Bücher veröffentlicht von National Council of Teachers of English

Cross-Talk in Comp Theory is a collection of pivotal texts that mark the rebirth of a field, composition studies, beginning with the rise of the process movement. It has been thrice revised to account for shortfalls and changing conversations. The second edition paid increased attention to the significance of gender, the rise in voices of people of color, and the move toward technology. The third edition deepened the conversation on technology and multimodal composing, while keeping most of what had been successful in prior editions of the collection.In this latest edition, we recognize that discussions of discourse have become commonplace. Meanwhile, issues of social justice-who we teach, how we teach, and who "we" are-have become much more prescient in our composition classrooms, as elsewhere. And, as technology evolves, so too do our discussions of the role of technology and multimodality in our classrooms. This important text:Maintains the historical perspective of previous editions;Provides critical insights into the ever-changing discipline of composition studies; andCenters composition scholars and instructors on the challenges and opportunities brought about by changes in today's students and world.Whether you're new to teaching composition or a long-time composition instructor, evolving alongside a rapidly changing field requires awareness of where the field has been, where it stands, and where it's going, to be of sound service to today's composition students.

This book is written for K-5 educators who are interested in cultivating young writers by designing and facilitating writing instruction that begins with the resources that students bring to the classrooms from their families, homes, and communities. This kind of asset-based and individualized instruction is designed to meet the unique writing needs of each young writer. K-5 educators teaching in shifting contexts encounter an array of challenges daily, from restrictive language policies and mandates to heightened accountability measures that often dictate the design of their writing time and instruction. This book focuses on elementary school teachers working with young writers in varying educational contexts, including dual language, bilingual, and English Only contexts, and in particular students who come from culturally and linguistically diverse settings. Part of the Principles in Practice series. Part of the Principles in Practice series, this book also includes a robust list of resources for writing teachers, as well as helpful insights for:Getting multilingual students writing beyond the classroom wallsDesigning a writing community that works for all your learnersUsing writing conferences as a social practiceInviting the use of all linguistic, cultural, and experiential resources

The digital era presents countless opportunities to read, write, and interpret young adult literature through a contemporary lens. Building upon NCTE's 2018 Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children's and Young Adult Literature position statement, the authors of this book spotlight how teachers and students can use digital tools and technologies to re-read, re-write, and restory young adult literature today. This book offers:Teaching approaches to integrate shifts in textuality in the ELA classroom;Helpful resources for using participatory digital networks in classrooms; andStrategies for restorying text selection with an eye toward multimodality, digital access, cultural diversity, and social justice.The authors propose digital young adult literature and digital young adult culture as conceptual tools from which teachers can learn effective digital restorying practices. The result is young adult literature instruction that is more engaging and just.

This collection of activities for the composition classroom includes dozens of practical, useful, successful, and accessible exercises that have been developed and implemented by writing instructors from all over the country. Editors Michal Reznizki and David T. Coad have assembled a collection of tried-and-proven teaching activities to help both novice and experienced teachers plan, prepare, and implement writing instruction in college. As two educators who have been teaching writing in the field for more than a decade, they have created the resource they wished they had.The book addresses many elements that are at the core of teaching first-year composition, providing engaging and inspiring ways to teach:RhetoricComposing and revisingArgument and synthesisVisual and social mediaReading skillsFoundational researchGrammar and languageIt also provides ways to think outside of the curriculum to engage students in active learning that goes beyond the class syllabus. By focusing on and emphasizing pedagogical practices, this book strengthens and brings to the forefront the practical to transform how students learn from, interact with, and experience first-year composition instruction.

This practical book brings together coauthors Troy Hicks and Jill Runstrom with the voices of ten additional educators (Grades 4-9) to explore applications of NCTE's Beliefs for Integrating Technology into the English Language Arts Classroom position statement in real classrooms. It follows a year in the life of Runstrom's ninth-grade English classroom amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the many changes that remote learning necessitated. With specific lesson ideas and examples of student work, the book brings the entire Beliefs statement to life while also foregrounding the primary goal that we should consider "literacies before technologies," creating rich opportunities for reading and writing, enhanced with digital tools. Part of the Principles in Practice imprint, this book includes chapters and vignettes that explore:How remote technologies can enhance in brick-and-mortar ELA instructionLessons and technologies for close and critical reading for literary analysisRecommendations for teaching writing to inform and argueConsiderations for remote and hybrid learningThe authors' insights and recommendations will help you use technology to enhance your ELA teaching across remote, hybrid, and in-person settings.

