© 2006 INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION (pp. 648–660) doi:10.1598/JAAL.49.8.2 JOURNAL OF ADOLESCENT & ADULT LITERACY 49:8 MAY 2006 648 Dana L. Grisham, Thomas D. Wolsey Recentering the middle school classroom as a vibrant learning community: Students, literacy, and technology intersect Recentering the middle school classroom as a vibrant learning community: Students, literacy, and technology intersect Threaded discussion groups were used in middle school classrooms to facilitate literature study and build a sense of community. Community is the soul of learning. Anything worth learning is situated in our consciousness as an artifact of who wrote, who said, who demonstrated, and who mediated that understanding. In the same way, what we learn is de- fined by those with whom we are able to share and build that learning (Borko, 2004). These tandem ideas delineate the world of the teacher. When the give and take of community be- comes too lopsided, genuine learning becomes a meaningless rite, rather than a rich opportunity to learn, to share, and to grow. Human beings don’t need to possess information only; they need to be- long to a community. In this article, we examine a way in which community can be constructed in the middle school classroom using online elec- tronic discussions of literature. Goodlad (1984) wrote that much of class- room discourse is disconnected from students and is teacher driven. Hillocks (2002) reiterated that impassioned discussion revolves around complex, even intractable, issues that students feel are of value. Our experience in U.S. classrooms and through research demonstrates that when stu- dents are given the opportunity and appropriate structures, they are competent and willing to think critically about com- plex situations and to work together to construct an understanding. The tran- scripts from asynchronous electronic discussions included in this article illustrate how students may construct communities of learning that tran- scend the traditional teacher-driven discourse in classrooms. The Breadwinner (Ellis, 2001) is a novel about Parvana, a girl living in Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban. Students in one eighth-grade humanities class grudgingly agreed to read the story with prompt- ing from their teacher. They read the book, talked about it with their group members, and wrote about it to one another in electronic threaded discussions using First Class Client software (a program similar to Microsoft Outlook). The fol- lowing exchange emerged (student names are pseudonyms; otherwise it is excerpted exactly as written): Jenny: Dear Group, I think the book is alright so far. What do you kids think. I think it suck to live in Afganistan because girls Grisham is the codirector of the Center for the Advancement of Reading at California State University Sacramento (Office of the Chancellor, 6000 J Street, Sacramento, CA 95819, USA). E-mail grisham@mail.sdsu.edu. Wolsey is a doctoral student at San Diego State University in California.