Professional Book Reviews: Building Knowledge for Life

This column features books that reflect strong convictions about teachers’ and teacher educators’ “nonnegotiable and moral imperative and mandatory professional responsibility” (Gay, 2010, p. 250) to “act now, without a moment’s hesitation” (p. 247) to transform classrooms and teacher education programs so that no child is lost in the so-called achievement gap. The works reviewed offer possibilities for building academically rigorous classrooms that honor and support children as they build on their funds of knowledge within the very real confines and constraints that so many educators experience on a regular basis. Included in this issue are: Change Is Gonna Come: Transforming Literacy Education for African American Students by Patricia A. Edwards, Gwendolyn Thompson McMillon, and Jennifer D. Turner; Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice by Geneva Gay; Latino Children Learning English: Steps in the Journey by Guadalupe Valdés, Sarah Capitelli, & Laura Alvarez; Teaching with Vision: Culturally Responsive Teaching in Standards-Based Classrooms edited by Christine E. Sleeter and Catherine Cornbleth; and Bedtime Stories and Book Reports: Connecting Parent Involvement and Parent Literacy, edited by Catherine Compton-Lilly and Stuart Greene. Additionally, Douglas Kaufman and Ryan Colwell review a number of seminal texts by Donald Graves, including: Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, A Fresh Look at Writing, Bringing Life into Learning: Creating a Lasting Literacy, and How to Catch a Shark: And Other Stories about Teaching and Learning.