Hilary Janks addresses key questions about literacy and power in this landmark text that is both engaging and accessible. Her central argument is that competing orientations to critical literacy education − domination (power), access, diversity, design − foreground one over the other, but are crucially interdependent and need to work together to create possibilities for redesign and social action that serve a social justice agenda. She examines the theory underpinning each orientation, and develops new theory in the argument for interdependence and integration. Sitting at the interface between theory and practice, constantly moving from one to the other, the text is rich with examples of how to use these orientations in real teaching contexts, and how to use them to counterbalance one another. In the groundbreaking final chapter Janks considers how the rationalist underpinning of critical literacy tends to exclude the non-rational shows ways of working ‘beyond reason’ − pleasure and play, desire and the unconscious − and makes the case that these need to be taken seriously given their power to cut across the work of critical literacy educators working from any orientation.

Language, Literacy, and Power in Schooling brings critical ethnographic perspectives to bear on language, literacy, and power in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts, showing how literacy and schooling are negotiated by children and adults and how schooling becomes a key site of struggle over whose knowledge, discourses, and literacy practices "count." Part I examines tensions between the local and the general in literacy development and use; Part II considers face-to-face interactions surrounding literacy practices in ethnically diverse classrooms; and Part III widens the ethnographic lens to position literacy practices in the context of globalization and contemporary education policies. Each section includes a substantive introduction by the editor and a synthetic commentary by a leading literacy researcher. Above all, this is a book oriented toward social action. Unpacking the complexity of literacy practices and experiences in diverse settings, the authors seek not only to build new knowledge, but to inform and transform the pedagogies and policies that limit human potentials. The chapters in this volume have much to teach us about the roots of inequality and the possibilities for positive change. Together, they highlight the urgent need for critical literacy researchers to engage politically, confronting education policies that deny the rich multiplicity of human literacies, thereby carving ever-deeper cleavages between those with and without access to literacies of power. The dual focus on language and literacy with critical-ethnographic accounts of identity and schooling speaks to a growing constituency of scholars and practitioners concerned with the role of literacy and discourse in alternatively affirming or negating knowledge, power, and identity, both within and outside of schools.

At the close of the ninth century Alfred the Great lamented the decay of teaming in England and proposed a program of official translations and scholarly study to set his country back on the path of intellectual inquiry. In his Preface to Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care, Alfred equated a knowledge of texts with the right governance of self and state. That document, rich in the history of Anglo-Saxon England and suggestive of the uses of literacy, has long been a canonical text in the teaching of the Old English language, and it begins Seth Lerer's study of the place of texts in the construction of the Anglo-Saxon literary imagination. Beowulf, the Old English Daniel, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the Exeter Book Riddles--all contain scenes of reading and writing, moments of self-conscious inscription and decipherment that have the power to alter the reader's conception of the mythical and historical, the commonplace and the fantastic. Lerer analyzes these scenes, which, taken in sequence, contribute to a reassessment of Old English literature, its nature and social function. He seeks to understand the workings of the lit-erate imagination in the history and fiction of the Anglo-Saxons. In the course of the book he addresses questions about how a Christian literature evokes its pagan past; about the nature of authority in Anglo-Saxon history, politics, and literature; and he considers how scholarly approaches to these questions--whether by medieval or by modern readers--create canons of literary history. Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature is the first book-length study to consider the construction of an early English cultural mythology of writing. Lerer's philological and historical explication of the texts provides new approaches for assessing representations of reading and writing in pre-Conquest literature. His book is a timely and provocative addition to medieval studies.

This text brings critical ethnographic perspectives to bear on the negotiation of language, literacy, and power in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts, showing how literacy and schooling are negotiated by children and adults and how schooling becomes a key site of struggle over whose knowledge, discourses, and literacy practices "count."

