Publications & Downloads

Inexperienced Readers
Apprenticing Adolescent Readers to Academic Literacy
Shortly after the publication of the first edition of Reading for Understanding, which introduced the Reading Apprenticeship framework and documented its success as the heart of an academic literacy course for all freshman in one San Francisco high school, this article appeared, describing the framework and course, and arguing against limiting inexperienced readers to remedial rather than engaging—and challenging—reading opportunities.
Cynthia Greenleaf, Ruth Schoenbach, Christine Cziko, Faye Mueller
Harvard Educational Publishing Group, Harvard Educational Review, Spring 2001
From the Text
“Rosa was interesting to me because she was articulate, sociable, active in the life of the school, but academically a B- or C student. She didn’t bring the strategic thinking and competence and engagement that I knew she had in other aspects of her life to academic tasks. She was never hostile; it wasn’t as though she was making a political statement like “I won’t learn from you.” She was cooperative, friendly to teachers, and responded positively to her teachers and to what she thought she was being asked to do. But it was as though she brought only a shadow of herself to the academic aspect of her school life.”
—Academic literacy teacher Christine Cziko