Offering the wisdom that only experience and expertise in the field can bring, this book takes a critical look into the present and the future of literacy as envisioned by leading reading researchers. The lead author of each chapter is a distinguished reading researcher elected by their peers into the Reading Hall of Fame. A key message in this book is that literacy professionals must take an active role to shape change.

This book explains the concept of multiliteracies and provides the literacy knowledge, resources, attitudes, and strategies that elementary and middle school students need to succeed in a changing world. The authors present a range of new and established ideas about literacy, emphasising successful practices. Chapters cover how teachers can rely less on print texts; respond to new trends in children's literature; and balance guided reading, outcomes-based curricula, and school-wide approaches to planning. New concepts are accompanied by reflection strategies to help understandings of literacy, multiliteracies, and texts. All chapters include Theory Into Practice: Classroom Application sections throughout to demonstrate how to incorporate multiliteracies every day in the classroom. [Back cover, ed].

An invaluable resource for both practicing and pre-service teachers, this long-awaited book offers a fresh and much-needed point of view of how to "rethink" literacy and technology in today's diverse classrooms. Authored by some of the most respected researchers in the field today, Literacy, Technology, and Diversity reflects on the idea that great expectations are achievable through educational projects that foster academic growth, with classroom diversity and technology as catalysts for deeper learning, and that a narrow focus ongrade expectations yields superficial results. Arguing today's learning principles need to incorporate the core values of community learning, critical pedagogy, multilingualism, anti-racist education, high academic standards, and technological fluency, Cummins, Sayers and Brown provide a thought-provoking introduction into these learning principles that will inspire the life-long learning of students. Take a peek inside... Provides examples of projects, backed by research-based theories for their effective adaptation to help both pre-service and practicing teachers become more independent and creative in the ways they use technology. Gives useful suggestions on how to effectively integrate literacy and technology into the classroom. Presents Portraits (Case studies) of collaborative projects promoting literacy learning and often involving technology on such topics as: Cognition, Assessment, Community of Learning, and Tools and Resources in Section II (Chapters 5-9). Contains an appendix of short vignettes of exemplary projects that promote learning of standards-based expectations for academic achievement. Includes a complimentary CD-ROM of additional resources for teachers as well as updated portraits on exemplary projects.

Changing Leadership for Changing Times examines the types of leadership that are likely to be productive in creating and sustaining schools of the future. Based on a long term study of 'transformational' leadership in school restructuring contexts, the chapters in this book offer a highly readable account of such leadership grounded in a substantial body of empirical evidence.

The authors have observed and analysed the components of social abilities and how they influence, through language and literacy the likely outcome of the lives and identities of individuals and groups.

Distrusting Educational Technology critically explores the optimistic consensus that has arisen around the use of digital technology in education. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives, this book shows how apparently neutral forms of educational technology have actually served to align educational provision and practices with neo-liberal values, thereby eroding the nature of education as a public good and moving it instead toward the individualistic tendencies of twenty-first century capitalism. Following a wide-ranging interrogation of the ideological dimensions of educational technology, this book examines in detail specific types of digital technology in use in education today, including virtual education, ‘open’ courses, digital games, and social media. It then concludes with specific recommendations for fairer forms of educational technology. An ideal read for anyone interested in the fast-changing nature of contemporary education, Distrusting Educational Technology comprises an ambitious and much-needed critique.

One: exploring student-driven learning and literacy through social action -- Part one: Social action in practice -- Two: Power play / Paula Laub -- Three: lending student voice to curriculum planning / Dietta Poston Hitchcock -- Four: Tthe story of the youth dreamers : in their own words / Mildred Harris, Chantel Morant, Shanta Crippen, Chris Lawson, Chekana Reid, Cierra Cary, Tiffani Young-Smith -- Five: Reflections on the youth dreamers / Kristina Berdan -- Six: Community action in a summer writing institute / Chinwe "La Tanya" Obijiofor -- Seven: Changing our world / Lori Farias, critics of society class -- Eight: Poetry and power in the creative writing workshop / Maggie Folkers -- Nine: Shall we dance? / Connie Ellard Bunch -- Ten: The march on John Philip Sousa / Elizabeth A. Davis -- Eleven: Social action and parent involvement / Mildred Serra -- Part two. Getting started with social action -- Twelve: Learning from social action : reflections on teaching and social action -- Thirteen: Principles for practice : what is social action? / Jennie Fleming, Ian Boulton -- Fourteen: Recommendations for the classroom : before you start / Jennie Fleming, Ian Boulton -- Part three. Stuff you can try : activities for social action -- Metro map -- Naming the group -- Community vocabulary -- Devising the vision -- How we behave in groups -- Movie poster -- Faces -- But why? -- Codes -- Changing your mind -- Sculpts -- The three c's -- Swot -- Ideal specimen -- Force field analysis -- Worst nightmare -- Now/soon/later -- The swimming pool -- Messages -- References -- Resources for further reading

Using literacy practices in the newly independent post-apartheid Namibia as a lens through which to examine the effects of globalisation, this broad case study looks at issues surrounding tourism, state control and the new forces of consumerism. By placing literacy at the centre of an investigation into social and cultural change as experienced by individuals, Papen shows that in times of change, reading and writing are always implicated in structures of power and inequality. The book considers language practices that can exclude some members of Namibian society and also looks at the strategies used by local people to accommodate and even embrace the onward march of global English and the influx of foreign visitors, practices and modes of commerce and interaction.

Literacy researchers interested in how specific sites of learning situate students and the ways they make sense of their worlds are asking new questions and thinking in new ways about how time and space operate as contextual dimensions in the learning lives of students, teachers, and families. These investigations inform questions related to history, identity, methodology, in-school and out-of school spaces, and local/global literacies. An engaging blend of methodological, theoretical, and empirical work featuring well-known researchers on the topic, this book provides a conceptual framework for extending existing conceptions of context and provides unique and ground-breaking examples of empirical research.

"....undeterred by sociological pessimism, Colin Lankshear hacks away at the underbrush, clearing a path for a new critical-liberatory discourse" James Paul Gee, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. This book explores everyday social practices and how they influence who people are, what they become, the quality of their lives, the opportunities and possibilities open to them, and those they are denied. It focusses especially on language and literacy components of social practices, asking: How are language and literacy framed within different social practices? How are social practices in turn shaped and framed by language and literacy? What are the consequences for the lives and identities of individuals and groups? How can we understand these relationships, and build on this understanding to develop critical forms of literacy and language awareness that enhance human dignity, freedom and social justice? In addressing these questions the book draws on social practices from diverse settings: from classrooms using conventional texts to so-called "enchanted workplaces"; from a Third World peasant cooperative enterprise to modern technologically-equipped homes and classrooms. The result is a rich sociocultural account of language and literacy, which challenges narrow psychological and skills-based approaches, and provides an excellent theory base for informing the practice of literacy educators. It will be compelling reading for academics, teachers and students of language and literacy education, critical literacy, discourse studies and cultural studies.