Discussions and practices focused on Black boys' literacy development and equity in U.S. classrooms require serious thought and interrogation if the aim is to move these boys toward advanced levels of reading, writing, intellectual development, and human development. Sorely, Black boys have become subjects of educational, programming, and policy…

Bradbury's central goal in this book is to challenge and redefine intellectualism in ways that recuperate and reinvigorate it as a meaningful concept. Bradbury diagnoses a common presumption in the popular American imaginary that equates intellectualism to academic success in elite institutions of higher education. This view of intellectualism, by…

This article explores how a Midwestern Christian university's doctoral program aligns an authentic assessment process of evaluation, in lieu of comprehensive exams, with the university's tag line to "Shape Lives that Shape the World." The process of assessing "authentically" comes from the belief that evaluating students on…

Several proposals for addressing religious literacy or including religious content in American public schools point to potential advantages for intellectual and moral development. These proposals include moral arguments, which suggest that religious literacy is an individual and social good. Although the proposals selected for this analysis span…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to work toward more fully conceptualizing literacy practices as social by theorizing the combined relational and intellectual context for learning. This context is created through students' and their teachers' uses of language. In particular, the quality of language that creates this intellectual relational…

Students are embedded in a stochastic world. Postmodern practitioners of fragmentation accept this, however they dispute Jungian and Eriksonian wholeness. The existential representation ego as a two-dimensional thing, the Kantian-, Jungian- I-formation is questioned. Similarly, Gardnerian frames of mind and MI are questioned as functional…

Conducted in an urban alternative education program for adolescents ages 17-21, this study provides an overview of a professional development program that sought to support teachers in developing unit plans that incorporated backwards design principles and culturally relevant and sustaining instruction. The authors offer a qualitative thematic…

Over the past two decades, two heavily funded initiatives of the Federal government of Australia have been founded on two very different and seemingly conflicting (if not antithetical) visions of education. The first, the Australian Values Education Program (AVEP, 2003-2010) enshrines what may be called an 'embedded values' vision of education;…

While previous research has examined outcomes related to academic rigor, mixed findings have resulted from differing conceptualizations of rigor as well as varying methodological approaches. Defining rigor as those in-class practices and assignments that require students to engage in deep learning and demonstrate cognitive complexity, we use…

Millions of Muslim children around the world participate in Qur'anic schooling. For some, this is their only formal schooling experience; others attend both Qur'anic school and secular school. Qur'anic schooling emphasizes memorization and reproduction (recitation, reading, and transcription) of Qur'anic texts without comprehension of their…

At a time when accusations of American ignorance and anti-intellectualism are ubiquitous, this article challenges problematic assumptions about intellectualism that overlook the work of adult basic literacy programs and proposes an expanded view of intellectualism. It is important to recognize and to challenge narrow views of intellectualism…

This article discusses how teachers in child care and elementary schools learn to work with Reggio-inspired pedagogical documentation. While teachers grasp the value of such documentation theoretically, it is most challenging but exciting to use in practical settings. Documentation illuminates teacher theories about children's understanding:…

In literacy education, neuroscience research has been alluded to increasingly in work meant to substantiate cognitive models of the reading process related to text decoding and its instruction. As a result, this material tends to focus on early reading or reading disability and dyslexia (e.g., Hudson, High, & Al Otaiba, 2007; Shaywitz, 2003). It…

There are many links between literacy and movement. Movement and language are both forms of communication and self-expression. Rhythm is an essential component of both language and movement. While people may think of rhythm primarily in musical terms, there is a rhythm to words and sentences as well. Individuals develop an internal rhythm when…

The use of literacy during non-school hours of three African-American families was examined. This study used a qualitative research design to probe the meanings and value of literacy in the homes of three African-American families during nonschool hours, including before school, after school, weekends, holidays, and summer breaks. The structure…