Sharon Mitchler argues for a reconfiguration of critical pedagogy to empower and engage American literature students at rural community colleges. She constructs an intersectional pedagogy that draws on feminist pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and conceptualizations of rural places and builds on the work of various other scholars. This approach addresses the multiple positions of power and marginalization rural students occupy, often concurrently. Critical rural pedagogy actively seeks to engage rural students to bring their lived experiences to college, and not only to individual classrooms, but to other forms of higher education, as community college students transfer on to university settings. The book includes activities and examples to model classroom practice. Drawing on her experiences in her American literature survey course at Centralia College, a small, rural, community college, Mitchler: Offers an insightful and effective response to lack of engagement and empowerment of rural students in the English classroom.Outlines a variation of critical pedagogy that explicitly addresses the multiple, concurrent positions of power and marginalization that rural students may occupy.Empowers instructors to enact scaffolding that empowers rural students to enter conversations about classroom texts in ways that connect to rural life.Provides sample activities and written assignments that model critical rural pedagogy in the American literature classroom.

This collection of original essays was occasioned first by the 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Annual Convention, and then, later, by the cancellation of it. As originally planned, Documentarians (attendees in a newly created role) would share their experiences of the CCCC Convention. After the meeting was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collection became a means for the Documentarians to share a common experience in this uncommon time.As the volume editors write, "Expect to have some of the tales resonate with your experiences and others to depict a process of sensemaking that might not align with your own. Some of the tales, and the learning they depict, are still in process-they're still happening. All of this is to say that this collection of Documentarian Tales might challenge your sensibilities . . . it might not fall together quite how you expect or even how you hope it may. But really-given its mission, its diverse sites of origin and diverse authorship-how could it? We ask you to take a moment, read, and listen to each other." The essays in this collection relate the shared experience of disruption in our work lives-which, as it turns out, also teaches us how deeply the terms of our work are implicated in our experiences of home, family, and everyday routines.

When principles guide our teaching, we can better understand our teaching purposes, make decisions about approaches and content, vet ideas supplied by others, and grow as teachers of writing. In Growing Writers, veteran teacher educator Anne Elrod Whitney explores how the principles defined in NCTE's Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing position statement can support high school writers and teachers of writing because they undergird our practice through knowledge and a conscious search for meaning in our writing activities.As part of the Writing in Today's Classrooms strand of the Principles in Practice imprint, the book includes snapshots from high school teachers working in a variety of settings who illustrate how their own principled classroom practices have helped both them and their students to grow, whether they are writing for advocacy, learning the importance of revision, experimenting with new audiences, or embracing the vulnerability and the power of writing.The principles come alive through the author's analysis and friendly discussion and the contributing teachers' everyday practices. Whitney's compassionate support and encouragement of active, ongoing learning is supplemented by further-reading lists and an annotated bibliography of both print and digital texts to accompany us on our journeys to ever greater effectiveness as writers and teachers of writing.

This book represents a deep and nuanced treatment of a student population that makes up an increasingly robust segment of higher education. As costs rise and dual credit and concurrent enrollment programs ramp up, understanding how those students navigate the cultural and bureaucratic transition between areas of the system gives valuable insight to readers.- Holly Hassel, North Dakota State UniversityThis book combines historical and mixed-methods research, writing with student and faculty colleagues, and personal reflection to urge, document, and enact more transfer-conducive writing ecologies. Examining the last century of community college-university relations in composition studies, it asserts that two-year college faculty and students have long been important but marginalized participants in disciplinary and professional spaces. That marginalization perpetuates class- and race-based inequities in educational outcomes. Countering such inequities requires reimagining disciplinary relations, both nationally and locally.Transfer in an Urban Writing Ecology presents findings from research into transfer student writing experiences at the University of Utah and narrates the first five years of program development with Salt Lake Community College faculty and students, discussing the emergent, and sometimes unexpected, effects of these collaborations. The book offers the authors' experiences as an extended, imperfect case study of how reimagining local disciplinary relations can use writing and rhetoric studies to challenge pervasive academic hierarchies, counter structural inequities, and expand educational opportunities for students. Additionally, this book:addresses the relative absence of two-year colleges and their faculty and students in disciplinaryhistoriography and studies of writing knowledge transfer;articulates disciplinary responsibilities for contributing to what critical higher educationresearchers call transfer receptive culture;offers precedent for faculty at two- and four-year institutions looking to foster more transferconducivewriting ecologies; andpresents a range of student- and faculty-authored perspectives on principles for partnership thathave emerged from inter-institutional collaborations in the Salt Lake Valley.

