Sense-Making and Shared Meaning in Language and Literacy Education

Murphy, Sharon

Teen & Young Adult

Routledge

This textbook provides a framework for teaching children's language and literacy and introduces research-based tactics for teachers to use in designing their literacy programs for children. Exploring how sense-making occurs in contemporary literacy practice, Murphy comprehensively covers major topics in literacy, including contemporary multimodal literacy practices, classroom discourse, literacy assessment, language and culture, and teacher knowledge. Organized around themes--talk, reading, and composing representation--this book comprehensively invites educators to make sense of their own teaching practices while demonstrating the complexities of how children make sense of and represent meaning in today's world. Grounded in research, this text features a wealth of real-world, multimodal examples, effective strategies, and teaching tactics to apply to any classroom context. Ideal for literacy courses, preservice teachers, teacher educators, and literacy scholars, this book illustrates how children become literate in contemporary society and how teachers can create the conditions for children to broaden and deepen their sense-making and expressive efforts.

Fragile Evidence: A Critique of Reading Assessment

Fragile Evidence--a critique of reading assessment informed by newly emerging conceptualizations of validity and reliability--brings psychometric theory, reading theory, and social critique to bear on reading assessment. Taking its lead from contemporary psychological theory and other fields which ponder the role of evidence and argumentation in making claims about social issues, this text examines the historical and contemporary ways in which such claims have been made for reading assessment. Traditional individualized and standardized tests are critiqued from a variety of perspectives. The assumptions and operational bases of contemporary revisionist assessments (e.g., large-scale performance-based assessments, authentic assessments, etc.) are considered in terms of what they include and what they omit. Collected here in one volume is a systematic analysis of several different reading assessment instruments and conceptualizations of reading assessment, with particular emphasis on the evidence of reading they provide--a type of analysis usually found only in separate articles in journals and edited volumes. This important volume:  * Offers a systematic (rather than generalized) critique of popular standardized norm-referenced group and individualized measures of reading. *Looks at the consequential validity of standardized tests. * Includes interviews with stakeholders who consider the question of how to describe reading without making reference to standardized tests. * Considers how tools such as miscue analysis influence reform. * Provides a critical analysis of contemporary reform efforts.

Reference

Johnston, Peter

Hansen, Jane

Shannon, With Patrick

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Telling Pieces is an exploration of how pre-adolescent middle-school children develop a knowledge and understanding of the conventions of art (art as literacy) and how they use this knowledge to create representations of their lives in a small midwestern U.S. town. Beginning with an overview of social semiotics and emergent literacy theorizing, the authors set the stage for their study of sixth graders involved in art. A galleria of children's artworks is presented, allowing readers/viewers to consider these texts independent of the authors' interpretations of them. Then, set against the galleria is the story of the community and school contexts in which the artworks are produced--contexts in which racism, homophobia, and the repression of creativity are often the norm. The interpretation the authors bring to bear on the artworks reveals stories that the artworks may or may not tell on their own. But the tales of artistic literacy achievement are counterbalanced by reflection about the content of the artworks produced, because the artworks reveal the impossibility for students to imagine beyond the situational bounds of racism, homophobia, and religiosity. The authors conclude by raising questions about the kinds of conditions that make literacy in art possible. In doing so, they explore selected alternative models and, in addition, ask readers to consider the implications of the ideological issues underlying teaching children how to represent their ideas. They also advocate for a participatory pedagogy of possibility founded on ethical relational principles in the creation and interpretation of visual text. Of particular interest to school professionals, researchers, and graduate students in literacy or art education, this pioneering book: * brings together the fields of art education and literacy education through its focus on how middle school students come to work with and understand the semiotic systems, * introduces sociolinguistic, sociological, and postmodernist perspectives to thinking about children's work with art--adding a new dimension to the psychological and developmental descriptions that have tended to dominate thinking in the field, * includes a galleria of 40 examples of children's artwork, providing a unique opportunity for readers/viewers to interpret and consider the artwork of the sixth graders independent of the authors' interpretations, * presents descriptions of art teaching in process, * gives considerable attention to the interpretation of the children's artworks and the influences that contribute to the content they represent, and * considers varying models of art education along with the implications of introducing new representational possibilities.

