Information literacy is becoming more prominent in K-12 education and continues to be a vital part of university-level studies. In today's complex society, it's not enough to be able to read, write, and do math. People continuously need to identify and recognize their information needs, locate necessary resources, use the essential information…

Teaching for economic justice can be challenging for upper elementary and middle school teachers. Many teachers may feel uncomfortable with the subject matter and thus avoid addressing sensitive social issues related to economic/financial inequities. This article describes how selected songs and works of visual art, expressions of social protest…

Online conversations help teachers engage in constructive criticism and attend more carefully to aligning lesson plans with problem solving. This article describes a strategy for using an online discussion board to help teachers evaluate one another's lesson plans. The online peer-review activity suggests that fostering critical pedagogical…

Community schools and other approaches to Alternative Primary Education or APE have increased access to primary education for underserved populations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as a major goal of the Education for All (EFA) movement. In Zambia, a country where an estimated 20 percent of the basic education enrollment now attends community…

Many teachers want to incorporate critical literacy into their instruction but are unsure of where to start. In this article, the authors pair Jones's (2006) three tenets of critical literacy (deconstruction, reconstruction, and social action) with books that highlight multiple perspectives. By combining this critical literacy framework with…

Both national and international evaluation studies have criticised Norwegian teachers for not being sufficiently specific and learning-oriented in their feedback practice. The feedback is largely characterised by general comments such as "Excellent" and "Good work", and less by feed-forward-oriented messages informing students…

This teacher research inquiry is a critical discourse analysis of second grade classroom talk about racial identity and dialect difference within the theoretical framework of moral philosophy. Participants in the study, which took place in an urban public district in a Midwestern United States city, included ten African American students and a…

This anthology places art at the center of meaningful urban education reform. Providing a fresh perspective on urban education, the contributors describe a positive, asset-based community development model designed to tap into the teaching/learning potential already available in urban cities. Rather than focusing on a lack of resources, this…

Background: Disorders in the acquisition of morphological agreement phenomena, e.g. case marking, are characteristic of German children with specific language impairment (SLI). Although the success of individual therapy has already been documented, there are general doubts about the success of grammar facilitation in the classroom. Aims: To…

This article presents a detailed case study analysis of oral and written language expressed by Jacqueline Meyer, a teacher of elementary English Language Learners (ELL),as she struggled to navigate the current political terrain with her students. Ms. Meyer's district adopted commercial materials and increased the amount and substance of testing…

After 2 years of progress, the literacy initiative at Donaldson Elementary faces challenges because of a disagreement between Principal Joanna Jackson and Literacy Coordinator Loretta Sullivan over whether Sullivan's role should include evaluative classroom observations and whether teachers should be mandated to receive coaching. The case is…

Parent involvement may have implications for student achievement (Epstein, 1986; Hoover-Dempsey, Bassler, & Brisse, 1987; Lopez, Scribner, & Mahitivanichcha, 2001). Today African-American parents are frequently criticized for not being involved enough in their students' education (Dearing, Kreider, Simpkins, & Weiss, 2006). African-American parent…

We explore the nature of knowledge and education and how Islamic traditions have shaped understanding of these matters. We contrast this with contemporary images of "Taliban-like" schools full of rote repetition and harsh, authoritarian literalism. Some of the history of Islamic scholarship venerates a much more generous relationship to…

An economics-driven discourse about early literacy (Trudell, 2009) in sub-Saharan African settings often includes a list of reasons for poor levels of literacy that remain mired in deficit thinking or a deficiencies model in which the problem lies within the non-literate people themselves. Meanwhile, the established post-colonial educational…

This article examines the effect of a teacher's cultural representations and tacit communicative style on interactive practices in the classroom. We compare two second-grade classrooms constituted predominantly by Latino immigrant children and teachers with differing cultural representations of education. Through video and acoustic analyses of…