Navigating a literacy landscape: Teaching conceptual understanding with multiple text types

The authors draw on Cognitive Flexibility Theory (Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 2004) as a lens to examine one seventh-grade English language arts teacher's pedagogical approach to using multiple text types to develop students' conceptual understandings about the 1957 integration of Little Rock's Central High School. Multiple text types included but were not limited to memoir, expository texts, photographs, documentaries, docudrama, and Web documents. Findings suggest the teacher's use of multiple text types required a systematic and strategic juxtaposition of texts along with questioning, resulting in a teacher-centered approach.