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Considering Butcher et al.'s (2011) call to create more transformational school-university partnerships that are truly collaborative and mutually beneficial, the purpose of this study was to document classroom teachers' perceptions of their partnership with a large, research intensive university. Utilizing survey methodology, 156 teachers across four partnership schools described their understanding of the relationship and the perception of the benefits to their school and classroom. Overwhelmingly, participants recognized the partnership as beneficial but described the relationship as transactional. Findings suggest that both partners receive benefits, but efforts to effect change through shared goals and collaboration are not a primary focus. Transformational partnerships provide the structure for sustainability and impact that is needed to support the idea of a mutually beneficial partnership.

In this article, we utilize the Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model (TIPM) to analyze interviews from beginning teachers and teacher candidates in early childhood education who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC). Findings revealed that participants developed a degree of consciousness to name the settler-colonial constructs that impacted their practice, but their understanding was not enough to overcome such conditions. We conclude with recommendations to support teachers enacting transformational praxis by generating opportunities to collectively develop antidotes to contexts of standardization.

The dynamic constellation of language, language varieties, and ways with words our children and youth possess continues to thrive. Indeed, a multilingual reality has always persisted outside of school and [...]

In this article, we unpack our interracial research relationship over the course of 2 years and how the Afrocentric pedagogy of eldering evolved as we grew our relationship into one of mutual mentorship, from professor and student to co-researchers, co-teachers, and friends. This shifting of roles contributed to our sense of communal responsibility as our dialogue about race and our racial identities evolved from surface-level conversations to open conversations that explored our biases, assumptions, identities, and then moved that work to conversations and curriculum with children.

Asset‐based and relational pedagogies highlight the centrality of meaningful relationships and authenticity in teaching and learning. Foregrounding children's lived experiences, interests, and ways of knowing provides a focus for teachers to be responsive, both relationally and pedagogically. Writing workshop, as conceived in the 1980's by Donald Graves and Lucy Calkins, is a longstanding curricular structure that encourages young writers to engage with multiple tools and resources, including peers, as they compose. Through writing conferences and authors’ chairs, young writers attend to the practice of composing on paper/screen as well as how their message may be received. This study analyzes children's writing samples to underscore the presence of (a) writing identity, (b) critical literacy, (c) culturally sustaining pedagogy, (d) translanguaging, and (e) intertextuality. Chilldren's interactions with tools, peers, and others provide fertile ground for understanding the critical role of a humanizing and relational approach to teaching and learning. The following questions guide this study: (1) How is a writing realities framework reflected in young children's compositions? (2) What do children's writing artifacts reveal about relationality? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors share how culturally relevant photographs reflecting children's lives and communities were curated and integrated into the literacy curriculum.

Multilingual students can thrive as multilingual writers when teachers create rich, meaningful contexts. The authors argue that teachers should use Brian Cambourne's seven conditions for learning as a guide: immersion, demonstration, approximation, engagement, expectation, responsibility, employment (use), and response.

This qualitative study foregrounded four teacher educators' perceptions of teaching collaboratively at shared school sites over the span of two years. As we reconvened to reflect on our experiences both individually and collectively, we retrospectively examined the affordances and challenges from this shared experience. Our data collection was guided by Pinar's method of currere which involves four "steps or moments that are temporal and reflective." These moments are "the regressive'' as past experiences are revisited; "the progressive" as the future was anticipated; "the analytic" to seek understanding of the past and future together; and finally, "the synthetical" to mobilize for action based upon these understandings. In considering the demands of university/school partnership work, methodologies such as currere, an autobiographical curriculum theory and method to support a context for reflection, is one that is rarely afforded due to the demands of higher education in general, and in field-based teacher education in particular. In analyzing these reflective interviews, we began to make sense of how these relationships shaped our perspectives of the past and led us to understand our present. Findings suggest that collaborative teaching created a third space that transformed our relationships with our teaching partners, enhanced our relationships with our students, and informed curricular revisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study examined what teacher candidates learned in a field-based mediated Language Arts methods course, intentionally designed to support teacher candidates in learning what is possible rather than typical, in an urban school setting where curriculum is often prescriptive rather than generative. Culturally sustaining pedagogies provided a powerful and important framework for curriculum and inquiry; these pedagogies guided this preservice teacher education course. Findings from this study indicate that this mediated experience served as an initial foray into recognizing and unpacking teacher candidates' deficit perspectives related to race and class-based assumptions about children and their families, and about the community in which they lived. In addition, teacher candidates began to understand the nuanced and intentional moves teachers must make to affect student learning.

