Kathryn F. Whitmore

This book, collaboratively developed by a network of hundreds of CELT (Center for Expansion of Language and Thinking) members and colleagues, provides a theoretical framework as well as practical ideas for teaching. It offers teacher educators models of how others have struggled to practice what they teach. In addition to being a theoretical research document, Whole Language Voices in Teacher Education is a genuinely practical compendium of ideas and procedures:Fifty protocols/engagements suggesting specific learning experiences that can be immediately implemented.Twenty-one narrative chapters detailing successes but also including the realities of failures and challenges of practicing whole language principles in a university setting.Models for teacher education at the course, program, or degree level.Samples of syllabi, collaborative learning experiences, and assignments that can be adapted to a unique purpose and setting.No other book addresses these issues in such a comprehensive, accessible manner. Teacher educators in universities and colleges as well as district inservice directors will find it particularly appropriate for courses in teacher education. And as teacher educators themselves reflect on their practice and consider ways to innovate and develop in their classes, they will take heart from reading stories of how others have dealt with similar challenges.

Whole Language Voices in Teacher Education

Debra Smith

The goal of this book is to encourage educators and researchers to understand the complexities of adolescent gang members' lives in order to rethink their assumptions about these students in school. The particular objective is to situate four gang members as literate, caring students from loving families whose identities and literacy keep them on the margins of school. The research described in this book suggests that advocacy is a particularly effective form of critical ethnography. Smith and Whitmore argue that until schools, as communities of practice, enable children and adolescents to retain identities from the communities in which they are full community members, frightening numbers of students are destined to fail. The stories of four Mexican American male adolescents, who were active members of a gang and Smith's students in an alternative high school program, portray the complicated, multiple worlds in which these boys live. As sons and teenage parents they live in a family community; as CRIP members they live in a gang community; as "at risk" students, drop-outs, and graduates they live in a school community, and as a result of their illegal activities they live in the juvenile court community. The authors theorize about the boys' literacy in each of their communities. Literacy is viewed as ideological, related to power, and embedded in a sociocultural context. Vivid examples of conversation, art, tagging, rap, poetry, and other language and literacy events bring the narratives to life in figures and photographs in all the chapters. Readers will find this book engaging and readable, yet thought provoking and challenging. Audiences for Literacy and Advocacy in Adolescent Family, Gang, School, and Juvenile Court Communities include education researchers, professionals, and students in the areas of middle/high school education, at-risk adolescent psychology, and alternative community programs--specifically those interested in literacy education, sociocultural theory, and popular culture.

Crip 4 Life

Literacy and Advocacy in Adolescent Family, Gang, School, and Juvenile Court Communities

Richard J Meyer

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.

Narratives of Hope, Power, and Vision

Reclaiming Early Childhood Literacies

Richard J. Meyer

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.

Manifestations of Values, Identities, Relationships, and Knowledge

Reclaiming Literacies as Meaning Making

James S. Chisholm

CO-PUBLISHED BY ROUTLEDGE AND THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH Bringing together arts-integrated approaches, literacy learning, and classroom-based research, this book explores ways upper elementary, middle, and high school teachers can engage their students physically, cognitively, and emotionally in deep reading of challenging texts. With a focus on teaching about the Holocaust and Anne Frank’s diary—part of the U.S. middle school literary canon—the authors present the concept of layering literacies as an essential means for conceptualizing how seeing the text, being the text, and feeling the text invite adolescents to learn about difficult and uncomfortable literature and subjects in relation to their contemporary lives. Offering a timely perspective on arts education advocacy, Chisholm and Whitmore demonstrate the vital need to teach through different modalities in order to strengthen students’ connections to literature, their schools, and communities. Accessible strategies are illustrated and resources are recommended for teachers to draw on as they design arts-based instruction for their students’ learning with challenging texts.

Layering Literacies Through the Arts

Reading Challenging Texts

Caryl G. Crowell

What are the patterns of teaching and learning that make a classroom holistic? How do children invent oral and written language? How do they create the culture and curriculum of a classroom? How does the spirit of community and collaboration develop among children and teachers? What are the relationships between literacy, schooling, and socialization as they form among the children? These are a few of the broad questions that Kathy Whitmore and Caryl Crowell answer in this absorbing portrait of Caryl's third-grade classroom, "the Sunshine Room." Over the span of a school year, we watch the students in this bicultural classroom within a bilingual, working-class neighborhood work and develop together as a community of learners. It is the story of how the Sunshine Room, like many whole language classrooms, invents itself; and how in this process the children themselves are continually inventing oral and written language, culture, and curriculum. In two separate collaborative voices, the authors carry readers through several critical events in the life of the classroom: the process through which the children and the teachers negotiate the curriculum, the creation of a theme study about the Middle Ages, and a vicarious experience of the Middle East war through children's literature and discussions. On an individual level, the deep friendship between Seaaira, an English-speaking child from the volunteer community, and Lolita, a bilingual Latina from the barrio, is symbolic of the bicultural experience fostered in the Sunshine Room.

Life in a Bilingual, Whole Language Learning Community

Inventing a Classroom

"In this edited volume, Whitmore and Meyer bring together top literacy scholars from around the world to discuss the role of literacy as a manifestation of meaning-making in reading, writing, drawing, speaking, and playing. Emerging from a rich, progressive scholarship, the volume lays out a clear discourse of meaning-making in literacies, and shifts the conversation away from treating literacies as commodities and towards an understanding of literacies as an active, engaged process by which learners compose and develop their own expressions of agency. Organized by five pillars of literacy-teaching, learning, language, curriculum, and sociocultural contexts-each section covers critical and cutting-edge topics in literacy and offers examples, tools and strategies for practical applications in classroom settings"--

Reclaiming Literacies As Meaning Making

With passion, clarity, and rich examples, Reclaiming Writing is dedicated to reawakening the journeys that writers take as they make sense of, think about, and speak back to their worlds in this era of high-stakes testing and mandated curricula. Classrooms and out-of-school settings are described and analyzed in exciting and groundbreaking narratives that provide insights into the many possibilities for writing that support writers’ searches for voice, identity, and agency. Offering pedagogical strategies and the knowledge base in which they are grounded, the book looks at writing within various areas of the curriculum and across modes of writing from traditional text-based forums to digital formats. Thematically based sections present the pillars of the volume’s critical transactive theory: learning, teaching, curriculum, language, and sociocultural contexts. Each chapter is complemented by an extension that offers application possibilities for teachers in various settings. Reclaiming Writing emphasizes literacy as a vehicle for exploring, interrogating, challenging, finding self, talking back to power, creating a space in the world, reflecting upon the past, and thinking forward to a more joyful and democratic future.

Composing Spaces for Identities, Relationships, and Actions

Reclaiming Writing

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.

Kathryn F. Whitmore

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