Reclaiming Literacies As Meaning Making

Whitmore and Meyer bring together top literacy scholars from around the world to introduce the concept of manifestations: evidence of meaning making in literacy events, practices, processes, products, and thinking. Manifestation are windows into literacy identities, and serve as affective and sociocultural signifiers of learners’ understanding at a point in time and in a specific context. The volume reclaims progressive spaces for understanding reading, writing, drawing, speaking, playing, and other literacies. It grounds manifestations of literacies in the discourse of meaning making and demonstrates how literacy learners and educators are active agents in this complex, social, political, emotional, and multimodal process. Ideal for preservice teachers, graduate students, and researchers in literacy education, this book shifts the conversation away from treating literacies as acquired commodities and illustrates how educators engage with learners to deepen understanding of literacy learners’ experiences. Organized by five pillars of literacy—teaching, learning, language, curriculum, and sociocultural contexts—each section covers critical and cutting-edge topics and offers examples, tools, and strategies for research and practical applications in diverse classroom settings. Each chapter includes a range of examples and is followed by a short, complementary reading extension to engage the reader.

Whitmore and Meyer bring together top literacy scholars from around the world to introduce the concept of manifestations: evidence of meaning making in literacy events, practices, processes, products, and thinking. Manifestation are windows into literacy identities, and serve as affective and sociocultural signifiers of learners’ understanding at a point in time and in a specific context. The volume reclaims progressive spaces for understanding reading, writing, drawing, speaking, playing, and other literacies. It grounds manifestations of literacies in the discourse of meaning making and demonstrates how literacy learners and educators are active agents in this complex, social, political, emotional, and multimodal process. Ideal for preservice teachers, graduate students, and researchers in literacy education, this book shifts the conversation away from treating literacies as acquired commodities and illustrates how educators engage with learners to deepen understanding of literacy learners’ experiences. Organized by five pillars of literacy—teaching, learning, language, curriculum, and sociocultural contexts—each section covers critical and cutting-edge topics and offers examples, tools, and strategies for research and practical applications in diverse classroom settings. Each chapter includes a range of examples and is followed by a short, complementary reading extension to engage the reader.

At a time when literacy has become more of a political issue than a research or pedagogical one, this volume refocuses attention on work with young children that places them at the center of their literacy worlds. Drawing on robust and growing knowledge which is often marginalized because of political and legislative forces, it explores young children’s literacies as inclusive, redefined, and broadened—encompassing technologies, the arts, multiple modalities, and teaching and learning for democracy, cultural sustainability and social justice. Highlighted themes include children’s rights to grow through playful engagements with multiple literacies to interrogate their worlds; adults who expand and inspire children’s consciousness and awareness of others and the world around them; the centrality of meaning making in all aspects of language and literacy development; a deep respect for diversities, including languages, cultures, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and more; and an expansive understanding of the nature of texts.

This book examines how the teaching of reading can be reclaimed from government mandates, scripted commercial programs, and high stakes tests via intensive reconsideration of learning, teaching, curriculum, language, and sociocultural contexts.

Inviting teachers back to the role of reflective advocates for thoughtful reading instruction, this book presents theory and pedagogical possibilities to reclaim and build upon the knowledge base that was growing when government mandates, scripted commercial programs, and high stakes tests took over as the dominant agenda for reading instruction in U.S. public schools. Focusing on literacy learners’ and their teachers’ lives as literate souls, it examines how the teaching of reading can be reclaimed via an intensive reconsideration of five pillars as central to the teaching and learning of reading: learning, teaching, curriculum, language, and sociocultural contexts. Reclaiming Reading articulates the knowledge base that was marginalized or disrupted by legislated and policy intrusions into classrooms and provides practical examples for taking good reading instruction out of the cracks and moving it back to the center of the classroom. Explaining what happens in readers’ minds as they read and how teachers can design practices to support that process, this book encourages teachers to initiate pedagogy that will help them begin or return to the stance of reflective, knowledgeable, professional decision-makers.

Building on Bobbie Kabuto’s groundbreaking 2010 book Becoming Biliterate, this book explores how identity impacts the development of bilingual readers and how reading practices are mediated by family and community contexts. Highlighting bilingual readers from Spanish, Greek, Japanese, and English language backgrounds, Kabuto offers an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of these readers’ behaviors and identities through the original approach of Biographic Biliteracy Profiles. The Profiles serve as a culturally relevant assessment tool for developing meaningful narratives and can reveal how bilingual readers make sense of texts in the context of their home and school environments. An ideal approach for unpacking the complexity of bilingual reading behaviors and how they change across time, the Profiles allow readers to explore what a bilingual reader’s identity means to becoming biliterate; the roles of code-switching and translanguaging; the influences of readers’ families and communities; and how they all interact and shape readers’ identities, behaviors, and meaning-making. Offering practical applications on observing and documenting bilingual readers, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students in courses on bilingualism, L2/ESL reading, and multilingualism.

Luminous Literacies shares examples of teachers and educators using local knowledge to illustrate literacy engagement and curriculum-making through scholarly accounts of experiences in teacher preparation courses, classrooms, and other community spaces in New Mexico.

In this volume, contributors advance the theories and praxis of Critical Digital Literacies. Aimed at literacy, teacher education, and English Education practitioners, this volume explores critical practices with digital tools, with a pronounced focus on social justice.