From the authors of the popular blog and resource for teachers, The Classroom Bookshelf, this book offers a framework and teaching ideas for using recently released children's and young adult literature to build a culture of inquiry and engagement from a text-first approach. Reading With Purpose is designed to help K–8 teachers tap into their inner reader, to make intentional text selections for their students, and to create joyful and purpose-driven literacy learning experiences. The heart of the book is organized according to four purposes for selecting and using literature: care for ourselves and one another, connect with the past to understand the present, closely observe the world around us, and cultivate critical consciousness. Each chapter includes classroom stories, accessible research, reasons for why this matters now, and criteria for selecting for this purpose. A final section provides teaching invitations that pair with suggested books but can also be used with any high-quality book teachers may already have in their classrooms. Book Features: Builds on important work from thought leaders, urging teachers to create their own reading identities so they can help their students do the same. Describes a simple, sustainable framework teachers and teacher educators can use immediately to make more purposeful text selections. Provides myriad teaching ideas, narrative anecdotes from diverse classrooms, student work samples, and reflective questions. Offers a list of recommended, recently published children's and young adult literature.

The essays, research studies, and pedagogical examples in this book provide a window into the embodied dimensions of literacy and a toolbox for interpreting, building on, and inquiring into the range of ways people communicate and express themselves as literate beings. The contributors investigate and reflect on the complexities of embodied literacies, honoring literacy learners and teachers as they holistically engage with texts in complex sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. Considering these issues within a multiplicity of education spaces and literacy events inside and outside of institutional contexts, the book offers a fresh lens and rhetoric with which to address literacy education policies, giving readers a discursive repertoire necessary to develop and defend responsive curricula within an increasingly high-stakes, standardized schooling climate.

The essays, research studies, and pedagogical examples in this book provide a window into the embodied dimensions of literacy and a toolbox for interpreting, building on, and inquiring into the range of ways people communicate and express themselves as literate beings. The contributors investigate and reflect on the complexities of embodied literacies, honoring literacy learners and teachers as they holistically engage with texts in complex sociopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. Considering these issues within a multiplicity of education spaces and literacy events inside and outside of institutional contexts, the book offers a fresh lens and rhetoric with which to address literacy education policies, giving readers a discursive repertoire necessary to develop and defend responsive curricula within an increasingly high-stakes, standardized schooling climate.

This text investigates the literate identities and practices of urban youth in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, with a focus on New York Citys Harlem neighborhood. The author takes a participatory action approach to define and engage with new directions in youth literacies in socially constructed spaces (i.e., classrooms, gentrifying communities). The author examines connections between race and place by discussing how Harlem youth, teachers, longtime black residents, and new white residents to the area view their role within the gentrification process, with quotes from community members and stakeholders. The active response of youth, via critical literacy/storytelling, in both traditional (print) and multimodal (digital video, etc) forms is investigated, honored, and thoughtfully considered for powerful implications for in-service teaching practice, educational policy, and teacher education. Vignettes, photos, and quotes from students and community members are included throughout.