An expansive look at the discipline of writing studies, with a focus on serving and supporting first-year writing students and instructors at open access institutions.There is a huge gap between perceptions of the field of writing studies and the material realities of those who teach in it. Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching argues for the centering of the field's research and service on first-year writing, particularly the "new majority" of college students (who are more diverse than ever before) and those who teach them.The book features the voices of first-year writing instructors at a two-year, open-access, multi-campus institution whose students are consistently underrepresented in discussions of the discipline. Drawing from a study of 78 two-year college student writers and an analysis of nearly two decades of issues of the major journals in the field of writing studies, Holly Hassel and Cassandra Phillips sketch out a reimagined vision for writing studies that roots the scholarship, research, and service in the discipline squarely within the changing material realities of contemporary college writing instruction.About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) SeriesIn this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition-including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse-ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

In this sequel to English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s), editor Bruce McComiskey and contributors from a range of disciplines propose seven principles to reimagine English studies for increased relevance in an increasingly diverse and globalized world.While social values outside of academia are changing from nationalism to globalization, much of English studies remains entrenched in nationalist discourses. From literature and theory to linguistics, writing, and rhetoric, English Studies Reimagined argues that English studies must shift from a limited national orientation to a more global and cosmopolitan one in order to remain culturally and academically relevant to students today.McComiskey introduces seven principles to reimagine English Studies for increased relevance: Conceive the discipline as a processSeek differenceExpand what counts as literaturePromote adaptive practicesValue technologyEmbrace collaborationTake a public turnEach chapter explores a different discipline within English studies from the perspective of difference: linguistics by Jacquelyn Rahman, rhetoric and composition by Victor Villanueva, creative writing by Sarah Sandman, literature and literary criticism by Richard C. Taylor, critical theory and cultural studies by Jeffrey J. Williams, and English education by Tonya B. Perry. All play vital and distinct but interrelated roles in this proposed shift toward a globally oriented English studies.

Salt of the Earth is an autoethnography and cultural rhetorics case study that examines white supremacy in the author's hometown of Grand Saline, Texas, a community long marred by its racist culture. Scholar and filmmaker James Chase Sanchez investigates the rhetoric of white supremacy by exploring three unique rhetorical processes-identity construction, storytelling, and silencing-as they relate to an umbrella act: the rhetoric of preservation. Ultimately, Sanchez argues that (1) we need to better understand the productions of white supremacy as a complex rhetorical act, and (2) in order to create a more well-rounded view of cultural rhetorics as a subfield, we need more analyses of the way cultures of the oppressor survive and thrive.

"Using teacher-friendly language and classroom examples, Deborah Dean helps answer the frequently asked questions high school teachers have about teaching writing, sifting through the most recent and reliable research and providing accessible recommendations"--

Heather Lattimer draws on Literacies of Disciplines: An NCTE Policy Research Brief and stories from high school classrooms to illustrate how we can learn to recognize the unique languages and literacy structures represented by various disciplines and then help our students both navigate within individual disciplines and travel among them. Lattimer explores instructional practices grounded in real-world contexts that provide students with opportunities to approximate the kinds of reading, writing, listening, and speaking that occur in the world beyond school.

