ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the knowledge-intensive nature of academic literacies and identifies several important ideas about supporting youths’ knowledge building. It presumes that urban immigrant youth are not lacking in knowledge or knowledge-building strategies even when they struggle to understand a concept. The first part of the chapter focuses on the ways in which Nasim, the focal youth in this chapter, worked to make connections, recontextualizing what he already knew or believed in for the purposes of understanding new ideas in history. The second part of the chapter shows how Nasim, when reading about evolution in his science class, struggled to make generative connections between ideas. His struggles suggest that knowledge building does not happen in a vacuum, but within a conceptual framework. Knowledge building, as a social and situated activity, also requires intersubjectivity between students, or between students and teacher. The third and final part of the chapter focuses on building intersubjectivity through dialogic talk as a way to know what youth know.
