This article honors Kathy G. Short, who has been awarded NCTE's Outstanding Educator in the English Language Arts award for 2011. Kathy's scholarly achievements as a lifelong inquirer, teacher, and mentor are featured in this article, celebrating her national and international influence in the field of literacy education. (Contains 1 figure.)

NCLB and Reading First are negotiated in implementing beginning reading instruction. The article describes and analyzes how two critical conditions for creating opportunity--access to qualified teachers and rigorous academic curriculum--are met by examining the enactment and adaptation of a prescriptive core reading program disproportionately…

Considerable research indicates that high-stakes accountability policies have the capacity to influence language arts instruction, particularly in urban, high-needs schools where pressure to increase test scores tends to be most acute. This article utilizes Cultural Historical Activity Theory to critically examine the constraints and affordances…

Randy Bomer and Beth Maloch take a look at the Common Core Standards and the ways they are presently shaping the curriculum offered to young children in school. They suggest that the Common Core Standards in early literacy and early childhood classrooms represents a restricted image of college or academic literacy. Mainly, the standards' authors…

Don Graves died Tuesday, September 28, 2010. In the early 1980s, Don blew open the door to teaching children to write. His qualitative research and subsequent 26 books transformed the teaching of writing in elementary schools. He showed how much could be learned by the simple, powerful strategy of sitting beside children and asking them about…

Donald Graves's early professional books inspired Koshewa to look more deeply into student writing during the 1980s, and to value all phases of the writing process. Graves's perspective on uncovering and celebrating voice elevated Koshewa's writing instruction to a new plane. In this article, he writes about the impact that Donald Graves's work…

In this article, we look closely at the way power circulates through school routines with ordinary texts in everyday moments. We address texts that support different types of achievement and how critical literacy helps us redefine achievement and examine what we're doing with texts and students in classrooms. We interrogate the notion of…

This article explores how a first grade class re-defines what constitutes writing achievement. The young children's authoring practices upended notions of writing as the individual production of "model" texts with predetermined features, as was emphasized in curricular guidelines and high-stakes assessments, and of writing as disembedded from…

Low-income male students of color are among the populations experiencing the least amount of success in the current arrangements of school, described by some as part of the "the boy crisis" in education. This article draws on a year long ethnographic study of a single-sex, all-male classroom in a public middle school. It explores their experiences…

In this research, two questions related to arts integration are studied: First, the extent to which sixth and seventh grade students' language arts and mathematics performance, as well as their engagement with school are positively impacted by classroom settings in which theater strategies are integrated into language arts instruction; and second,…

The default image to which many ELA standards adhere lacks the complexity and sensitivity to account for the diverse range of students that occupy ELA classrooms. For young Black men, such standards poise a unique threat as they fail to reflect the social and cultural dimensions that factor into Black male literacy practices. In so doing, Kirkland…

This article examines how five teachers, who participated in a national program, supported and sustained collaborative teacher inquiry as a means for addressing inequities in their classrooms and schools. Their efforts illustrate both the possibilities and challenges that emerge as teachers interact, analyze data together, and write about…

This article reports on the meaning potential of daily access to drawing/writing media for widening and deepening meaning construction. In a yearlong study in a second grade classroom, the author worked with a second-year teacher to see what would happen when art and language were encouraged ways of knowing in which children could construct…

This piece shares preservice teachers and instructors reflections on their perceptions of a course on Spanish language arts methods in Puerto Rico. The course was redesigned to focus on interrelated curricular and pedagogical aspects such as literacies as situated social practice, funds of knowledge, popular culture and critical literacy. In…

In this article we share our current thinking about the methodology of collaborations for change and make visible our own attempts to theorize the practice of university-school partnering. We suggest that a fruitful new direction for research may involve turning to the Global South and the Latin American idea of horizontalidad [horizontalism],…