Telling Pieces

Arts & Photography

Albers, Peggy

Study & Teaching

Telling Pieces is an exploration of how pre-adolescent middle-school children develop a knowledge and understanding of the conventions of art (art as literacy) and how they use this knowledge to create representations of their lives in a small midwestern U.S. town. Beginning with an overview of social semiotics and emergent literacy theorizing, the authors set the stage for their study of sixth graders involved in art. A galleria of children's artworks is presented, allowing readers/viewers to consider these texts independent of the authors' interpretations of them. Then, set against the galleria is the story of the community and school contexts in which the artworks are produced--contexts in which racism, homophobia, and the repression of creativity are often the norm. The interpretation the authors bring to bear on the artworks reveals stories that the artworks may or may not tell on their own. But the tales of artistic literacy achievement are counterbalanced by reflection about the content of the artworks produced, because the artworks reveal the impossibility for students to imagine beyond the situational bounds of racism, homophobia, and religiosity. The authors conclude by raising questions about the kinds of conditions that make literacy in art possible. In doing so, they explore selected alternative models and, in addition, ask readers to consider the implications of the ideological issues underlying teaching children how to represent their ideas. They also advocate for a participatory pedagogy of possibility founded on ethical relational principles in the creation and interpretation of visual text. Of particular interest to school professionals, researchers, and graduate students in literacy or art education, this pioneering book: brings together the fields of art education and literacy education through its focus on how middle school students come to work with and understand the semiotic systems, introduces sociolin

Telling Pieces: Art As Literacy in Middle School Classes

The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 (War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850)

The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 considers the history of the libraries that the East India Company and Regular Army respectively established for soldiers during the nineteenth century. Drawing upon a wide range of material, including archival sources, official reports, and soldiers’ memoirs and letters, this book explores the motivations of those who were responsible for the setting up and/or operation of the libraries, and examines what they reveal about attitudes to military readers in particular and, more broadly, to working-class readers – and leisure – at this period. Murphy’s study also considers the contents of the libraries, identifying what kinds of works were provided for soldiers and where and how they read them. In so doing, The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 affords another way of thinking about some of the key debates that mark book history today, and illuminates areas of interest to the general reader as well as to literary critics and military and cultural historians.

The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 (War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850)

History

Europe

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

"I heard drawers and closet doors open and close as the policemen continued their search in the bedrooms. My files were stacked in the office. Those papers could connect my name and my face. My picture albums were piled on the floor. If the officers opened them, they’d see that I was the mother they were looking for. I thought of everything they might find to bring my charade crashing down around me." With the intensity of a mystery novel and the heart of a true life drama, this heartbreaking memoir details Murphy’s years spent on the run with her young son. Disappearing Act is a gripping story that reveals the saga of an ordinary woman’s struggle against the influence of her ex-husband’s powerful mother, famed author Maya Angelou. With extraordinary honesty, Murphy recounts her marriage to Angelou’s charismatic son, Guy Johnson. Guy becomes violent, but not before the author gives birth to their son Colin. To protect Colin, Sharon pursues a divorce. But money, power, and influence put Colin in Guy’s custody, despite his violent behavior. Realizing that neither she nor her son would ever live in peace and safety, Murphy makes the controversial decision to kidnap her own son. Disappearing Act chronicles the harrowing years Murphy and Colin spent on the run, as Guy and Angelou attempt to track them down. Eventually Sharon is caught and Colin is returned to his abusive father. Her subsequent incarceration and release are recounted in painful detail. The author has found an astonishing emotional truth about these events that both scarred and defined her family. As the years pass, Murphy comes to recognize and identify the hopes, fantasies, weaknesses, and family patterns that led to the decisions she made. The issues that she brought to her marriage, and to her relationship with her son begin to crystallize and provide a kind of platform from which to move on with her life. Entangled in a situation she did not understand, Murphy reflects in Disappearing Act on the choices she made that turned out to have consequences beyond her imagination. An intensely personal story, this memoir ultimately describes a universal journey of love, acceptance, and redemption. Praise for Disappearing Act ~ A Mother’s Journey to the Underground “Sharon Murphy has written a gripping, all-too-real memoir about her custody battle and her flight “underground”. Murphy is both bold and humble as she confronts an abusive husband who is also an abusive father and his formidable mother, the writer Maya Angelou. Her scenes with both Angelou and with the writer’s son ring true. They are chilling, informative, dramatic. Brilliantly, Murphy managed to protect her child for five years. When she is found, Angelou herself came to collect her grandson, and returned him to his father. “This is a writer’s book. It is also a mother’s book. Murphy had strong sisters who helped her and a network of supportive women, including feminists and lesbian feminists. Murphy was also turned in by a woman. As the author of, Mothers on Trial. The Battle for Children and Custody (1986, 2011) and Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, (2002, 2009) I can assure you that Murphy exaggerates nothing." Brava, Sharon! Phyllis Chesler Ph.D is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at City University of New York. She is a best- selling author, a legendary feminist leader, a psychotherapist and an expert courtroom witness. “Disappearing Act is a story of a woman's fierce bravery and tenacity, and her refusal to be destroyed in the face of experiences that might so easily have crushed her. I love the pluck and humor and above all the big heart of this woman, and her willingness to reveal not only her moments of rare courage but just as much so her failings, as she fights not only for her son but for her own survival against extraordinary obstacles.” Joyce Maynard Joyce Maynard is the author of fourteen books, including Labor Day now a major motion picture.

Disappearing Act: A Mother's Journey to the Underground

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Transforming the Land and Cities: A Training Manual for Healing our World

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Independently published

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