ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Michelle, a second-generation Mexican immigrant youth, and her struggles to access complex texts in history. It situates her academic literacy struggles in broader structures and policies that work against a socially and intellectually-engaged literacy education. This chapter puts forward the argument that in order to understand students’ academic literacies, we need to look at opportunities to learn at the classroom level, as well as macro-level educational policies and practices, such as teacher and school-evaluation systems and school admissions policies that ensure that struggling students are sent to struggling schools. The chapter concludes with the concept of critical bifocality in teaching and researching academic literacies.
