Constituting 'at risk' literacy and language learners in teacher talk: exploring the discursive element of time.

Alford, Jennifer ; Woods, Annette

Introduction

The student category of 'at risk' is often assigned to learners who are considered by teachers and school administrators to not meet specified curriculum and assessment requirements. It is a pervasive term that manages to go unquestioned. To consider this notion of 'deficit talk' about students, their families and communities and the endemic implications of such talk on education possibilities for marginalised young people, in this paper we analyse interview data collected with one teacher who teaches cohorts of students who are, for the most, part newly arrived in Australia, and as such have English as an additional language (EAL).

While students such as these are often considered to be 'at-risk' literacy and language learners in education contexts, this teacher accomplishes other ways of framing the cohort. Over four interviews, the teacher was asked to discuss the curriculum, her planning and pedagogy, and her students. We investigate how this teacher's talk works to represent the young people with whom she engages as successful literacy learners rather than as being at risk of not succeeding, and use this analysis to uncover the common threads produced as the success and failure of the students is talked into being. We note the solutions offered by this teacher to address both learner and learning needs that actively centre curriculum and teachers' pedagogical choices.

Time-related language contributes to the constitution of discourses, which Lemke (1995) describes as the 'social activity of making meanings with language and other symbolic systems' (p. 6). Drawing particular attention to the discursive element of time, through temporal markers in teachers' language, and how time is conceptualised, allows us to trace built up representations of the students' literate lives. More broadly, our interest is in how the cumulative experiences of schooling over time come to represent the literacy learning of young people in some ways and not others, and how teachers understand their students' lives in time. The talk of this one teacher illuminates how at least some teachers are able to consider the implications of broader social and systemic constructions, for example the rigid curriculum as implicated in representations of students that they work with. Considering students' lives beyond the here and now might support teachers to position their own pedagogical and relational approach as implicated in the success or failure of their most 'at-risk' students.

Exploring the discursive element of time--a theoretical and methodological lens

Language is a social semiotic that is used by speakers to make sense of what is going on across time (Lemke, 1995). Language choices can invoke 'timescales' (Lemke, 2000) that indicate episodic events in the very short term, as well as long term processes such as identity formation over decades. Understanding how time scales relate to one another allows us to understand how 'moments add up to lives' (Lemke, 2000, p. 273). Drawing on Lemke, Compton-Lilly (2011) posits that three types of timescales provide useful lenses through which to understand meaning-making: Historical timescales to do with long term historical events that inform understandings of the present; Familial timescales personal experiences of family members and the ways these circulate within families; and Ongoing timescales references to last week, yesterday, earlier today; the loosely defined present to make sense of events.

Over time, people draw on discourses to make sense of their worlds. What is significant about this for our purposes is that these discourses - in this case deficit discourses that make terms like 'being at risk' logical circulate and then become available for others to take up and appropriate, shaping attitudes and beliefs and influencing action (Lemke, 1995). Discourses that are shared among many relevant people over time contribute to 'persistent habits of speaking and acting' (Lemke, 1995, p. 24) that characterise particular social groups, e.g., teachers. These habits shape shared worldviews, opinions and attitudes within, for example, communities, schools and education institutions more broadly. However, these habits also allow for dissent and renegotiation, as the analysis presented in this paper confirms.

When speakers use language that situates their experience in timescales, they talk into being a longer social history that comes with being someone in a context (Compton-Lilly, 2011). In this paper, the speaker is a teacher of English language learners in the context of a very culturally and linguistically diverse, metropolitan high school in a capital city in Australia. The teacher, Riva, had more than 25 years' experience in the role. Her learners were users of various languages including French (France), German, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (Putonghua & Cantonese), Vietnamese and Korean. Some were highly literate in their first language and others were not so. Riva's language and lexical choices indicate the way in which she interprets the micro moments of her experience with these learners by interpreting the larger picture.

To explore the construction of literacy and language learners in this teacher's talk, and to unpack how being 'at risk' or otherwise evolves for some students, we draw on Compton-Lilly's (2014a; 2014b) temporal discourse analysis or TDA. Compton-Lilly (2012) does not dispute that time can manifest in a variety of ways. However, drawing on Lemke's concepts, TDA analyses discourses across time and draws attention to time as a 'constituitive dimension of experience that people use to conceptualise their experiences with literacy, schooling and identity' (Compton-Lilly, 2014a, p. 41). Compton-Lilly proposes five categories as beginning points that can assist the discourse analyst to explore the ways people make sense of their experiences across and within time. The categories are:

1. The language people use to situate themselves and others in time. For example: 'every day'; 'a couple of times a day'; 'every time'; 'when John was a child' etc.

