This timely book focuses on different social justice pedagogies and how they can work within standards and district mandates in a variety of English language arts classrooms. With detailed analysis and authentic classroom vignettes, the author explores how teachers cultivate relationships for equity, utilize transformative language practices, demonstrate critical caring, and develop students’ critical literacies with traditional and critical content. Boyd offers a comprehensive model for taking social action with youth that also considers the obstacles teachers are likely to encounter. Presenting the case for more equity-oriented teaching, this rich resource examines the benefits of engaging students with critical pedagogies and provides concrete methods for doing so. Written for both pre- and inservice teachers, the text includes adaptable teaching models and tested ideas for preparing to teach for social justice. “This is an appealing vision for the future, for it bears much promise—for our classrooms, and also for the future our students will both shape and inhabit.” —From the Foreword by Deborah Appleman, Carleton College “Through the careful observation and analysis of three teachers with different approaches to teaching critical literacy, Ashley Boyd provides a repertoire of practices rich with detail.” —Hilary Janks, Wits University, South Africa “This important book counters the belief of so many teacher educators who think that social justice asks too much of teachers.” —George W. Noblit, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The first edition of Acts of Resistance: Subversive Teaching in the English Language Arts (ELA) Classroom won the 2021 Society of Professors of Education's Outstanding Book Award and garnered other nominations. The second edition includes a foreword by Ashley Hope Pérez, author of the young adult literature novel Out of Darkness, one of the most frequently banned books across U.S. classrooms. Four new chapters reflect sociopolitical changes since the book's publication, including a widespread, coordinated uptick in the banning of books centering authors and characters from marginalized communities; the COVID-19 pandemic and with it, increased acts of violence against folks identifying as Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander; the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other victims of police brutality; the January 6th insurrection; the closing of the Trump era; the passing of anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation; and a "school choice" movement that defunds public schools, deprofessionalizes educators, and places democracy in peril. Chapters specifically illustrate the storied practices of subversive teachers across the 6-12 ELA context. They provide educators with instructional ideas on how to do anti-oppressive work while also meeting traditional ELA disciplinary elements.

Elementary-aged children are often positioned as not developmentally ready to learn about race, racism, and injustice. Yet, the classroom materials used in most schools misrepresent history, withhold knowledge about racial injustice, or fail to uplift stories of resilience and resistance. For almost a decade, this groundbreaking resource has been one of the most highly used textbooks in justice-oriented social studies methods courses for grades 3–8. The author has thoroughly revised her bestseller to provide additional lessons that are more deeply situated within the current context of converging pandemics—COVID-19, racism, and impending environmental catastrophe. Grounded in the daily realities of public schools, Agarwal-Rangnath shows teachers how to use primary and other sources that will offer students new ways of thinking about history while meeting language arts standards for information text proficiency and critical thinking. Educators will also learn how to teach language arts and social studies as complementary subjects. New for the Second Edition: More concrete connections between theory and practice.Additional lesson examples that are centered in today’s context of converging pandemics.Reflection questions that challenge readers to think about ways to navigate curricular constraints and standardization in the classroom.

This book articulates an understanding of what is meant by the term social justice from a global perspective, drawing upon examples of practice from across a range of English for academic purposes (EAP) and English language teaching (ELT) higher education contexts. Presently, within western higher educational systems, there is a drive for greater integration of approaches that lend themselves to social justice. However, questions still remain about what that means in practice. This book seeks to answer that not by telling but by showing. It presents a series of chapters that act as vignettes into a diverse set of classrooms, contexts and countries, offering examples of how and where an epistemology of social justice has been put into practice in teaching and learning situations. Such situations range from cross-continental higher educational partnerships between east and west to instances of EAP practitioners' work with refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. These examples are threaded together by the common goal of understanding what it is that defines an enactment of social justice and what the shared denominators are across these contexts. Through looking at these various examples, the authors produce a set of codes and themes that are common to practice across contexts and discuss how these might help inform practice in other areas of language education, higher education and educational development work in general.