This study examined the potential role of critical reflection as a tool to support pre-service early childhood teacher interns in understanding and questioning pedagogical choices witnessed in their preschool internships while developing their own socially responsible teaching capacity. This study contributes to the field of critical reflection in teacher education by emphasizing an analysis of power, using Patricia Hill Collins' matrices of power to understand the complexities of systemic injustices and identify potential solutions. The authors conducted an analysis of students' critical reflections, which were completed weekly during their quarter-long preschool internship. The authors found that a critical analytic lens, using power, created intentional space to pause and expand interpretations of unequal and inequitable dynamics within the students' preschool internship experiences, and had the potential to impact their subsequent pedagogical decisions. These findings hold the possibility for teacher preparation programs to bolster students' reflective praxis and seed justice-oriented possibilities in early childhood education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research and teaching resources are replete with ideas for creating a more culturally responsive and critical curricula (Allen, 2010; Bomer & Bomer, 2001; Lewison, Leland, & Harste, 2008). Many have suggested that by offering a curriculum that is authentic and meaningful to children, real differences will be made in teaching and learning. In this article, findings are shared when elementary teachers in two schools in the southeastern region of the United Sates implemented a study that integrated poetry with issues related to social justice. Data collected included students' writing, interviews, and classroom observations. Analyses of students' poems and interviews revealed that their compositions and ideas reflected the 4 dimensions of critical literacy identified by Lewison, Flint, and Van Sluys (2002). Through a writing workshop poetry study, the teachers began to reposition children and curriculum, and in the process, built interest in navigating the terrain of more critical approaches to literacy instruction.

This qualitative study examines what early childhood preservice teachers enrolled in a field-based literacy methods course deemed relevant regarding teaching, literacy, and learning. This study is based on postcourse interviews with 7 early childhood preservice teachers. Findings suggest that "contextualized field experiences" facilitate preservice teachers' development of "noticing and naming" as a social practice. Early childhood preservice teachers developed understandings regarding early literacy learning, teaching, and the nuanced but powerful ways learning and identity are linked to early childhood literacy learning. Implications include the need for more contextualized learning experiences in early childhood teacher education.

This article draws upon five different empirical studies to examine how critical dialogue can be fostered across educational settings and with diverse populations: middle-school students discussing immigration picture books, a teacher study group exploring texts on homelessness, a teacher education class studying critical literacy, working class adults in a culture circle in Brazil interrogating systems of poverty, and teens in youth organizations discussing their photo-essays that challenge negative stereotypes of youth. In this paper, we analyze discursive practices that fostered critical dialogue across these settings. In doing so, we seek to describe practices that can support practitioners as they facilitate critical dialogue with learners and one another in order to become more critically engaged participants in their own communities. (Contains 2 tables.)

Over the past 30 years, writing workshops have been implemented in classrooms around the world. Students are being asked to write across multiple contexts and genres and to use digital technologies. At the same time, high-stakes writing tests are increasing even though the time teachers spend teaching writing is decreasing. This study examines academically tracked 4th-graders' first-time engagement with a writing workshop structure and the functions of students' talk within this curricular venue. During writing conferences, author celebrations, and author sharing, talk functioned as a tool for creating a shared learning space, developing meta-awareness of processes and practices, and building writing identities. These functions of talk have implications for the teaching of writing, in general, and for teaching writing in the intermediate grades, in particular, given that most states have a high-stakes writing test in 4th grade.