The third edition of With Literacy and Justice for All: Rethinking the Social in Language and Education continues to document Carole Edelsky's long involvement with socially critical, holistic approaches to the everyday problems and possibilities facing teachers of language and literacy. This book helps education professionals understand the educational/societal situations they are dealing with, and literacy instruction and second language learning in particular contexts. Edelsky does not offer simplistic pedagogical formulas, but rather, progressively works through differences and tensions in the discourses and practices of sociolinguistics, bilingual education, whole language, and critical pedagogy--fields whose practitioners and advocates too often work in isolation from each other and, at times, at cross purposes. In this edition, what Edelsky means by rethinking is improving and extending her own views, while at the same time demonstrating that such rethinking always occurs in the light of history. The volume includes a completely new Introduction and two entirely new chapters: one on reconceptualizing literacy learning as second language learning, and another on taking a historical view of responses to standardized testing. Throughout, in updating the volume, Edelsky uses a variety of structural styles to note contrasts in her views across time and to make the distinction clear between the original material and the current additions. This edition is a rare example of a scholarly owning-up to changes in thinking, and a much needed demonstration of the historically grounded nature of knowledge. As a whole, the third edition emphasizes recursiveness and questioning within a deliberately political framework.

The rise of New Literacy Studies and the shift from studying reading and writing as a technical process to examining situated literacies—what people do with literacy in particular social situations—has focused attention toward understanding the connections between reading and writing practices and the broader social goals and cultural practices these literacy practices help to shape. This collection brings together situated research studies of literacy across a range of specific contexts, covering everyday, educational, and workplace domains. Its contribution is to provide, through an empirical framework, a larger cumulative understanding of literacy across diverse contexts.

Extraordinary K–12 teachers show us what social equity literacy teaching looks like and how it advances children's achievement. Chapters identify six key dimensions of social equity teaching that can help teachers see their students' potential and create conditions that will support their literacy development. Serving students well depends on understanding relationships between race, class, culture, and literacy; the complexity and significance of culture; and the culturally situated nature of literacy. It also requires knowledge of culturally responsive practices, such as collaborating with and learning from caregivers, using cultural referents, enacting critical and transformative literacy practices, and seeing the capacities of English Language Learners and children who speak African American Language.

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.

The release of U.S. census data in 1910 sparked rhetoric declaring the nation had a literacy crisis and proclaiming illiterate citizens a threat to democratic life. While newspaper editors, industrialists, and officials in the federal government frequently placed the blame on newly arrived immigrants, a smaller but no less vocal group of rural educators and clubwomen highlighted the significant number of native-born illiterate adults in the Appalachian region. Author Samantha NeCamp looks at the educational response to these two distinct literacy narratives—the founding of the Moonlight Schools in eastern Kentucky, focused on native-born nonliterate adults, and the establishment of the Americanization movement, dedicated to the education of recent immigrants. Drawing on personal correspondence, conference proceedings, textbooks, and speeches, NeCamp demonstrates how the Moonlight Schools and the Americanization movement competed for public attention, the interest of educators, and private and governmental funding, fueling a vibrant public debate about the definition of literacy. The very different pedagogical practices of the two movements—and how these practices were represented to the public—helped shape literacy education in the United States. Reading the Moonlight Schools and the Americanization movement in relation to one another, Adult Literacy and American Identity expands the history and theory of literacy and literacy education in the United States. This book will be of interest to scholars in literacy, Appalachian studies, and rhetoric and composition.

Offering a comparative analysis of “community-literacy studies," Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics traces common values in diverse accounts of “ordinary people going public.” Elenore Long offers a five-point theoretical framework. Used to review major community-literacy projects that have emerged in recent years, this local public framework uncovers profound differences, with significant consequence, within five formative perspectives: 1) the guiding metaphor behind such projects; 2) the context that defines a “local” public, shaping what is an effective, even possible performance, 3) the tenor and affective register of the discourse; 4) the literate practices that shape the discourse; and, most signficantly, 5) the nature of rhetorical invention or the generative process by which people in these accounts respond to exigencies, such as getting around gatekeepers, affirming identities, and speaking out with others across difference.