Working from the premise that literacy is a social process rather than an autonomous practice, The Way Literacy Lives offers a curricular response to the political, material, social, and ideological constraints placed on literacy education. Shannon Carter argues that fostering in students an awareness of the ways in which an autonomous model deconstructs itself when applied to real-life literacy contexts empowers them to work against this system in ways critical theorists advocate. She builds upon a theoretical framework provided by new literacy studies, activity theory, and critical literacies to construct a new model for basic writing instruction, one that trains writers to effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one.

An award-winning journalist and literacy advocate provides a clear, step-by-step guide to helping your child thrive as a reader and a learner. When her child went off to school, Maya Smart was shocked to discover that a good education in America is a long shot, in ways that few parents fully appreciate. Our current approach to literacy offers too little, too late, and attempting to play catch-up when our kids get to kindergarten can no longer be our default strategy. We have to start at the top. The brain architecture for reading develops rapidly during infancy, and early language experiences are critical to building it. That means parents’ work as children’s first teachers begins from day one too—and we need deeper knowledge to play our positions. Reading for Our Lives challenges the bath-book-bed mantra and the idea that reading aloud to our kids is enough to ensure school readiness. Instead, it gives parents easy, immediate, and accessible ways to nurture language and literacy development from the start. Through personal stories, historical accounts, scholarly research, and practical tips, this book presents the life-and-death urgency of literacy, investigates inequity in reading achievement, and illuminates a path to a true, transformative education for all.

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.

This book addresses critical questions facing public education at the twenty-first century.

Winner of the 2017 American Educational Research Association's Division B Outstanding Book Award Literary of the Other stages a bold psychoanalytic investigation into the existential significance of literacy. Featuring a dazzling array of novel artifacts and events, the book situates literacy in the internal fictive worlds of the self and other. This approach is designed to encourage teachers of language and literature to sustain reflexive thought in their practices of reading and writing as a means to gain insight into the psychical processes of literacy. With lucid and compelling prose, Aparna Mishra Tarc reminds us of the importance of fostering a meaningful practice of literacy in the construction of real and fictive stories by which to live well throughout our lives. Renarrating many versions of a shared humanity might develop in us all a sympathetic regard for the storied lives of others.

A ground-breaking book. For years educationists have sought evidence of genuine partnerships between schools and homes reciprocal partnerships where schools are as keen to foster home practices relating to literacy and learning as they are to tell families this is what we do and ask that they should do the same. Eve Bearne, Cambridge Un

Demonstrating what it is like to be an adult learner in today’s world, this book focuses on language, literacy and numeracy learning. The authors explore the complex relationship between learning and adults’ lives, following a wide range of individual students in various formal learning situations, from college environments to a young homeless project, and a drug support and aftercare centre. The study is rooted in a social practices approach and examines how people’s lives shape their learning. Themes addressed range from: how literacy is learned through participation and how barriers such as violence and ill-health impact on people’s lives. Based on a major research project and detailed, reflexive and collaborative methodology, the book describes a coherent strategy of communication and impact which will have a direct effect on policy and practice

Curating a Literacy Life spotlights the idea of curation as a process for inspiring student-centered learning with digital media. Young people need to learn to become purposeful collectors and, thus, curators of their own learning. In this book, Kist shows educators how to empower students as they make sense of all the books, videos, websites, and social media they access. Packed with ideas and activities developed over time in a high school setting, the author presents a model for learning to learn—a way of processing, making meaning, and repurposing all the texts around us. Kist demonstrates how curating can happen no matter where the teaching and learning are taking place, whether virtually or face-to-face, in school or out of school. Using Smart phones; a Netflix account, and access to a variety of YA, canonical, and media texts, this resource provides a foundation for becoming lifelong scholars and artists. Curating a Literacy Life is for both teachers and parents who are interested in helping young people harness, manage, and learn from the multiple messages and texts they encounter every day. Book Features: A powerful model to help teens make sense of and even repurpose the texts they encounter daily.Ideas for making use of digital media in ways that are meaningful to today’s students.Strategies for bridging the divide between in-school and out-of-school literacies. Activities developed during the author’s years as an instructional coach at Cleveland’s Glenville High School.

This collection presents "more than 650 readings about daily life from present-day authors ..."--Inside jacket flap.