In this article, three educators share case studies describing racial biases and segregationist practices in early schooling. The authors draw upon critical race theory as a lens and employ critical discourse analysis to uncover classed and raced biases within and across three early childhood contexts. While the cases are situated in specific public school settings--a parent teacher association (PTA) fundraiser, a mandated literacy program, and a read-aloud--they shed light onto a variety of contexts as these are all common phenomena in many American elementary schools. Together, the cases illustrate how racism has been normalized through familiar practices in early childhood settings. Through description and reflection, the authors suggest ways to start seeing the strange in the familiar, unpacking racialized practices across three settings, and advocating new ways of thinking about these common practices leading to change and transformation. (Contains 1 figure and 1 note.)

Most new English language learners spend their school days in monolingual teachers' classrooms. This study examines the writing practices taken on and negotiated by multilingual class members within two multiage elementary classrooms. This article details the writing practices enacted and constructed in the daily writing lives of elementary writing communities and how multilingual students extended and transformed their learning community's existing literacy practices. Situating multilingual students as valued classroom community members opens up possibilities for students to engage with their new communities, draw upon their linguistic resources, and craft possible futures as multilingual people. (Contains 7 figures.)

Literacy educators are troubled by the isolated nature of many contemporary reading programs. Too often in middle school classrooms, students read alone, take computerized tests, and do not engage in authentic dialogue with peers. In this article, the authors argue that reading texts individually, while necessary, is not sufficient, and through engaged discussions, students have opportunities to gain new and deeper understandings of texts. Through close examination, the authors explore the meanings young adolescents constructed as they engaged in a literature discussion. They highlight the positions students took in their talk, how they furthered each other's understandings of one another and the text, and how these understandings guided the students' critical analysis of the literature.

Many approaches to literacy instruction treat language as an object of study. The curricular assumptions that inform such instruction are that language is located outside the person, extracted from context, neutral, and explicable through defined rules. An underlying assumption in many language arts classrooms is that children will not pay attention to the parts of language without direct instruction. In this article, the authors examine how children in a first- through third-grade and a fourth- through sixth-grade classroom used written conversations as a communicative forum to explore writing and their surrounding social worlds. Through written conversations, children explored grammatical features of texts, genres, spelling, and language. Children also used written conversations as a forum to explore cultural identity, linguistic resources, and gain cultural capital within peer worlds. Findings from this study suggest the need for classroom curricular structures that encourage inquiry into language and learning. (Contains 1 table and 5 figures.)

This article examines the curricular possibilities within critical inquiry-based primary classrooms. The children in this first through third grade multi-age, multi-lingual classroom participated in a two-year critical and collaborative inquiry around issues of segregation and the Jim Crow laws. A touchstone text, Freedom Summer (Wiles, 2001) and a critical reading strategy (Christensen, 2004) offered students opportunities to interrogate the cultural models that underpin the picture book, their interpretations of the book, and their social worlds. Findings from this study indicate that pivotal moments are key to learning and that read-aloud events go beyond community building. The study also examines the use of touchstone texts and positions critical reading strategies as tools for thinking. The findings from this article contribute to the growing body of research demonstrating the engagement of very young children in critical literacy and inquiry. The author discusses children's talk during interactive read-aloud, children's talk during small-group work, and children's talk during an individual presentation. (Contains 3 figures.)

Karen Hesse. (2001). Scholastic Press (555 Broadway, New York, NY 10012, USA). 161 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 0-439-27199-1. US$16.95. Witness haunts the reader with its poetically stark verse and multiple voices. [...]

The article presents an introduction to the column wherein the educators presents the book reviews and share resources for literature which enlightens children interested in arts.

The article introduces three books that analyze the interplay between local and global structures, processes, and relations that give rise to different forms of literacy across the globe, as well as redefining literacy as a practice of voice and citizenship rather than a technical skill.

An introduction to a series of articles that review several books is presented including "Change Is Gonna Come: Transforming Literacy Education for African American Students," by Patricia A. Edwards, Gwendolyn, Thompson McMillon, and Jennifer D. Turner, "Writing: Teachers and Children at Work," by Donald H. Graves, and "A Fresh Look at Writing," by Donald H. Graves.