Language Arts - Volume 94, Issue 4, 2017

Although there is widespread support for culturally sustaining pedagogy, there is a lack of understanding about the challenges that teachers face while trying to do this. This kind of instruction can be difficult because teachers often have different backgrounds from their students. Our goal is to help construct a more coherent vision of culturally sustaining pedagogy through a narrative inquiry approach by sharing teachers’ stories of their experiences. Here, each teacher shared a moment when she tried to enact a culturally sustaining lesson but it failed in some way. We hope these narratives will inspire reflection, debate, and dialogue about how to incorporate and respond to students’ cultural, linguistic, and historical backgrounds.

Historians and detectives work in similar ways, each trying to figure out what happened in the past. Both look for clues or evidence left behind, and both create a tentative explanation based on this evidence. This article begins with this important similarity in order to show how nonfiction books for children that present history as a mystery read like thrillers and reveal the process of historical thinking. We use two distinct detective stories about Typhoid Mary to show how history mysteries accomplish this: the story of the detective on the scene who, like any mystery detective, tackles a perplexing problem in front of him, and the story of the present-day historian detective who uses historical sense-making concepts to make sense of the past for today’s readers. We conclude by providing suggestions for using history mysteries in the classroom and a list of recommended titles to investigate.

This column examines the concept of post-humanism and outlines some possibilities and cautions for how it might be integrated in literacy teaching, research, and policy.

This article invites readers to enter a New York City dual-language, second-grade classroom and see the power and possibilities of engaging in culturally relevant literacy teaching as an everyday practice.

In this candid interview, award-winning illustrator and author Bryan Collier shares thoughts and wisdom acquired throughout his artistic journey that began at the age of 15.

The 2016 Notable Children’s Books, unique in language and/or style, encourage readers to discover quality texts that linger long after the pages have been read.

Places can be powerful catalysts for writing, inviting us to explore and understand our individual and collective relationships with one another and the world.