ABSTRACT
On the surface, this chapter documents the academic challenges faced by Jermaine as he moved from first grade into early adulthood. However, the chapter also explores Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of chronotope as a powerful tool for making sense of students’ literate trajectories. Chronotope invites analysis of what school literacy experiences offer, allow, and reject in terms of school trajectories as well as how students come to define themselves, and how they are defined by others as they construct and inhabit particular literate trajectories. I argue that the construct of chronotope is a useful heuristic that can be used to examine how trajectories are constructed and how they operate – providing students with various possibilities for change, malleable sequences, connections to the world beyond school, and opportunities for critique. Chronotope also allows for multiple situated interpretations of shared experiences. Specifically, I ask, How are students’ literate trajectories inhabited, constructed, and understood over long periods of time?
