As long as we have schools, teachers and students, educational policy mandates, with a one-size-fits all subtext will always ebb and flow. Schools however, will forever encounter diversity writ large--teachers and students, families, languages, cognitive and academic abilities, interests, etc. The policy decisions do not necessarily fit the…

This column explores how literacy practices similarly enacted across disciplines served as a platform for considering collaborative professional development contexts. With current educational policy, content area teachers are expected to include relevant literacy practices within their disciplinary instruction. Based on research across science and…

David Moore interviews Fenice Boyd, an associate professor and associate dean for teacher education in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Sociocultural theory informs her work with multicultural literature and its uses across the curriculum. She asks educators to consider opportunity…

Censorship is about restriction and control of intellectual development, and the danger when educators fail to investigate what censorship truly means--for example, by attaching it to metaphors with abundant entailments--is that people will merely "shrug off" the removal of books from libraries and classrooms and fail to see challenges of books as…

This article provides an overview of research about how teachers, parents, and others can help young people develop literacy practices for success in school and life beyond school. The authors, members of the International Reading Association's Commission on Adolescent Literacy, present the results of its review of the literature in the form of…

Describes the theoretical foundations, classroom context, and activities of a multicultural literature study (based on S. F. Staples'"Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind") in a ninth-grade English language arts classroom. Shares understanding and philosophy of multicultural literature and the merits for including it in classrooms as an integral part of…