Saavedra discusses how children in the borderlands can inform our language and literacy practices through the Latin American literary genre known as "testimonio." Drawing from the work of Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogy, I frame my "experiencias" with language and literacy in three different moments in my life. Through these…

Standards can aid educators as they work to produce strong student writers who can create meaningful and skillfully crafted authentic pieces of writing. This once-a-month, yearlong professional development program, conducted during the school day, shifted a district's kindergarten writing program to a writing workshop model that enabled the…

In this article, the authors explore a young child's lived experience of discipline and play with/in a mandated balanced literacy curriculum. Mandating balanced literacy presents an interesting case of disciplining literacy because it is rooted in the progressive tradition of meaning-and-process pedagogies. As such, it avoids the most obvious…

Argues that society's capacity to become more powerfully literate depends on its capacity to develop better ways to explain to and to show others what people do when they read and write. Offers ways in which schools and communities can help students go beyond current inadequate but deeply entrenched verbal constructs. (HTH)

Kindergarten teachers could help educators and researchers by creating opportunities and experiences in classroom settings to offer literacy learning. Children, however, learn literacy when immersed in classroom environments that support natural literacy experiences throughout the day.

Laments the lack of successful integration of current technological advances into American classrooms. Suggests that schools need to acknowledge the role, form, and function of the mass media in society, and that teachers should develop teaching strategies to help students cope with the iconic world in which they live. (SKC)

Describes a "literate occasion," when the death of a teacher's grandmother gave her fourth-grade students the chance to use their reading and writing skills for a purpose--to support their teacher. Emphasizes the importance of showing students the power of literacy in their lives and the lives of others. (MM)

Considers how nonfiction is the genre most likely to spur children's passion and wonder for learning. Describes how educators teach students that their best writing teachers are the authors they love, not the encyclopedias they need for beginning research. (SG)

Explores graphical, hypertextual, interactive elements of children's literature and compares them to the characteristics of writing taught in early elementary school. Finds mismatches between ways children are taught to write and the materials they are reading. Discusses finding places where early elementary writing instruction can be updated to…

Focuses on three books that tackle what it means to effectively organize classrooms for literacy instruction. Notes that these texts emphasize the role of teachers as researchers working in collaboration with one another and with university researchers. (SG)

Critical lessons that share a transactional view of early literacy development are synthesized. A transactional view of reading and writing means that literacy as a meaning construction process, and that within a given literacy event, both the text and the reader are changed.

Describes how students parallel the process of author Megan McDonald in conducting research and collecting information to provide ideas for the form and content of their writing. Notes that guiding students to record and organize information in a graphic format helps them to transfer those interesting details to new types of writing. (SG)

Focuses on the nature of elementary school classrooms as social contexts for literacy, particularly for writing. Explores the nature of the classroom as the context for literacy, how children come to understand such classroom contexts, and what defines a beneficial context for literacy growth. (HTH)

Asserts that the teacher's big desk serves as a metaphor for how teacher and students relate in a classroom. Observes that moving the teacher's desk from the center of the room to the periphery produces positive results with respect to children's literacy, language, and attitudes. (PRA)

Uses children's drawings about reading and writing to provide valuable insights into metalinguistic knowledge that children have about literacy, including their beliefs about self and others as language users and knowledge about the demands of different literacy events. Makes a case for children's art as a source of insight on the nature and…