There's More to Passing Than Knowing the Answers

Abstract

To be academically successful, students must learn “how to do school”—which involves mastering both the things to be learned (academic knowledge) and the ways of learning (social knowledge). They must learn how to negotiate the school curriculum with teachers and materials. Many of the scripts for “learning do to school” are implicit. For students who are culturally/linguistically diverse and students with learning disabilities, the implicitness of how to do school presents a roadblock to their acquiring the academic content of school. To facilitate the success of students, educators and speech-language pathologists must understand not only the academic content that students are to learn, but also the context in which they are expected to learn. Using observational and interview data from an ethnographic study documenting school reform, this article describes the components of learning to do school and describes how the scripts for “doing school” changed across the grades in an elementary school with a population that was culturally/linguistically diverse.