2. References to the pace of schooling and the timelines that operate in schools. For example, 'I don't learn quickly'; 'the teacher is going too fast'.

3. Comments and practices that reflect long social histories. For example, 'these kids live in rough areas'; 'these kids don't do much critical thinking back in their home countries'

4. Repeated discourses over time. For example, repeated presence of comments such as 'these kids can't do x or y'; also, 'now and then' discourses comparing the 'glorious' past with an inadequate present.

5. Repeated stories that present changing or consistent meanings. The story may remain consistent - 'that boy has always got into trouble' - or it can change 'that boy used to get into trouble but now he doesn't all the time'.

Calling on this approach to investigate the data collected during previous studies has been useful because it allowed us to explore the ways that an Australian teacher has situated her learners and herself in time, and the ways that language is used across time to construct learners as 'at risk' or otherwise. Consequently, we start to build an emergent picture of how learners are constituted over time, and how this aspect of language can contribute to either locking learners in to an 'at risk' category, or opening other reasons for why they may not be succeeding in school over time.

Exploring 'at-risk' students

The trend of teachers and others involved in education calling upon deficit definitions is not new, of course. Indeed, these issues have been discussed over several decades. There is evidence that for many teachers, schools and systems the answer to school failure is located squarely between the ears of individual children or within their families and the cultural and social practices that they engage in (Woods, 2004; Gutierrez, Zitali Morales & Martinez, 2009). A 'deficit' discourse is relatively common even among well-meaning teachers of English language learners (Luke, et al., 2013; Lam, 2006). As a discourse, it 'locates its explanation of the underperformance or underachievement of non-dominant students in the nonalignment of the cultural practices of the home and school' (Gutierrez, et al. 2009, p. 218). Ascribing failure to individual students' characteristics, such as their cultural backgrounds and first languages, can lead to categorising students according to terms such as 'at risk' or 'low achievers' (Gutierrez, et al. 2009), or as 'problems' that need fixing (Cummins, 2001; Gutierrez & Orellana, 2006a, 2006b). At its core, these language practices assume that access to and participation in high quality education programs is available for all, but that learners' own characteristics and backgrounds can legitimately preclude them from taking advantage of these opportunities (Valencia, 1997). Students who speak languages or language varieties other than standard ones are 'prime and easy targets of the deficit thinking intellectual discourse that blames them, their cultures, and their families for diminished academic success' (Valencia, 2010, p. xiv).

However, as Compton Lilly (2009) reported, characterisations of families as being uninterested, or worse unsupportive, of their children's performance at school in communities of high poverty are 'highly questionable' (p. 449). Shirley Brice Heath's foundational work Ways With Words (1983) reported a ten-year, longitudinal study of language and literacy practices in three South Carolina communities. In this study, Brice Heath's careful documentation of literate practices across the diverse communities demonstrated that families in all of the communities engaged in rich and relevant literacy practices, and that even those children who were identified early by schools as being 'at risk' of failing to learn literacy, brought literacy understandings and practices to their schooling experience that could be used as the foundation for future learning. McLean, Boling and Rowsell (2009) also argue that teachers 'need to ... value literacy learners' funds of knowledge and the ways in which they can inform literacy teaching' (p. 169). 'Funds of knowledge' refers to the abundant knowledge diverse learners' families possess, which can be accessed through social networks of exchange (Moll & Gonzales, 2004). 'At risk', then, as a category needs to be thought of, not as something students bring, but as something schools produce, as Valencia (2010) argues: 'schools are organised and run in such oppressive ways that many students are placed at risk for school failure' (p. 125)

The impetus for this paper has come from our investigations and observations of a variety of teachers talking about their students as learners of language and literacy. These transcripts were collected as part of a variety of studies over time and our investigations have led us to characterise the different explanations that teachers give for why their students might not be learning literacy as we might hope. We have begun to map these stories of logic out with examples of how such beliefs and assumptions are formed into statements that represent various positions we have identified, in Table 1.

