, 325-356.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (2005). The aftermath of ‘you’re only half’: Multiracial identities in the literacy classroom. Language Arts, 83, 96-106.
Manuscripts in progress:
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. Children writing for themselves, their teacher and the state in an urban elementary classroom.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (in preparation). ‘About your color, that’s personal’: Race, identity, and the confounding of a district agenda in an urban elementary classroom.
Presentations:
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (2007, April). Stories Count: Examining children’s experiences across mathematics and literacy in an upper-elementary classroom. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Illinois.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (2006, April). ‘About your color, that’s personal’: A critical discourse analysis of race and resistance in an urban elementary classroom. Paper accepted for the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.
Kazemi, E., Dutro, E., Balf, R. (2006, April). Supporting mathematical engagement: Elementary children’s experiences in one discussion-intensive mathematics classroom. Paper accepted for the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (2005, September). Children’s Positioning Across Subject Areas in an Urban Elementary Classroom. In Positioning Across Texts and Contexts: Understanding the Lived Experiences of Teachers and Students. Symposium presented at the congress of the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research, Seville, Spain.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (2004). ‘We didn’t fit the category’: Critical literacy and the interrogation of racial categories in an urban elementary classroom. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Reading Conference, San Antonio, Texas.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E., Balf, R. (2004, April). Children writing for themselves, the teacher, and the state in an urban elementary classroom. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, Californi
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E. (2003, April). What are you and where are you from? Mining the meaning of culture in an urban elementary classroom. Paper accepted for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E. (2002, October). Stories Count: Children’s Experiences in Literacy and Mathematics. In The Interplay of Culture, Cognition, and Identity in Classrooms. Symposium presented at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, Seattle, WA.
Dutro, E., Kazemi, E. (2002, June). Making sense of “The Boy Who Died”: Tales of a struggling successful writer. In L. Herrenkohl, (chair) Culture, Cognition, and Identity: Examining Classroom Data Across Cultural Contexts. Symposium presented at the ISCRAT conference, Amersterdam, The Netherlands.
This work was supported by a Royalty Research Fund grant from the University of Washington
Adolescent Zines
Collaborator: Jennifer Sinor, Utah State University
“Zines” are self-published, non-commercial magazines, and adolescent zine authors (or zinesters) are primarily middle-class girls. We are interested in the form and function of zines and the implications of this underground practice for research and classrooms.
Dutro, E., Sinor, J., Rubinow, S. (1999). Who’s at risk? Entering the world of adolescent zines. In Alvine, L. & L. Cullum (Eds.), Breaking the cycle: Gender, literacy and learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Reading Gender/Gendered Readers
My dissertation, Reading Gender/Gendered Readers: Girls, Boys and Popular Literature, examined children’s reading of popular fiction, particularly how that reading functions as both a gendered and a gendering practice. The children with whom I worked were fifth graders in a predominantly African-American public school. Focusing on gender, as intertwined with race and class, I drew on literary and feminist theories to explore the dynamic relationship between texts and readers, wherein texts work to situate readers, while readers resist, accept and/or re-appropriate the messages they encounter in texts. My analyses emphasize the fluidity of gender identities performed by children in literacy classrooms and also reveal some of the various ways that popular texts can be read as both reinforcing and challenging traditional gender norms. I continue to engage in professional conversations focused on the relationship between gender and literacy.
Publications:
Dutro, E. (in press). Boys reading American Girls: What’s at stake in assumptions about what boys won’t read. In R. Hammett & K. Sanford (Eds), Boys, Girls, and the Myths of Literacies and Learning. Toronto: CSPI/Women’s Press.
Dutro, E. (2003). ‘Us boys like to read football and boy stuff’: Reading masculinities, performing boyhood. The Journal of Literacy Research, 34, 4, 465-500.
Dutro, E. (2001/2002). ‘But that’s a girls’ book!’ Exploring gender boundaries in children’s reading practices. The Reading Teacher, 55, 4, 376-384.
Manuscripts in Progress:
Dutro, E. ‘Samantha is rich ‘cause her family owned slaves’: Race, class and commodity in African American girls’ discussions of popular literature.