Critical Literacy as Resistance is a collaborate effort among secondary and university educators from across the United States that addresses questions such as: What does a critical literacy classroom look like? What various texts are used? What strategies do teachers use to encourage students and teacher candidates to recognize how texts construct power and privilege? How do educators inspire activism in and out of the classroom? This book documents the experiences of scholars and teachers who have successfully bridged theory and practice by applying critical literacy into their respective content areas. The authors spell out the difference between critical thinking and critical literacy, then show how to write and implement curriculum that incorporates diverse texts and multiple literacies in all content areas (including world language), and includes the voices of students as they confront issues of race, class, gender, and power. The principles and practices laid out here will help teachers use literacy to liberate and empower students both in and outside the classroom by respecting and studying the literacies students bring to school, while simultaneously teaching (and challenging) the literacies of those in power. This is a book for pre- and in-service teachers in all content areas, staff developers, secondary literacy specialists, university professors, and anyone interested in social justice.

This book illustrates how teachers can draw upon young adult literature to facilitate students’ social action. Each chapter centers on one novel that represents a contemporary topic including police brutality, women’s rights, ecojustice, and bullying. In each, authors provide pre-, during-, and after reading strategies for teaching that connect the social issues in the texts to students’ lives and to the world around them. They then offer a multitude of avenues for student action, emphasizing the need to move readers from understanding and awareness to asserting their own agency and capacities to effect change in their local, national, and global communities. In addition to methods for scaffolding students’ analysis of texts and topics, authors also offer a plethora of additional resources such as documentaries, canonical companions for study, connected music, and supplementary lesson plans.

The urgency to create equity in schools has never been greater, especially since legislators are considering the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind as a means to eliminating the achievement gap. Studies continue to show that increased standards, testing, and accountability have simply maintained the status quo. In response, this book proposes alternative ways of addressing these educational inequities, taking an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complex historical, social, and global issues that stand in the way of ensuring that all students have access to literacy - issues that policy makers and educators can no longer ignore. Literacy as a Civil Right assembles an impressive group of essays that broaden the conversation taking place about school reform, unmasking an ideology that maintains unequal relations of power in school and society. The ideas presented here will help readers re-imagine success in schools by understanding the possibilities that grow from a democratic vision of education. Together, this book provides an alternative framework to increased testing, offering a more humane vision of education that values agency, rigor, civic responsibility, and democracy.

Social justice language teacher education conceptualizes language teacher education as responding to social and societal inequities that result in unequal access to educational and life opportunities. In this volume authors articulate a global view of Social Justice Language Teacher Education, with authors from 7 countries offering a theorized account of their situated practices.

Students in public schools serving poor and working-class students are inundated by the effects of high-stakes examinations. Teachers are demoralized and students suffer substandard curricular and pedagogical experiences. These effects are articulated by students and teachers in the high school that provided the setting for the critical ethnography on which this text is based. Teachers resent being judged on the basis of students’ performance on standardized assessments. They are deprofessionalized as their roles are oriented toward working-class norms. Students feel alienated by content that is meaningless and test-based pedagogies that are disempowering. While these findings are disturbing, critical theory provides a foundation for seeking hope. By incorporating inquiry and dialogue, this theoretical framework opens a space where resistance can be revealed and examined. In this case, the study exposed glimmers of resistance, spaces in the structure of schooling where students and teachers critique the system and suggest ways of subverting the negative effects of the neoliberal reforms through dialogic, empowering, culturally responsive pedagogies. Collective resistance, achieved through dialogic pedagogies that build on understandings of resistance and power, can cultivate theoretical and material spaces where a cycle of praxis can enhance possibilities for social justice. To that end, the conclusion is devoted to the implementation of critical, dialogic approaches to literacies, approaches intended to interrupt the hegemonic influences that perpetuate social reproduction by capitalizing on the potential for solidarity and collective agency among the students and teachers who populate and educate the working classes. This book would interest teacher educators, teachers, and school administrators.

Shows how full literacy can be achieved for minority language communities and brings together examples of good practice and recent research.