This book offers specific ideas for how to teach writing in a culturally relevant way. Drawing on research-based understandings from NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, Winn and Johnson demonstrate how these principles support an approach that can help all students succeed.How can we reach all of our students-especially those who have been ignored and underserved in America's classrooms? Maisha T. Winn and Latrise Johnson suggest that culturally relevant pedagogy can make a difference. Although it certainly includes inviting in the voices of those who are generally overlooked in the texts and curricula of US schools, culturally relevant teaching also means recognizing and celebrating those students who show up to our classrooms daily, welcoming their voices, demanding their reflection, and encouraging them toward self-discovery. Writing Instruction in the Culturally Relevant Classroom offers specific ideas for how to teach writing well and in a culturally relevant way. Drawing on research-based understandings from NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, Winn and Johnson demonstrate how these principles support an approach to writing instruction that can help all students succeed. Through portraits of four thoughtful high school teachers, the authors show how to create an environment for effective learning and teaching in diverse classrooms, helping to answer questions such as: How can I honor students' backgrounds and experiences to help them become better writers?; How can I teach in a culturally responsive way if I don't share cultural identities with my students?; How can I move beyond a "heroes and holidays" approach to culturally relevant pedagogy?; How can I draw on what I already know about good writing instruction to make my classes more culturally relevant?; and How can I create culturally responsive assessment of writing?

O'Connor offers new approaches to teaching poetry in middle and high school with more than 25 writing activities that can constitute an entire course or work as individual lessons.John S. O'Connor offers exciting new approaches to teaching poetry in middle school and high school classrooms with more than 25 high-interest activities designed to sharpen students' writing and self-understanding and heighten their awareness of the world around them. In the process, he demystifies poetry for teachers and students by using students' own life experiences as the basis for all student writing. The activities can constitute an entire course in poetry writing or work as individual lessons, depending on the teacher's classroom goals. Early lessons start out with simple lists and wordplay; later lessons involve more complicated forms and subjects. Throughout the book, however, the emphasis is on fun and making sure that every student succeeds. In all, O'Connor provides an impressive number of poetry models-more than 30 professional models and more than 80 models from students in his own classroom. Students will also learn how to dramatize poems, creating special effects in performance, both in the classroom and beyond the walls of the school. Wordplaygrounds shows how students can move beyond the traditional boundaries of English curricula, interpreting poetry through a variety of media, including music, art, and dance-without special talent and training in these areas.

Sara Kajder examines ways in which teachers and students co-construct new literacies through Web 2.0 technology-infused instructional practices.This book isn't about technology. It's about the teaching practices that technology enables. Instead of focusing on where to point and click, this book addresses the ways in which teachers and students work together to navigate continuous change and what it means to read, write, view, listen, and communicate in the twenty-first century. Sara Kajder (a nationally recognized expert on technology and literacy) recognizes that students are reading and writing every day in their "real lives." Drawing on ideas found in Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, Kajder offers solutions for connecting these activities with the literacy practices required by classroom curricula. Through extensive interviews and classroom experiences, Kajder offers examples of both students and teachers who have successfully integrated technology to enrich literacy learning. As part of the Principles in Practice imprint, Adolescents and Digital Literacies: Learning Alongside Our Students offers critical consideration of students' in-school and out-of-school digital literacy practices in a practical, friendly, and easily approachable manner.

Julius Caesar, with its themes of loyalty, ambition, and deception, still resonates with high school students and remains a favorite text in classrooms everywhere. Through differentiated instruction, Lyn Fairchild Hawks offers solutions for bringing the play to life for all students-those with various interests, readiness levels, and learning styles. She offers practical, engaging, and rigorous lessons for teaching reading, writing, speaking, performance, and research that can be used as-is or can be adapted to suit the needs of your students and classroom environment. This book is a comprehensive curriculum for teaching the play and offers lesson plans highlighting key scenes; mini-lessons for reading and writing; performance activities; close reading assignments for ELL, novice, on-target, and advanced learners; and quizzes, writing assignments, and compacting guidelines.

This collection highlights important historical events, current debates, and new questions and critiques in the controversial issue of cultural authenticity in children's literature. Contributors include authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, educators, librarians, and scholars, including Rudine Sims Bishop, Jacqueline Woodson, Susan Guevara, Kathryn Lasky, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Joel Taxel, and Mingshui Cai. Essays address the social responsibility of authors, the role of imagination and experience in writing for young people, cultural sensitivity and values, authenticity of content and images, authorial freedom, and the role of literature in an education that is multicultural.¿A notable feature of the book is the interaction between contributors: writers refer to the texts, ideas, and stances of others in the volume, making it a valuable resource for practicing teachers, prospective teachers, librarians, teacher educators, or anyone who uses literature with young people.