Amongst these many transcripts, several feature in our analysis because they differ from the norm. While many teachers called on deficit explanations of their students, their families or communities, others were somehow able to discuss their students - regardless of their achievement levels - as other than deficit. In the rest of this paper we focus on one such teacher Riva - who was an experienced senior high school English teacher. Riva had many years of experience working with English language learners in a large, urban Australian high school. The data was originally collected as part of a study that investigated critical literacy as a pedagogical choice in classrooms where high numbers of English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners were being served (Alford, 2015). For the purposes of this paper, we focus on four interviews conducted with Riva across a one-year period (March to November). Our initial interest comes from observations that within the interview talk, this teacher avoids talking about her students as being deficit. While there are references to her students needing extra support as language and literacy learners, her talk frames these students as being on the way to learning, a process that is somehow staged and in progress. She does not talk in terms of lacking basic skills or ways of working that are somehow an essential and unchanging part of the student's experience. Her focus on the processes of learning and her ways of conceptualising curriculum and pedagogy across time seem to play into the placement of the teacher and teaching as central to the performance of the students in the class. We proceed now to investigate how an investigation of time within the transcripts can help us to unpack how this teacher achieves what so many others in our interviews could not.

Teacher's talk in time: Situating students lives in policy

People engage in life in ways that mean that what they do is 'embedded and extended in time across the multiple modalities of past, present and future' (Henwood & Shirani, 2012, p. 1). The opening interview question in the first interview with Riva asked her to talk about how the ESL syllabus was being taught at her school.

It is not surprising that, after asking permission, Riva feels the need to contextualise before answering. In this historical shift, from today to the past, she embeds her response in the history - a sequence of time and place of her school and her students.

Extract 1:

1. Interviewer: Thanks, Riva. So first of all can you just tell me a little about how the ESL (1) syllabus is taught at this school?

2. Riva: Can I start by contextualising why it's taught here at the school and all of that?

3. Interviewer: Yes, yes anything you want to tell me

4. Riva: We have quite a cohort of ESL students. It varies but in Grade 11 and 12 (2) we have around 25%, sometimes it's more sometimes it's less, but it's a significant cohort of ESL students and this school always acknowledged that they needed ESL support to do that. The English Head of Department some years ago, when the 2002 (mainstream) English syllabus came in, took the students into consideration when she prepared the work program and the ESL teachers were involved in that. Um, nevertheless! (laughter) The school found that that syllabus was overly demanding in the critical for our students ... every single task had to be critical and that just fed back to all the teaching; all the learning was critical from the very beginning. So, we did a lot of support work as an ESL group but we also advocated for a new syllabus and that's been going on since before I came here since the 1990s. In 2005 or 2006, I think (the local curriculum authority body) had a review of senior phase of learning and we revived our lobby. And we jumped into that phase. We got a group of schools from around south east Queensland, about 20 or 30 schools together and we put in a joint lobby, and we also put in our submission and we encouraged them to put in their submissions . and (the local curriculum authority body) for the first time agreed to a second syllabus.

(Interview 1 with Riva)

Not only does Riva provide important contextual detail about the inception of the syllabus that she currently uses to plan and teach, she also locates her work in time as part of this initial talk (turn 4). We are given insight into the longevity of the fight for an appropriate curriculum for the ESL students, and provided with a timeline through the use of dates (1990s, 2005 or 2006 as examples). Riva explains that the school's ESL student cohort fluctuates in number over time but is always a key feature for the school in terms of their curriculum choices as they have always acknowledged that they needed ESL support to teach effectively at this school. Within the extract she notes that the original syllabus (2002) was too demanding in the critical dimensions for this group of students, and explains how the Head of English worked with the ESL teachers to ensure that the school's work program was well suited to the students at the school. Riva also details a two to three decade fight for a second syllabus - and ESL English curriculum - to run parallel with the mainstream English curriculum. While all of this demonstrates the placement of teacher and student practice in time, it also serves to centre curriculum, institutional policy and teacher practice as central to the learning outcomes of students. Riva does not blame the individual learner or learners nor discuss them in deficit terms, but instead locates any difficulties within curriculum and policy decisions, and likely solutions as squarely related to teacher practice.

By engaging in talk about time, which Compton-Lilly (2012) reminds us is the 'constant and inescapable dimension of life' (p. 1), Riva locates her practice in time, centring the curriculum and teacher practice as central in how students learn. This can also be seen in extracts from the interviews where Riva comments on time allocations for particular components of the curriculum. See as an example in Extract 2 how Riva addresses the issues of the syllabus allotting time to particular skills and understandings relevant to this particular group of students. This move results in a solution for any resultant difficulties being located in the syllabus not in the child.

