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Sixteen bodies attentively listened from a six foot square blue carpet, facing a small white board covered mostly in instructional posters, hand-made by their teacher, Ms. Chamorro. (1) Ms. Chamoro has just asked her 2nd graders at her Title I elementary school where they can get information for research. Nearly all students' hands flew up in eager anticipation of being called upon, and most did not contain themselves as they called out answers. "The computer! The Internet!" students called out. "We can get it from people we know," explained Monique, the one African-American student in the class of otherwise Latino students. "You can gather information from the TV," Joey, one of the usually quieter boys said. "Uh huh, right!" the teacher encouraged the students. Other responses ranged from video games to buildings to libraries, highlighting a breadth and depth of knowledge encouraged by the high academic expectations and the instructional structuring their teacher had for them. She eventually focused on the responses which would help lead into an introduction about a large project students would complete on biographies. "Books," another boy called out, "You can get information books about animals." Ms. Chamorro asked, "Is that fiction or nonfiction?" The boy responded, "It's expository text." Ms. Chamorro smiled broadly at the boy's use of a higher academic register and exclaimed, "Wow!" She launched into a larger discussion of biography writing the students would begin. The vignette above demonstrates one of several structures one teacher used regularly in her instruction--connecting what students knew and had studied to the work they were about to start. Ms. Chamorro taught the structuring of responses (structuring not often found in many U.S. K-12 classrooms), including the use of academic language and complete sentences. The teacher also facilitated the students' engagement in multiple curricular spaces, ranging from students' social networks to the school building to various media, including television and Internet. The vignette also shows the spontaneous and unpredictable responses students offer--moments I explain as anti-structure moments, or places of creativity for students to grow in their education. In this article, I theorize how structure and anti-structure work in a dialectical manner, based on ethnographic observations of a public schoolteacher and her students during the 2009-2010 academic year. Current debates surrounding the field of education focus heavily on school accountability, including state-mandated, standardized testing (Au, 2009). The mandated testing means that teachers work to get students to pass tests, and in schools where students have performed poorly, there is a heavy reliance on the curriculum which correlates with the test items. The accountability movement stems from purported efforts to improve the education for all students, particularly students from groups who have historically been under-served, including African American, Latino, and lower socio-economic status students (U.S. Department of Education, 2009). Educational researchers have demonstrated that this accountability trend has been damaging for students in terms of the quality of instruction they receive, including the kind of curriculum to which they are exposed (Au, 2009; De Lissovoy & McLaren, 2003; Nichols & Berliner, 2007; Valenzuela, 2004). Similarly, the accountability movement, with its focus on standards and test scores, has failed to "recognize the mediating role that schools play in the production of space (or social context) through the education of place makers (or citizens)" (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 620). It follows that schools where historically underserved youth are receiving increasingly proscribed and prescribed curricula become places of increasingly limited possibilities. In this article, I refer to space as a geographic location while place becomes a contextually imbued location shared by social actors. …

Structured Spaces of Play in a Southwestern U.S. Urban Elementary Classroom: Dialectics of Community and Academic Rigor