Language Arts - Volume 83, Issue 5, 2006

Tim O’Keefe, Rise Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, Bruce Morgan, Julia López-Robertson, Donna Santman, JoAnn Wong-Kam, Sharon Hill, and Linda Christensen provide short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their work with children and teachers connect to larger issues of literacy, language, inquiry, voice, and social justice.

Tim O’Keefe, Rise Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, Bruce Morgan, Julia López-Robertson, Donna Santman, JoAnn Wong-Kam, Sharon Hill, and Linda Christensen provide short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their work with children and teachers connect to larger issues of literacy, language, inquiry, voice, and social justice.

Tim O’Keefe, Rise Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, Bruce Morgan, Julia López-Robertson, Donna Santman, JoAnn Wong-Kam, Sharon Hill, and Linda Christensen provide short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their work with children and teachers connect to larger issues of literacy, language, inquiry, voice, and social justice.

Tim O’Keefe, Rise Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, Bruce Morgan, Julia López-Robertson, Donna Santman, JoAnn Wong-Kam, Sharon Hill, and Linda Christensen provide short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their work with children and teachers connect to larger issues of literacy, language, inquiry, voice, and social justice.

Tim O’Keefe, Rise Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, Bruce Morgan, Julia López-Robertson, Donna Santman, JoAnn Wong-Kam, Sharon Hill, and Linda Christensen provide short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their work with children and teachers connect to larger issues of literacy, language, inquiry, voice, and social justice.

Tim O’Keefe, Rise Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, Bruce Morgan, Julia López-Robertson, Donna Santman, JoAnn Wong-Kam, Sharon Hill, and Linda Christensen provide short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their work with children and teachers connect to larger issues of literacy, language, inquiry, voice, and social justice.

Linda Christensen, et al., provides short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their work with children and teachers connect to larger issues of literacy, language, inquiry, voice, and social justice.

This memoir examines the use of supplementary educational programs in a low-income school district. Through sharing experiences from an after-school high school tutoring program and a first-grade reading enrichment program, the author raises questions about these programs: Are the causes of students falling behind being addressed? Are the instructors qualified, and are they given adequate resources? How do these programs motivate students to learn? Do these programs truly prepare students? What do the students’ voices tell us about their education?

Mark was a fifth-grade student who resisted writing in certain contexts. This article explores how he used positional writing practices to construct academic and social positions within classroom writing practices and how these positions constrained and enabled his literacy learning. In addition, the methods used by the teacher in response to his positioning are presented.

Playing the Play describes the experiences of a storyteller and teacher of literature who created a literature-based literacy program at Concourse House, a homeless shelter in Bronx, New York, for women and their young children. This program is based on the belief that pleasure is the primary reason children want to learn to read, and that where children have seldom listened to the rhymes and stories that are the ground base for literate children, they need to hear the “call of literature for themselves. The author describes the way stories are chosen, the active engagements with literature and drama, and the negotiation between her desire for a shared literary experience and the children's desire for play. Playing the play is about giving children the choice to engage imaginatively in stories, and helping them extend that engagement through a performance practice that deepens their knowledge of stories and feeds their sense of themselves as competent, literate people.

This article describes a first grade study of the poetry of Langston Hughes and creation of poems reflecting the children’s dreams. It details how the project went beyond writing poetry to becoming a community building experience in which the children learned the power of sharing their dreams.

Teachers rely on their vision of literacy and literacy education to guide their teaching and influence the ways they view their students’ literacy learning. This article describes what happens when a career teacher senses that her vision is limiting her teaching and her students’ opportunities for learning. Kid watching and careful study of critical incidents are among the strategies she uses to work through belief-level changes about teaching literacy in ways that help students construct more democratic ways of living.

Educational practice has focused primarily upon a transmission model of education dealing with dominant, mainstream, western ideology. This model often alienates student learners due to the absence of cultural relevance. This article focuses on a theoretical framework teachers in Hawaii are using to become transformative practitioners who promote social change.

Tim O’Keefe, Rise Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, Bruce Morgan, Julia López-Robertson, Donna Santman, JoAnn Wong-Kam, Sharon Hill, and Linda Christensen provide short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their work with children and teachers connect to larger issues of literacy, language, inquiry, voice, and social justice.

Notes from the sidebar editors.