ABSTRACT
This chapter reports Scottish research using communities of practice theory to examine how experienced teachers in Scotland developed broader, more equitable and more responsive understandings of literacy teaching and learning. Researchers employed a lightly specified ‘boundary object’, the Strathclyde Three Domain Model, to facilitate teacher noticing within and across a range of literacy research disciplines offering different, often conflicting, epistemological understandings of literacy. The focus was on broadening what teachers noticed and on how they orchestrated professional knowledge from different research communities to create the optimal ‘learning mix’ for their own students. Teachers reported a variety of changes in their noticing that led to being more responsive to students’ identities as readers and as learners, to their students’ cognitive knowledge and skills and to their cultural and social capital. Becoming more noticing changed what the teachers did (their pedagogic actions) and how they talked to their students (their pedagogic interactions) at both individual and class levels. It also led many to identify changes to the school systems and policies for literacy teaching that could make literacy education more equitable.
