This article describes a particular endeavor, the Bridge Builders Academic Mentoring Program (BAMP), a partnership between a school of education in a Catholic university in the Northwest and a community-based rites of passage program for adolescent African American males. The partnership exemplifies tenets of Catholic social teaching, in that it is community-based, justice-oriented, and in many ways countercultural. The pedagogy aligns with the goals of service learning; that is, the service extended by university students satisfies a genuine community need, and at the same time affords those engaged in service an opportunity to acquire crucial knowledge, skills, and dispositions to which they would not otherwise have access. Implications for translating this program to other contexts are provided.
This manuscript details an exploratory study of an assignment in a literacy across the curriculum course that assisted teacher candidates to recognize the distance between expert and novice readers in their content specific teaching. The study explores how teacher candidates discovered strategies necessary to build comprehension of disciplinebased texts, particularly for novice readers. Data collection included multiple entries from thirty teacher candidate journals that were generated during partnered dialogues. Journals were analyzed for clues as to how teachers can better approach helping students to read varied disciplines' texts with greater comprehension. Findings suggest that by placing teacher candidates in the position of both novice and expert readers, 1) they gained insight into how to scaffold instruction so that students become more expert readers of their content; and 2) they exhibited a willingness to work with these strategies because they empathized with struggling readers.
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