Extract 2

Riva: And for most students who'd gone through Grade 10 that was a fair assumption but for our students who haven't done Grade 1-10 English here (in Australia) but they were coming in without that assumed knowledge and the teachers were focusing on critical literacy because they had to. So we needed a syllabus which allotted time, not just allowed time, but allotted time to the explicit teaching of languages and that's what this [new] one did. We actually wrote it with a percentage written in it.

(Interview 1 with Riva, her emphasis in italics)

In Extract 3 below, Riva's language shows she is highly conscious of her learners' previous educational practices, born of vastly different cultures of learning to those found in most Australian schools. She recognises there is a 'shift' to be made to meet the expectations of often intransigent curriculum; a realignment that inevitably involves time and considerable effort over time. There is no blame in these statements but a recognition of the repositioning that is involved when learners come with educational experiences and practices that are often not valued in Australian classrooms, for example some English language learners have experienced more transmissive styles of teaching and learning in their countries of origin or transit.

Extract 3

Riva: Some of them still come with the idea that they have to learn what the teacher says . where they have to wait for the teacher's meaning and learn that one and so they've got a bit of a shift to make. It's exhausting for them. A big challenge.

(Interview 2 with Riva)

By understanding her current students as having pasts, being located over time in a building up and overlaying of experiences, Riva demonstrates an understanding of what Lemke (2000) has discussed as being about how 'our shared moments add up to social life', (p. 273). These students are not static representations of an isolated moment in the here and now.

Students with futures: making positive assumptions about trajectories and future pathways

In Extracts 2 and 3 we saw Riva discussing the pasts of her students, demonstrating an understanding of how past education and social histories require certain solutions for the students she is tasked to teach. For Riva her students are not deficit, instead like all other students they require teaching and access to appropriate curriculum. But Riva also frames her students as having futures. These futures are bright and Riva makes the assumption that the students' experience of schooling has the capacity to support the students to continue to develop and move toward their goals. For example, see how in Extract 4 as she answers a question about why she continues to include critical literacy work in her teaching and learning activities, she answers by framing the futures that her students are planning.

Extract 4

Interviewer: And why do you think they need the critical tools?

Riva: Because most of them have a goal of tertiary study in Australia and that's what's used in tertiary study in Australia in humanities anyway . if you are going to do any subjects that require language you're expected to be able to do critical analysis or at least to understand what it means.

(Interview 1 with Riva)

Riva is able to see her students, many of whom are currently learning a new language as they learn about English as a disciplinary subject, as involved in a process of learning - as learners who continue to develop. As such they are in the process of developing new understandings, developing new ways of knowing, and developing new understandings. Her students are not static, instead they are located in material lives that will unfold over time and where they themselves will shift and develop (Henderson & Woods, 2016). This seems to be a crux in how Riva is able to move beyond constructing her students in deficit terms. What they might not know or be able to do now, they are in the process of learning how to do as they move toward their futures. It is in this notion of learning as a process over time, that not knowing something shifts from being deficit and becomes a possibility for new learning. In the second interview, Riva refers again to the future trajectories of her learners:

Extract 5

Riva: If they're going to study in a western society they need to know that (critical) way of looking at texts, because all of our study is based on those ideas; that texts can be questioned.

(Interview 2 with Riva)

As Alford (2014) has argued, examples of this kind of teacher talk can point to a particular kind of deficit discourse, one that is contingent and circumscribed by factors beyond the learners' individual lacking. We believe that in these talk patterns there is evidence that Riva is conscious of the complex challenges facing her students in future educational contexts and she reports this modifying of her practice to prepare them for these challenges.

There's never enough time: References to the pace of schooling and the timelines that operate in schools

Riva, like so many of her peers, highlights the tyranny of time, or indeed the tyranny of not enough time across a variety of dimensions in the interviews. The current education context in Australia operates in a world that Gleick (2000) has suggested is becoming 'faster' in 'just about everything'. Riva discusses how she orders the curriculum so that students have what they need first, and then build on this for later learning. She discusses how these curriculum decisions enabled her learners to be successful in a curriculum that was considered too demanding. This involved re-engineering the curriculum so that time was factored in for explicit language instruction.

