''I teach students, not subjects'': Teacher-student relationships as contexts for secondary literacy

THIS ETHNOGRAPHY focused on how and why a high school content area reacher and her students engaged in literacy activities. Based on analysis of data collected over a 2-year period, the author argues that the relationship established between the teacher and her students motivated them to engage in literacy activities. Because the teacher cared deeply about her students' success, she searched for pedagogical strategies, in particular, literacy strategies, that she felt would ensure such success. Students sensed and appreciated the teacher's caring for them and responded positively to the strategies she taught, although they did not always use the strategies in the same way, nor did they transfer the strategies to other content classes. In this article, the author provides details of literacy uses in this classroom, and interprets the participants' experiences and beliefs about reaching and learning, the meanings they made from their classroom interactions, and how these interactions led to the development of relationships that contextualized their literacy practices. The power of this teacher-student relationship illustrates how literacy practices and strategies are socially constructed and constituted. As a result, the author raises questions about the implications of these findings for literacy teacher education, research, and reform. Specifically, she argues that we need to conduct more research on literacy practices, rather than isolated literacy events, in actual content area classrooms so that we can better understand how secondary literacy teaching and learning are shaped by the unique contexts of secondary schools and classrooms. Moreover, the author asserts that research on teachers' beliefs and practices about content area literacy must be reconceptualized so that we examine not only teachers' beliefs about literacy, but also their beliefs about their content areas, their students, and the social and political contexts in which they work.