Teacher noticing in language and literacy landscapes of practice

This chapter demonstrates what happened when experienced teachers in Scotland began to navigate a wider range of knowledge domains and epistemologies to better understand and address the literacy attainment gap associated with poverty. The study views literacy education as a complex practice requiring teachers to notice and respond in real-time to the different kinds of evidence that emerges during teaching. It employs the theoretical framework of Wenger (1998) and Wenger-Trayner et al. (2014) to investigate how a lightly-specified model for thinking about these different kinds of evidence may facilitate the processes of engagement, alignment, and imagination and enable professionals to define and orchestrate professional knowledge to become more widely ‘noticing’. The model encompasses evidence about children as readers that considers their cognitive knowledge and skills, cultural and social capital, and social identity. Results indicate that the model helped teachers develop and orchestrate their literacy knowledge to become more noticing of their students so that they changed their actions and interactions, but also of the school systems that shape their work.