Riva discusses the sequence of the learning that she plans so as to provide her students with a solid grounding for more difficult concepts. In all of this talk her students are discussed as learners, progressing along a learning path, benefitting from curriculum and pedagogy as a right. See for example in Extract 6 where Riva discusses the introduction of the term 'discourse'.

Extract 6

Riva: The other word that I think is, the term or idea or concept, that is really - it's the concept that's really difficult for them is 'discourse'. Lucas (a fellow teacher) and I have talked about that and neither of us like tackling it at this point. We leave it until later, more to the end of the unit, and interestingly, I found my Grade 12s this year, we start with the media unit, media and research unit in Grade 12, so it sort of follows through, they were asking me about 'discourses'. So we just introduced the idea of a discourse being a language, a concept that language can develop a particular understanding of an issue, and then the Grade 12s took that up this year. But to do it now, at the beginning (of Grade 112) is too confusing.

(Interview 2 with Riva

In this instance, Riva goes on to discuss how she recycles content that has not been clear when first introduced to particular groups of students, and discusses pushing some forward, while others engage in recycled material getting ready to move forward.

This way of constructing her students as constantly developing is part of how Riva resists the notion of deficit in her talk about her students.

That is not to say that Riva is not dealing with the same time constraints as most other teachers. On several occasions Riva details how in order to fit in the curriculum that she is left to access moments from outside class time.

Extract 7

Riva: There's a heap of one-on-one outside class (time), before class, lunchtime, after school. There's massive one-on-one. Come and see me before school; come and see me after school.

(Interview 1 with Riva)

What is of note here is the way Riva utilises the marginal time in the school day, the not class time, to provide extensive support for her language learners. The work Riva and her students do takes considerable time which eludes most teachers in their daily work and especially teachers such as Riva who are attempting to 'catch learners up'. As a result of their histories, and the place they find themselves now learning in, they have more to learn; more to learn about English language and literacy acquisition, content knowledge, cultural knowledge and skill sets that are essential for success in schooling in the Australian context within which they are now learning. They deal with a curriculum and many resources that assume certain capacities and ignore others. Riva also identifies, in Extract 8, that the in-class time that is allocated must be managed carefully by teachers when making decisions about what will and will not be attended to.

Extract 8

Riva: I think this is what ESL teaching is about. I think it's about learning to express what you understand in good fluent English and that's what we're doing here: constructing sentences to express their understanding at a sophisticated level that they'll get credit for. But you can see how slow it is, how much time it takes. It's very time consuming and you have to make decisions about what you don't have time to do. It's very, very time consuming.

(Interview 4 with Riva)

Such statements indicate Riva is able to take responsibility for her part in enacting policy in her particular local context, in a particular moment in time that will eventually add up with other moments to an equitable education for her students. There is no blame attributed to the students themselves - they are in the process of learning as we would expect all of our learners to be. We suggest that Riva's ways of representing her students allow her to surpass what some others are able to in terms of thinking positively about the students they work with, their backgrounds and the communities within which they live.

Conclusion

This paper has provided evidence and discussion of the ways Riva, an experienced English teacher, talks about her English language learners so as not to fall into the ubiquitous deficit or 'at risk' discourses. To unpack the discourses evident in her talk, we drew on Temporal Discourse Analysis (Compton-Lilly, 2014) to explore Riva's nuanced references to time as she spoke to Jennifer as interviewer. We identified that the temporality in her talk achieved a number of things: firstly, by always framing her work in a historical and futures view of curriculum and policy, she situated her students' lives in policy, embedding and contextualising her talk about her students as being players in education. By not ignoring the historical and current influence that policy has on her, and on the students, she seems able to foreground systemic constraints and broader social formations as implicated in the constitution of these young people and their learning. She also makes positive assumptions about their trajectories and future pathways by referring to their learning goals (tertiary study) as logical, and by discussing what is required in the current moment to move them toward making these goals a reality. By taking account of what Preissle (2011) has highlighted as the serial nature of time, she makes positive assumptions about their futures, as her students' lives are represented as being 'composed of events particular to each of us in the coming years, decades, and centuries' (p. 695). Riva also acknowledges that in light of the pace of schooling and the timelines that operate in schools, she is responsible for making choices about how she utilises class time to meet her learners' specific needs, instead of expecting her learners to simply make the most of what is offered. However, She does also detail how she feels compelled to utilise significant amounts of out of class time to achieve this.