Rocklin explores how performance enriches students' understanding of Shakespeare's plays, with a focus on Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, and Hamlet.How can high school and college teachers help their students get the most out of studying Shakespeare? In Performance Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare, Edward L. Rocklin offers teachers a wide array of concepts and practices to explore with their students' specific performances as well as the performance potentials of a Shakespeare text. Examining drama as both text and performance opens up a range of actions that inexperienced readers can miss when they are limited to reading words on the page. The importance of analyzing and interpreting Shakespeare's works becomes clear when students are encouraged to use their critical thinking skills to imagine and perform these texts. To help teachers incorporate a performance dimension into their literature courses, Rocklin's approach asks students to analyze, cast, rehearse, and perform parts of a play, as well as to observe, respond to, and learn from these performances. The many activities outlined in the book include making editorial choices, studying performance histories, staging scenes, and examining current productions through performance records, film, and video. After explaining the constitutive practices and models for performance, Rocklin provides in-depth lessons, including classroom discussions and activities, student responses, and carefully crafted writing assignments, to illustrate how performance works with three Shakespeare plays: The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, and Hamlet.

The hybrid instructional mode, which combines online and face-to-face learning in a single course, has, according to the National Education Association, the potential to maximize student learning in the twenty-first century. And interest in hybrids is growing-by administrators, by faculty, and by students. But a truly effective hybrid curriculum works only when colleges and universities invest in broad, institutional planning and decision making, as well as strong professional development opportunities for faculty. Making Hybrids Work provides a resource for institutions of higher education to grow and sustain quality hybrid curricula, outlining an institutional framework by focusing on defining and advertising hybrids; developing, supporting, and assessing hybrid programs; and training faculty. To examine the reality rather than the hype of a hybrid curriculum, authors Joanna N. Paull and Jason Allen Snart look at several existing hybrid courses in a variety of disciplines, as well as explore the possibilities and limitations of teaching with technology.Although there is no one easy path to instituting a hybrid curriculum, the authors argue that the hybrid model might well offer a potential "best of both worlds" in its blending of online and face-to-face instruction, but only with a strong foundation of institutional planning and professional support in place.

Jaime Wood offers middle school English language arts teachers material for teaching poetry by Nikki Giovanni, Li-Young Lee, and Pat Mora; the text includes graphic organizers and other resources.Middle school students often find studying poetry to be a fearful and frustrating experience. In this versatile teacher's resource, Jaime R. Wood uses her passion for and knowledge of poetry to help students overcome their fears and to introduce students to a kind of literacy they can get excited about. Because "traditional" poets may seem inaccessible to students, Wood focuses on the poetry of three "living voices"-Nikki Giovanni, Li-Young Lee, and Pat Mora. These poets are not only still living and writing, but they also have cultural backgrounds that parallel many of the lives of our students. Through easy-to-follow lesson plans, Wood uses the work of these contemporary multicultural poets to demonstrate key concepts such as symbolism, personification, characterization, and theme. The lessons have been teacher-tested in middle school classrooms and are designed to encourage students to take ownership of their learning. Wood provides many examples of student writing and graphic organizers, as well as a chapter of further resources. Open Living Voices at any section and jump in. You'll discover a whole new way to teach poetry.

The Lifespan Development of Writing presents the results of a four-year project to synthesize the research on writing development at different ages from multiple, cross-disciplinary perspectives, including psychological, linguistic, sociocultural, and curricular.Although writing begins early in life and can develop well into adulthood, we know too little about how writing develops before, during, and after schooling, as well as too little about how an individual's writing experiences relate to one another developmentally across the lifespan. There is currently no adequate accepted theory of writing development that can inform the design of school curricula and motivate appropriate assessment practices across the years of formal education. The Lifespan Development of Writing is a first step toward understanding how people develop as writers over their lifetimes and presents the results of a four-year project to synthesize the research on writing development. First collectively offering the joint statement "Toward an Understanding of Writing Development across the Lifespan," the authors then focus individually on specific periods of writing development, including early childhood, adolescence, and working adulthood, looked at from different angles. They conclude with a summative understanding of trajectories of writing development and implications for further research, teaching, and policy, including the assertion that writing research "can raise our curricular vision beyond the easily measurable to recognize that writing development is far more than the accretion of easy testable skills, and that successful writing development cannot be defined as movement toward a standard."

