Language Arts - Volume 85, Issue 4, 2008

In “Reading Salt and Pepper” Anderson examines a story written by three third grade girls and their insights about that story as they re-read it during its production and retrospectively, eight years later. Using a frame for understanding children’;s writing as social practice, the children’;s interviews, showing their multiple and sometimes contrastive interpretations, are juxtaposed with the researcher’;s interpretations.

In “Reading Salt and Pepper” Anderson examines a story written by three third grade girls and their insights about that story as they re-read it during its production and retrospectively, eight years later. Using a frame for understanding children’;s writing as social practice, the children’;s interviews, showing their multiple and sometimes contrastive interpretations, are juxtaposed with the researcher’;s interpretations.

Using the Boxed Voices project as one way to connect traditional and non-traditional literacies, the author examines her work with preservice and inservice teachers (university students) as they develop and sustain collaborative, literate learning communities. In her multiliteracy process, the author takes the reader from theory to practice as she discusses the project’;s potential impact on student engagement and new knowledge acquisition. She records her teachers’; journeys through reflective excerpts, project photographs, and other multimodal methods designed to help them, and the reader, implement this project in upper elementary and middle school inclusion classrooms.

In an increasingly globalized world, in which demographics suggest that the U. S. population is becoming increasingly diverse, educational institutions are focusing almost exclusively on learning outcomes and generally ignoring learning incomes—i.e., what students bring with them when they come to school. To mitigate this trend, the author draws on his work with Michelle Hall Kells to describe a cultural ecology model that provides the tools students need to become transcultural citizens. The author considers how a move from writing across the curriculum to writing across communities in elementary and middle school classrooms—and through it, the teaching, learning, and use of writing in communities outside of school contexts—can be integrated into such a model. This essay is an attempt to think through how that might be done.

Welcome to the Pine Cone Wars, as enacted by Mrs. Kay’;s children in her urban first grade. The children brought these wars from the playground to the classroom, reformulating them within the possibilities and constraints of the daily writing time. The Pine Cone Wars thus illustrate the inevitable interplay between the official world we shape as teachers and the unofficial one governed by children. This interplay can reveal children’;s everyday lives, their symbolic resources, and the sources of their worries and pleasures. And, when exploited, this interplay can become a means for expanding and enriching the official curriculum for the benefit of all.

Monica Brown is an author of bilingual children’s books that honor the uniqueness of her subjects, not ignoring common ground, but not universalizing cultural difference. In this profile, she discusses the way contemporary Latino/a children’s literature, in particular her own, intervenes in a history of exclusion in children’s publishing and intervenes in the cycle of stereotypical representations and children’s stories about--though not by--Latinos/as.

Following recommendation from organizations such as the National Writing Commission and the National Writing Project, the resources reviewed in this department encourage elementary literacy teachers to consider writing and community on two levels; first, successful writing pedagogies develop support networks to nurture identities as writers. These support networks include other students, the teacher, the larger school community, and the community at large.

Every year the Notable Children’;s Books in the Language Arts committee reads and reviews hundreds of books to select thirty titles that Language Arts teachers will enjoy sharing with and recommending to their students. Notable books may deal explicitly with language, such as plays on words, word origins, or the history of language or they may demonstrate uniqueness in the use of language or in style. Often, they invite child response or participation.

In the words of Angel Nieto Romero, we begin to see the complex characteristics and demanding roles of a teacher. This gift of poetry, presented in both English and Spanish, gives voice to what teachers know and what the people around them ought to know.