Riva's capacity to talk in these ways about her students, and about her own responses to their learning needs, allows her to disaffiliate from what is increasingly a default position of labelling learners who are not yet showing mastery of language and literacy as deficient or 'at risk'. In deploying temporality in particular ways, she generates a more optimistic discursive position that challenges views of English language learners as 'wanting' and potentially as 'at risk'. The consideration of lives as 'sequential moments', always building, moves the talk about these students from a description of a series of isolated moments when students do not have the skills, capacities and capabilities required, to detail of an ongoing pathway toward a 'serial future' (Preissle, 2011, p. 695). We argue that documenting teacher talk of this nature in this way is powerful for shifting collective notions of learner groups such as English language learners. It is also highly instructive for teachers undertaking initial teacher education programs so that they learn to challenge both 'at risk' and 'deficit' categories during their formation as teachers. This has far reaching consequences for how future generations of English language learners are discursively constituted in teacher talk and systemically provided for in policies and programs. By showing how these learners can be constituted by teachers in ways that are more enabling we have aimed to resist the enticing power of deficit notions of students in our schools.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Riva for her inspiration to our thinking and also to the students and teachers with whom she worked and continues to work. We also thank the reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

(1) The ESL (English as a Second Language) Syllabus referred to here is a specific 2-year course of study designed (in 2007) for ESL learners who were working towards full academic English proficiency. The syllabus focuses on literature, academic language (e.g., for research) and media studies and is taught where possible by specialist ESL teachers such as Riva. In the United States, the term 'ELL English Language Learner' or Emergent Bilingual learner is often used to refer to these learners. In Australia, the term EAL/D is now widely used - English as an Additional Language or Dialect on account of the fact that many are learning English as a third of fourth language, or learning Standard Australian English as an additional variety of English in the case of Indigenous learners.

(2) Grades 11 and 12 are the final two years of high school in Australia.

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Jennifer Alford

Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology

Annette Woods

Faculty of Education Queensland University of Technology

Jennifer Alford is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at QUT. She teaches in the area of English language and literacy education for ESL/EAL/D learners. Her current research includes: analysis of international English language education policies for how they construct and represent 'critical literacy'; hybrid practices of critical literacy with language learners in schools in Australia, Canada and Sweden; intercultural capacity building for teachers.

Annette Woods is a Professor at Queensland University of Technology. She researches and teaches in social justice, literacies, and pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. Her current research includes a sociomaterial analysis of learning to write, an investigation of young children naming the world when literacies and sustainability are brought together in education contexts, and a project that supports Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people to develop programs to consider cultural identity and well-being. Table 1. A matrix of examples of statements made to explain students as being 'at-risk' of not learning language and literacy. Ways of constituting 'at risk' Explanation Individual learner Traditional deficit view of learner background and knowledge as deficient and therefore problematic Individual school These schools and these kids-- context teaching in the welfare state Discipline of English/ The way English or literacy Literacy within the as an object of study is school approached affords certain areas of study and not others. Institutional constraints Policy directives influence beyond the school what teachers can and cannot including policy do. Evaluating teacher Teachers take responsibility practice in context for their part in enacting policy in particular local contexts. Ways of constituting 'at risk' Typical statements that exemplify this view Individual learner 'I think attitude has a lot to do with why they fail.' 'I honestly believe there is a problem with that child, you know, if they aren't learning. If other kids in the class are learning well ...' Individual school 'In areas like this you don't context get a lot of support from parents .' Discipline of English/ 'Studying classic literature Literacy within the (the Western canon) is central school to learning English. I don't use many pop culture texts.' Institutional constraints 'There's too much X in the beyond the school syllabus.' including policy Evaluating teacher 'If a child isn't learning then I practice in context think you should look at what you are teaching them and how you are teaching them.' 'Well isn't that my job? Aren't I paid to teach them something--so if they aren't learning then I'm clearly not teaching properly' Ways of constituting 'at risk' Effect on learners 'at risk' Individual learner The learner is the source of the 'problem' and blame is relegated to them and their families. Learners find it difficult to be seen in any other way than 'the problem' in an otherwise unproblematic system. Individual school The learner is trapped context in a construction of an 'underperforming community' often related to social class. Discipline of English/ The learner experiences some Literacy within the approaches to English and school literacy learning but not others that might be more accessible. Institutional constraints Learning is constrained beyond the school &/or enabled by policy including policy constructions of what English and literacy is. Evaluating teacher The learner's particular practice in context situation is taken into account in the process of enacting policy.