This popular text, now in its Fourth Edition, introduces pre-service and in-service teachers to the most current theories and methods for teaching literacy to children in elementary schools. The methods presented are based on scientific findings that have been tested in many classrooms. A wealth of examples, hands-on activities, and classroom vignettes--including lesson plans, assessments, lists of children's literature books to fiction and nonfiction texts, and more--illustrate the method...

This book offers a comprehensive report on a three-year, cross-cultural, critical participatory action research study, conducted in children’s homes and communities in Fiji. This project contributed to building sustainable local capacity in communities without access to early childhood services, so as to promote preschool children’s literacy development in their home languages and English. The book includes rich descriptions of the young children’s lived, multilingual literacy practices in...

Excavating Whiteness: How White Teachers’ Histories, Communities, and Relationships Frame Their Understandings about Race follows a group of sixteen teachers, fourteen White, one African American, and one Native American teacher as they participated in a university summer course centered on examining the role of race in education. The voices and experiences of the teachers powerfully demonstrate their various views and stages of racial identity development. The teachers’ interacti...

Called to Sankofa is a collection of Hurricane Katrina survival stories by African American education leaders in New Orleans. It draws upon the West African concept, Sankofa, which loosely translates to "return to the source and fetch." The griots, through their stories, fetch salvageable and knowledge-laden valuables linked to their resilience and rebuilding efforts. Thus, the Sankofa concept serves as a lens for examining leadership in the aftermath of disaster...

This accessible book will help elementary school teachers improve literacy instruction inside or outside the Common Core environment. The authors address teachers’ instructional needs by introducing key concepts from current trends in literacy education—from high-level standards to the use of 21st-century literacies. Readers then follow teachers as they successfully implement the curriculum they developed to promote high-level thinking and engagement with disciplinary content. The text foc...

This handbook is the first of its kind to explore Positioning Theory. Taking inspiration from the groundwork set by Rom Harré and collaborators such as Bronwyn Davies, Fathali Moghaddam, Luk Van Langenhove, and others the book explores the emergence, historical context, and disciplinary applications of Positioning Theory and its basic precepts as a social psychological theory.This volume encompasses over 20 chapters across four sections, assimilating cross-disciplinary insights tha...

Professional learning (PL) opportunities are essential for PreK–12 literacy educators, but too often these efforts fail to help teachers develop and deeply engage with their work. This forward-looking book describes keys to providing effective, sustainable literacy PL that values teachers over test scores and capitalizes on social networks and communities. The volume presents case studies of transformational initiatives tailored to culturally and linguistically diverse pop...

This book explores the conceptual framework, opportunities for learning, as a transaction between literacy learners, mediating agents, and the literacy content to be learned within social, cultural, and historical contexts. With contributions from top scholars from around the world, the chapters in this book provide a window into the varied ways learners, their families, educators, and researchers have co-constructed opportunities for learning in a range of PK-12 classroo...

Using a multiliteracies theoretical framework highlighting social diversity and multimodality as central in the process of meaning making, this book examines literacy teaching and learning as embedded in cultural, linguistic, racial, sexual, and gendered contexts and explores ways to foster learning and achievement for diverse students in various settings. Attending simultaneously to topics around two overarching and interrelated themes—languages and language variations, and cultures, ethn...