Presentations:
Dutro, E. (2006, April). Beyond girls and boys: Prospects for gender as a category of analysis in research on children’s literature. Invited address to the annual meeting of the Literature Special Interest Group, American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, California.
Dutro, E. (2001, April). Boys reading “American Girls”: Negotiating masculinities through fiction. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle, Washington.
Dutro, E. (1999, November). Gridirons, Ghouls, and Girly Stuff: Children Negotiating Gender Through Popular Fiction. Research Roundtable presented at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Denver, Colorardo.
Dutro, E. (1999, February). Boys will be. . .constructed: Reading popular series fiction with young boys . In, Exploring Gendered Selves: Women’s and Children’s experiences of Working, Housing and Schooling. Panel presented at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Dutro, E. (1997, November). The Babysitters Club: Girls Negotiating Identity Through Popular Literature. Paper presented at the meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Detroit, Michigan.
Literacy Content Standards
A second strand of my research focuses on standards policy in literacy. This work grew from collaborations with Karen Wixson when I was a graduate student at University of Michigan. Although much policy work has focused on systemic reform as a whole, very little work has analyzed content standards specifically, particularly from a subject-area perspective. My collaborative work in this area represents an important contribution to research into this area of policy. This work has informed my classroom-based research in important ways, particularly in the current reform context when state and federal policy mandates greatly impact the experiences of teachers and students in public schools. The publications below have resulted from the standards research.
Publications:
Wixson, K.K., Dutro, E., Athan, R. (2004). The Challenges of Developing Content Standards. In R. Floden (Ed.), Review of Research in Education, volume 27.
Dutro, E., Valencia, S. (2004). State and local content standards: Issues of alignment, influence, and utility. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 12 (45).
Dutro, E., Valencia, S. (2004). The relationship between state and local literacy standards: Issues of alignment, influence, and utility. Seattle, WA: Center for Teaching and Policy.
Dutro, E. (2003). Do state content standards make a difference? An illustration of the difficulties of addressing that pressing question. Midwest Educational Researche, r15 (4), 4-6.
Dutro, E., Fisk, M., Koch, R., Roop, L., Wixson, K. (2002). When state policies meet local district contexts: Standards-based professional development as a means to individual agency and collective ownership. Teachers College Record, 104, 4, 787-811..
Wixson, K.K., Dutro, E. (1999). Standards for Primary-Grade Reading: An Analysis of State Frameworks. The Elementary School Journal, 100, 2, pp. 89-110.
Wixson, K.K., Fisk, M., Dutro, E., McDaniel, J. (1999). The alignment of state content standards and assessments in elementary reading. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement.
Presentations:
Valencia, S., Dutro, E. (2002, December). A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? The Relationship Between State and Local Standards Policies in Reading. Paper presented at the National Reading Conference, Miami, Florida.
Dutro, E., Collins, K., Collins, J. (2002, April). Teachers’ responses to the standards movement: Perspectives from literacy practioners in three states. Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, Louisiana.
Dutro, E. (2001, December). Understanding teachers’ stances toward literacy standards. In Literacy and educational equity: Reading and writing instruction for the standards movement and beyond. Symposium presented at the National Reading Conference, San Antonio, Texas.
Dutro, E. (2001, November). Teachers’ responses to the standards movement. In Literacy and educational equity: Reading and writing instruction for the standards movement and beyond. Symposium presented at the National Council of Teachers of English, Baltimore, Maryland.
Wixson, K., Dutro, E., Fisk, M., Yamaguchi, R., Young, S. (1999, April). Standards as professional development. In E. Hiebert (chair), CIERA: Reform of early literacy instruction through staff development. Symposium presented at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Canada (presented by Karen Wixson).
Wixson, K., Dutro, E. (1998, December). An analysis of early reading/language arts standards. In E. H. Hiebert (chair), CIERA’s research within policy contexts: Standards, resource use and assessment practices. Syposium presented at the meeting of the National Reading Conference, Austin, Texas.