Susi Long

Vivian Maria Vasquez

Mariana Souto-Manning

In this inspiring collection, 13 early childhood leaders take action to challenge and change inequitable educational practices in preschools and elementary schools. For them, educating for social justice is not an empty platitude. Steadfast and resolute, they turn rhetoric into reality as they guide early childhood teachers to teach for social justice innovatively and strategically. Through the voices of families, teachers, and the administrators themselves, each chapter shares ways that these leaders use the power entrusted in them to question and disrupt discriminatory and marginalizing practices that deny opportunities for some students while privleging others. The book includes insights, strategies, and resources that administrators can use to build confidence, knowledge, and skills as they invest in more equitable and just pre/schools.

Taking a Stand for Social Justice

Courageous Leadership in Early Childhood Education

Jerome C. Harste

Stacie L. Tate

How can teacher educators engage pre-service and in-service teachers in learning about and framing their teaching from a critical literacy perspective? What does this mean? Why is it important? To address these questions, this book offers a theoretical framework and detailed examples, pedagogical resources, and insights into ways to build critical literacies with teachers in and out of school. Its unique contribution is to bridge critical literacy theory and teacher education. Participants in teacher education programs and professional development settings are often reminded of the need to build curriculum using children’s inquiry questions, passions and interests but generally this message is delivered only through telling (lectures) or showing (examples from other people’s classrooms). This book advances critical literary by explaining and illustrating how teacher educators can do much more—by creating opportunities for pre-service and in-service teachers to "live critical literacies" through experiencing firsthand what it is like to be a learner where the curriculum is built around teachers’ own inquiry questions, passions, and interests.

Theoretical Foundations and Pedagogical Resources for Pre-service and In-service Contexts

Negotiating Critical Literacies with Teachers

This book explores the ways in which teachers can use critical literacy as a framework for teaching and learning. The book shares the varied experiences of its authors as they attempt to put a critical edge on students' classroom discussions about books and other texts, and thus create spaces for critical literacy in the K-6 classroom. Each chapter in the book focuses on how the authors used children's literature in combination with other texts to introduce critical conversations and construct social action projects in their classrooms. The book shows how its authors used books in four ways: (1) Pairing everyday texts with texts written for children; (2) Focusing on social issues: Bringing the outside world into the classroom; (3) Using children's literature to unpack social issues in the school community; and (4) Integrating critical literacy, children's literature, and mathematics investigations. Central to each chapter are the issues that students raise about the world and the difference that critical literacy discourse makes in the classroom. The book provides classroom strategies and annotated lists of children's literature that can be used to encourage and support children's critical conversations. Interspersed throughout the book are "Reflection Points," which ask teachers to reflect on their own practice and to consider personal philosophies and strategies for teaching; classroom vignettes; excerpts of student dialogue; and suggested readings. (Contains 49 references and 37 children's book references.) (NKA).

Creating Space for Critical Literacy in K-6 Classrooms

Getting Beyond "I Like the Book"

Explains and illustrates using one teacher's experience how issues from everyday talk with children can be used to created an integrated critical literacy curriculum over the course of one year.

Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children

The editors discuss the transformative possibilities of literacy through a collection of 12 articles originally published in Primary Voices K-6. Based on a view of literacy as social practice, this book highlights the ways in which classroom teachers and educators have practiced and imagined teaching literacy in everyday classrooms. The twelve essays published here originally appeared in the NCTE journal Primary Voices K-6 and highlight four key issues essential to literacy practice in elementary classrooms: access, meaning making, inquiry, and transformation. The individual essays challenge us to go beyond a view of literacy as a simple matter of skill and help to realize its transformative power. In providing a contemporary conceptual framework and further resources, the editors have looked not only back to Primary Voices K-6 but also forward, noting that the practices reported in the book represent only the tip of what is possible and including throughout the volume discussions of what the future might look like and how particular sets of social practices might mature and evolve.

Primary Voices K-6

Literacy as Social Practice

This book bridges critical literacy theory and teacher education by offering a theoretical framework and detailed examples and pedagogical resources teacher educators can use to build critical literacies with teachers in and out of school.

"Getting Beyond "I Like the Book": Creating Space for Critical Literacy in k-6 Classrooms" (second edition) draws you into life in classrooms where students and teachers together use critical literacy as a framework for taking on local and global issues like racism and gender using books and everyday texts such as school posters and advertisements. This expanded second edition includes the following features: (1) Two additional content areas chapters--science and social studies--to emphasize that critical literacy is not just a part of the literacy curriculum; (2) a new chapter on new technologies such as websites, videos, and podcasts and their impact on critical literacy; and (3) a fresh focus interspersed throughout the book on multimedia literacy and using multimedia text sets. In addition, reflection questions at the end of each chapter can help you connect the ideas in this book with your experiences.

Vivian Maria Vasquez

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