This article examines how Chicana/o and Latina/o youth employed their political-historical knowledge to "talk back" to the xenophobia and political contradictions that underlie the (im)migration "debate." A literacy unit that honed bilingual students' everyday translating created opportunities for students to utilize this political-historical…

In this article, the authors explore a young child's lived experience of discipline and play with/in a mandated balanced literacy curriculum. Mandating balanced literacy presents an interesting case of disciplining literacy because it is rooted in the progressive tradition of meaning-and-process pedagogies. As such, it avoids the most obvious…

Language arts education has experienced enormous growth and change with the advent of multimodalities in new media, digital literacies, and technologies. In this paper, Hagood uses Deleuze and Guattari's (1980/1987) theoretical work of a rhizome, rhizoanalysis, and rhizomatic cartography to view the field and examine differently converging…

This article seeks to restore a counter-narrative of discipline as distinct from punishment. Punishment is retribution for an offense, an exclusionary act by which students are removed from the opportunity to learn. It is harm inflicted by an external agent as a mechanism through which outside regulation becomes internalized subjectivity. Too…

Dutro discusses an analysis of the disconnect between the material realities of the lives of a group of third-grade children living in poverty and the middle-class assumptions of a district-mandated unit within a literacy curriculum. The analysis arose in the context of an ethnographic study of identity and classroom literacy practices; it was…

The controversial and complicated nature of the "N" word is examined in a multicultural classroom project. Utilizing both old and new literature, pop culture, historical lenses, and contemporary interpretations, the word proves extremely relevant in today's language arts classroom. By examining students' perceptions and experiences as well as the…

In U.S. schools, African American students are typically fed steady diets of stereotypical and culturally invasive literature and often do not see themselves positively and consistently represented in books. The crisis is fueled, in part, by teachers who (for various reasons) do not include and draw upon counter-narratives in their classrooms.…

Seidl and Conley elaborate a set of beliefs regarding transformative spaces, identity-making, and the development of a critical, multicultural identity that inform their approach to multicultural teacher education. They believe that if we expect new teachers to co-construct with their students classroom spaces that allow multiple voices and…

Strains on the global economy and an imminent recession in the U.S. offer a particularly ripe moment for educators to raise questions about educational reform, the world of schooling, and the kinds of literacy practices that will prepare students for their lives as citizens in a world structured through the social and economic relations of…

This article honors Karen Smith, who has been given NCTE's Outstanding Educator in the English Language Arts award for 2009. Through the voices of many colleagues and former students, the article celebrates Karen as a teacher, learner, mentor, collaborator, scholar, storyteller, and visionary thinker and doer.

Writing assessment is a contested site where competing discourses overlap and invoke conflicting expectations, creating dilemmas for teachers who want to do what they believe is best for children and fulfill their school's writing targets. A critical look at assessment quandaries reveals surface dilemmas as clashes between overlapping discourses,…

Traditionally, assessing student writing ability has often been product-focused. Advocates of child-centered process-oriented classrooms, however, suggest that teachers should also focus on understanding children's writing behaviors in the context of meaningful communicative tasks. In such an approach, writing conferences are one way in which…

There has been a resurgence of deficit discourses that implicate deficiencies in the language and culture of poor students as the cause of their academic failures. An influential study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley concludes that high levels of academic failure among poor children can be linked to the quantity and quality of language interactions…

This article demonstrates, through stories of Ohanian's teaching, journalism experience, and analysis of testing items and outcomes, that we have every right and obligation to challenge institutionalized norms that shape today's views of assessment practices.

This article highlights the importance of rethinking literacy assessment in a digital and global world. Although pressures currently abound to narrow conceptions and practices of literacy, especially in an era of high stakes testing, digital multimodality and connectivity offer the potential for new ways of thinking, representing, and…