Kathryn F. Whitmore

This text invites pre-service teachers to explore arts-informed practices that showcase the transformative potential of literature in the classroom. Through the lens of "stories-we-live-by," the authors recognize literature as interference, capable of disrupting the habitual patterns through which we interpret the world in order to reawaken the capacity of students and teachers alike to change. Chapters are designed to inspire students’ love of literature by fostering literary and artful encounters that provoke their thinking and sense-making. Each chapter includes engaging pedagogical features that spark thinking and analysis of literature and invite readers to further engagement. The appendices include directions for instruction as well as additional resources. An essential text for courses on children’s and adolescent literature and English methods, pre-service teachers will come away with plenty of text recommendations and arts- and social justice-informed practices to use with their future students. Through artful encounters with visual learning analyses, visual-verbal journals, drama, soundscapes, poetry, and so much more, readers examine their own transformative experiences with literature. Readers will learn to craft and curate practices that encourage engagement, imagination, experimentation, and self-awareness in and beyond the classroom.

This text invites pre-service teachers to explore arts-informed practices that showcase the transformative potential of literature in the classroom. Through the lens of "stories-we-live-by," the authors recognize literature as interference, capable of disrupting the habitual patterns through which we interpret the world in order to reawaken the capacity of students and teachers alike to change. Chapters are designed to inspire students’ love of literature by fostering literary and artful encounters that provoke their thinking and sense-making. Each chapter includes engaging pedagogical features that spark thinking and analysis of literature and invite readers to further engagement. The appendices include directions for instruction as well as additional resources. An essential text for courses on children’s and adolescent literature and English methods, pre-service teachers will come away with plenty of text recommendations and arts- and social justice-informed practices to use with their future students. Through artful encounters with visual learning analyses, visual-verbal journals, drama, soundscapes, poetry, and so much more, readers examine their own transformative experiences with literature. Readers will learn to craft and curate practices that encourage engagement, imagination, experimentation, and self-awareness in and beyond the classroom.

CO-PUBLISHED BY ROUTLEDGE AND THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISHBringing together arts-integrated approaches, literacy learning, and classroom-based research, this book explores ways upper elementary, middle, and high school teachers can engage their students physically, cognitively, and emotionally in deep reading of challenging texts. With a focus on teaching about the Holocaust and Anne Frank’s diary—part of the U. S. middle school literary canon—the authors present the concept of layering literacies as an essential means for conceptualizing how seeing the text, being the text, and feeling the text invite adolescents to learn about difficult and uncomfortable literature and subjects in relation to their contemporary lives. Offering a timely perspective on arts education advocacy, Chisholm and Whitmore demonstrate the vital need to teach through different modalities in order to strengthen students’ connections to literature, their schools, and communities. Accessible strategies are illustrated and resources are recommended for teachers to draw on as they design arts-based instruction for their students’ learning with challenging texts.

CO-PUBLISHED BY ROUTLEDGE AND THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISHBringing together arts-integrated approaches, literacy learning, and classroom-based research, this book explores ways upper elementary, middle, and high school teachers can engage their students physically, cognitively, and emotionally in deep reading of challenging texts. With a focus on teaching about the Holocaust and Anne Frank’s diary—part of the U. S. middle school literary canon—the authors present the concept of layering literacies as an essential means for conceptualizing how seeing the text, being the text, and feeling the text invite adolescents to learn about difficult and uncomfortable literature and subjects in relation to their contemporary lives. Offering a timely perspective on arts education advocacy, Chisholm and Whitmore demonstrate the vital need to teach through different modalities in order to strengthen students’ connections to literature, their schools, and communities. Accessible strategies are illustrated and resources are recommended for teachers to draw on as they design arts-based instruction for their students’ learning with challenging texts.

The goal of this book is to encourage educators and researchers to understand the complexities of adolescent gang members' lives in order to rethink their assumptions about these students in school. The particular objective is to situate four gang members as literate, caring students from loving families whose identities and literacy keep them on the margins of school. The research described in this book suggests that advocacy is a particularly effective form of critical ethnography. Smith and Whitmore argue that until schools, as communities of practice, enable children and adolescents to retain identities from the communities in which they are full community members, frightening numbers of students are destined to fail. The stories of four Mexican American male adolescents, who were active members of a gang and Smith's students in an alternative high school program, portray the complicated, multiple worlds in which these boys live. As sons and teenage parents they live in a family community; as CRIP members they live in a gang community; as "at risk" students, drop-outs, and graduates they live in a school community, and as a result of their illegal activities they live in the juvenile court community. The authors theorize about the boys' literacy in each of their communities. Literacy is viewed as ideological, related to power, and embedded in a sociocultural context. Vivid examples of conversation, art, tagging, rap, poetry, and other language and literacy events bring the narratives to life in figures and photographs in all the chapters. Readers will find this book engaging and readable, yet thought provoking and challenging. Audiences for Literacy and Advocacy in Adolescent Family, Gang, School, and Juvenile Court Communities include education researchers, professionals, and students in the areas of middle/high school education, at-risk adolescent psychology, and alternative community programs--specifically those interested in literacy education, sociocultural theory, and popular culture.

The goal of this book is to encourage educators and researchers to understand the complexities of adolescent gang members' lives in order to rethink their assumptions about these students in school. The particular objective is to situate four gang members as literate, caring students from loving families whose identities and literacy keep them on the margins of school. The research described in this book suggests that advocacy is a particularly effective form of critical ethnography. Smith and Whitmore argue that until schools, as communities of practice, enable children and adolescents to retain identities from the communities in which they are full community members, frightening numbers of students are destined to fail. The stories of four Mexican American male adolescents, who were active members of a gang and Smith's students in an alternative high school program, portray the complicated, multiple worlds in which these boys live. As sons and teenage parents they live in a family community; as CRIP members they live in a gang community; as "at risk" students, drop-outs, and graduates they live in a school community, and as a result of their illegal activities they live in the juvenile court community. The authors theorize about the boys' literacy in each of their communities. Literacy is viewed as ideological, related to power, and embedded in a sociocultural context. Vivid examples of conversation, art, tagging, rap, poetry, and other language and literacy events bring the narratives to life in figures and photographs in all the chapters. Readers will find this book engaging and readable, yet thought provoking and challenging. Audiences for Literacy and Advocacy in Adolescent Family, Gang, School, and Juvenile Court Communities include education researchers, professionals, and students in the areas of middle/high school education, at-risk adolescent psychology, and alternative community programs--specifically those interested in literacy education, sociocultural theory, and popular culture.