With Literacy And Justice For All: Rethinking The Social In Language And Education

Language, Culture, and Teaching

by Carole Edelsky

With Literacy and Justice for All is not simply about the great debate over literacy and language education. It is a debate in itself, one which addresses, interrogates and engages teachers, teacher educators and researchers. The attempt here to 'rethink the social in language and education' speaks not only of the need to counter 'anti-humane' practices and 'deskilling' curricular technologies - it also serves to represent one teacher and researcher's practical engagement with emergent theories of language and education.
This volume documents Carole Edelsky's decade long involvement with socially critical holistic approaches to the everyday problems and possibilities facing teachers of language and literacy. There are no simplistic pedagogical formulae on offer here. Instead, the essays progressively work through differences and tensions in the discourses and practices of sociolinguistics and bilingual education, whole language and critical pedagogy - educational 'fields' whose practitioners and advocates often work in isolation from each other and, at times, at cross purposes.
This second edition features a new preface and concluding chapter, presenting an up to-date statement of Edelsky's thinking on language, literacy and education. It forms an account of what has happened to the author as an academic and scholar since (and partly because of) the publication of the first edition. The new concluding essay initiates a discussion on retheorizing holistic conceptions of language education.

242 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1996

About the author

Carole Edelsky is Professor Ermerita of Curriculum and Instruction at the Arizona State University. Her research has focused on language and language learning, including literacy learning, discourse analysis, and teacher inquiry. She developed a theoretical distinction between reading/writing and reading/writing exercises. She has worked actively to improve life chances for young students through literacy for social justice. She is the 2007 NCTE Outstanding Language Arts Educator of the Year.