Reclaiming Powerful Literacies

Offering a unique, reflexive framework for Critical Discourse Analysis focused on discourses of hope, transformation, and liberation, this book showcases a variety of powerful literacies in action. Drawing from original research in a range of public, educational spaces across the lifespan—from Kindergartners studying social justice movements, to sixth graders designing a social justice museum exhibit focused on the environment and sustainability, to teacher education students practicing racial literacy in response to the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—Rogers makes the case that critical social theories often associated with Critical Discourse Analysis have not kept pace with a recent shift toward the positive, referred to as Positive Discourse Analysis. Encouraging readers to reconsider their understanding of concepts such as power, action, context, critique, and reflexivity, this book illustrates the potential of theorizing discourse analysis from a positive orientation.

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.

Reclaiming English Language Arts Methods Courses showcases innovative work in teacher education that fosters teachers’ capacities as reflective practitioners and public intellectuals; extends traditional boundaries of methods courses on teaching the English language arts, literacy, children’s and young adult literature; and embodies democratic and critical politics that go beyond the reductive economic aims and traditional classroom practices sanctioned by educational policies and corporate educational reforms. Featuring leading and emerging scholars in English language arts teacher education, each chapter provides rich and concrete examples of elementary and secondary methods courses rooted in contemporary research and theory, on-line resources, and honest appraisals of the possibilities, tensions, and limits of doing teacher education differently in a top-down time of standards-based education, high-stakes testing, teacher assessment, and neoliberal education reforms. This book offers important resources and support for teacher educators and graduate students to explore alternative visions for aligning university methods courses with current trends in English and cultural studies, critical sociocultural literacy, new literacies and web 2.0 tools, and teaching the English language arts in multiethnic, multilingual, and underserved urban communities.

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.

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.

Building on the original Powerful Literacies first published in 2001, this new volume considers the new developments in theory, technology and policy that are having an impact on learning and teaching literacies, and links to the current policy context of lifelong learning, active citizenship and social inclusion.

An approach to literacy that understands it as lived and experienced in the everyday across varied spaces and populations. This book approaches literacy as lived and experienced in the everyday. A living literacies approach draws not only on such official, schooled activities as reading, writing, speaking, and listening but also on such routine, tacit activities as scrolling through Instagram, watching news footage, and listening to music. It goes beyond well-worn framings of literacy as an object of study to reimagine literacy as constantly in motion, vital, and dynamic, filled with affective intensities. A lived literacies approach implies a turn to activism, to hopeful practice, and to creativity. The authors examine literacies through a series of active verbs: seeing, disrupting, hoping, knowing, creating, and making. Case studies--ranging from an exploration of photography as a way to shift perspectives to a project in which adults teach young people how to fish--show lived literacies in both theory and practice. With these chapters, Pahl and Rowsell, along with contributors Collier, Pool, Rasool, and Trzecak, make it possible to see literacy in everyday activities, woven into the modes of seeing and knowing. By disruption and activism, literacy can encompass a wide array of practices--exchanging information at a school gate or making a collage. Grounding theory in the sites and spaces of their research, working with artists, photographers, poets, and makers, the authors issue a call to action for literacy education.