This book develops a new theoretical approach to the study of writing by fusing key aspects of postmodern theory with the empirical sensibilities of composition studies and with that field's long-standing investment in writerly agency. Specifically, Inside the Subject describes the act of writing in terms of the event, a concept for mapping relations between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic. In addition, the book casts writers as both locations and catalysts for these relations. And finally, it develops a theory of identity to describe these relations, and these locations, in more detail than the field currently has at its disposal.

As teachers, we live in a world of standards. From local administration to national education policy, standards permeate every aspect of our teaching lives. In Adolescent Literacy at Risk? The Impact of Standards, Rebecca Sipe offers an in-depth look at the world of standards. Throughout the book, she raises questions that are significant to teachers and administrators who are concerned about the direction the standards movement has taken: What do we mean by standards? Why are there so many standards for literacy and where do they come from? How have standards come to be seen as a formula for curricula rather than a platform for collaboration and planning? In addition to her own stories, Sipe takes us into the world of classroom teachers. These stories demonstrate how innovative educators are able to remain true to best practices in adolescent literacy while working within a standards-based framework. Questioning the ways in which the standards movement has played out in classrooms, school districts, and states, Sipe issues a call for thinking about standards differently. She advocates for supporting and trusting teachers to find ways to make standards support the best of what we do. As part of the Principles in Practice imprint, Adolescent Literacy at Risk? situates itself in research-based understandings gleaned from Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief and shows how those understandings connect to the standards movement.

NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar provides this much-needed resource for K-college teachers who wonder what to do about grammar-how to teach it, how to apply it, how to learn what they themselves were never taught. Grammar Alive! offers teachers ways to negotiate the often conflicting goals of testing, confident writing, the culturally inclusive classroom, and the teaching of Standard English while also honoring other varieties of English. This hands-on approach to grammar in the classroom includes numerous examples and practical vignettes describing real teachers' real classroom experiences with specific grammar lessons-including ESL issues-as well as a review of grammar basics.

For many students, Noguchi believes, formal study of grammar seems far removed from the daily use of language. He believes that grammar can help students but only with style, not with content or organization, and he suggests presenting students with a "writer's grammar" that specifically addresses the problems that crop up most often or those that society deems most serious.

Leslie Seawright describes the journey of a police report as it travels through the criminal justice system. Tracing the path of a police report from writer, to supervisor, to prosecutor, to defense lawyer, to judge, this study exposes the way in which power, agency, and authority circulate and accrue between writers and readers. The chained literacy event, created as a report moves through the system, is highlighted and its hierarchical nature examined. The book ultimately addresses the constraints of the police report genre and seeks to expose the complex and multifaceted rhetorical situation of report writing. Due to her position as a police officer's wife, Seawright was granted access to perspectives and realities of police writing typically reserved for those inside the police profession. Seawright obtained candid interviews and perspectives from police officers and supervisors, lawyers and judges. This book analyzes the writing and reading process of the officer writing the report and the report's subsequent readers. Interlaced throughout the book are micro-chapters that offer glimpses into the day-to-day job of police officers. These vignettes, combined with Seawright's description of her own life as wife and scholar, present a compelling picture of the complexity of police writing. This study challenges the idea that arhetorical and objective documents are possible to create in many organizations.

Through a blend of African American cultural theory and literacy and rhetorical studies highlighting the intellectual and pedagogical traditions of African American people, Rhea Estelle Lathan argues that African Americans have literacy traditions that represent specific, culturally influenced ways of being in the world. She introduces gospel literacy, a theoretical framework analogous to gospel music within which to consider how the literacy activities of the Civil Rights Movement illuminate a continual interchange between secular and religious ideologies. Lathan demonstrates how gospel literacy is deeply grounded in an African American tradition of refusing to accept the assumptions underlying European American thought and institutions, including the oppression of African American people and the denial of full citizenship rights. Lathan's critical historical analysis draws on oral histories, personal interviews, and archival data, allowing her to theorize about African American literacy practices, meanings, and values while demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between literacy and the Civil Rights Movement. Central to her research are local participants who contributed to the success of citizenship education, and she illuminates in particular how African American women used critical intellectualism and individual creative literacy strategies to aid in the struggle for basic human rights.