The essays, research studies, and pedagogical examples in this book provide a window into the embodied dimensions of literacy and a toolbox for interpreting, building on, and inquiring into the range of ways people communicate and express themselves as literate beings. The contributors investigate and reflect on the complexities of embodied literacies, honoring literacy learners and teachers as they holistically engage with texts in complex sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. Considering these issues within a multiplicity of education spaces and literacy events inside and outside of institutional contexts, the book offers a fresh lens and rhetoric with which to address literacy education policies, giving readers a discursive repertoire necessary to develop and defend responsive curricula within an increasingly high-stakes, standardized schooling climate.

Whitmore and Meyer bring together top literacy scholars from around the world to introduce the concept of manifestations: evidence of meaning making in literacy events, practices, processes, products, and thinking. Manifestation are windows into literacy identities, and serve as affective and sociocultural signifiers of learners’ understanding at a point in time and in a specific context. The volume reclaims progressive spaces for understanding reading, writing, drawing, speaking, playing, and other literacies. It grounds manifestations of literacies in the discourse of meaning making and demonstrates how literacy learners and educators are active agents in this complex, social, political, emotional, and multimodal process. Ideal for preservice teachers, graduate students, and researchers in literacy education, this book shifts the conversation away from treating literacies as acquired commodities and illustrates how educators engage with learners to deepen understanding of literacy learners’ experiences. Organized by five pillars of literacy—teaching, learning, language, curriculum, and sociocultural contexts—each section covers critical and cutting-edge topics and offers examples, tools, and strategies for research and practical applications in diverse classroom settings. Each chapter includes a range of examples and is followed by a short, complementary reading extension to engage the reader.

The Handbook of Critical Literacies aims to answer the timely question: what are the social responsibilities of critical literacy academics, researchers, and teachers in today’s world? Critical literacies are classically understood as ways to interrogate texts and contexts to address injustices and they are an essential literacy practice. Organized into thematic and regional sections, this handbook provides substantive definitions of critical literacies across fields and geographies, surveys of critical literacy work in over 23 countries and regions, and overviews of research, practice, and conceptual connections to established and emerging theoretical frameworks. The chapters on global critical literacy practices include research on language acquisition, the teaching of literature and English language arts, Youth Participatory Action Research, environmental justice movements, and more. This pivotal handbook enables new and established researchers to position their studies within highly relevant directions in the field and engage, organize, disrupt, and build as we work for more sustainable social and material relations. A groundbreaking text, this handbook is a definitive resource and an essential companion for students, researchers, and scholars in the field.

This book examines how children’s bodies are trained in time and space to produce schooled, literate individuals. Moving from theory to practice, examples of real classroom events show how teachers’ practices direct discipline onto children’s bodies.

Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently attends to pressing questions in literacy education, such as the poor quality of many children’s experiences as readers, routine disregard for their thinking and the degrading impact of narrow skills measurement and comparison. This cutting-edge book moves beyond social, psychological and scientific categories that focus on individualistic and linear notions of the knowing subject; of progress and development; and of child as less than fully human. It adopts a posthumanist framework to explore new perspectives for teaching, learning and research. Authors from diverse disciplines and continents have collaborated to interrogate the colonising characteristics of humanism and to imagine a different – more just - reading of a literacy classroom. Questions of de/colonisation are tackled through the exploration of both education and research practices that seek to de-centre the human and include the more than human. Inspired by an example of high quality children’s literature, playful philosophical teaching and the power of the material, the authors show how the chapters diffract with one another, thereby opening up radical possibilities for a different doing of childhood. The book hopes to help transform adult-child relationships in schools and universities. As such, it should be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of literacy, philosophy, law, education, the wider social sciences, the arts, health sciences and architecture. It should also be essential reading for teacher educators and practitioners around the world.

This book presents a new vision of literacy that frames meaning-making and communication in relation to individual, collective, and ecological needs. Building on the concept of the pluriversal, Perry explores how literacy education can support multiple ways of being and becoming. In so doing, Perry rejects limiting and skills-focused definitions of literacy and instead embraces a more profound conceptualisation that reflects the boundless potential of literacy practices. Bringing together research from the Global North and South, Perry connects literacy education with semiotics, philosophy, sustainability studies, and geopolitics to argue for the urgency of a pluriversal model of literacy that combats a normative, neo-colonial understanding of reading and writing. Offering a unique contribution to the field of literacy studies, this book demonstrates how literacy is a semiotic process and literacy practices can connect learner needs with pathways to social, ecological, and cultural sustainability. With Perry as a guide, this illuminating book invites readers to join the journey into literacies beyond words, to arrive at a more holistic and inclusive understanding of what literacy practices are and can be.

Bridging the world of reading instruction and applied cognitive neuroscience, this book presents research-backed reading instructional methods and explains how they can be understood through the lens of brain processes. Dispelling myths about neuroscience, Spence and Mitra explore how brain-based research informs literacy research in a way that is clear and accessible to pre-service teachers. Chapters address theories of reading, social-emotional learning, phonological processes, embodiment, multilingualism, reading comprehension, and more. Featuring examples of instruction and consistent "Did you know?" and "Food for thought" sections, readers will come away with a greater understanding of the reading brain and how neuroscience can facilitate effective instruction. Delving into the extent to which neuroscience can underpin reading research, this text is ideal for pre-service teachers, educators, and students in the fields of language arts and literacy, as well as cognitive neuroscience.

The essays, research studies, and pedagogical examples in this book provide a window into the embodied dimensions of literacy and a toolbox for interpreting, building on, and inquiring into the range of ways people communicate and express themselves as literate beings. The contributors investigate and reflect on the complexities of embodied literacies, honoring literacy learners and teachers as they holistically engage with texts in complex sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. Considering these issues within a multiplicity of education spaces and literacy events inside and outside of institutional contexts, the book offers a fresh lens and rhetoric with which to address literacy education policies, giving readers a discursive repertoire necessary to develop and defend responsive curricula within an increasingly high-stakes, standardized schooling climate.

Centered around the idea that literacy teaching is more than the transmission of strategies and skills, this volume serves as a foundation for approaching literacy from an identity perspective. Through incisive and accessible chapters from top scholars, it introduces readers to the concept of literate identities, examining them across ages and grade levels to present an overview of how scholars and educators can use this concept in their research and teaching. Organized by developmental level with sections on early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, and cross-age research, contributors reveal how literacy can be framed as an identity practice to engage students and support their development. Applying a range of theoretical perspectives and frameworks, each chapter identifies the identity theory used, explains the relevant methodology and research questions, covers implications for practice, and includes questions or prompts for discussion. The volume reveals how understanding literate identities is at the heart of effective and inclusive literacy instruction by addressing key topics, including culturally relevant pedagogy, intersectionality, and transnationalism, among others. Illuminating multiple pathways to understanding students as readers and writers, this book is essential for teachers, scholars, and researchers in literacy education, research methods, and multicultural education.