Creating Critical Classrooms

This popular text articulates a powerful theory of critical literacy-in all its complexity. Critical literacy practices encourage students to use language to question the everyday world, interrogate the relationship between language and power, analyze popular culture and media, understand how power relationships are socially constructed, and consider actions that can be taken to promote social justice. By providing both a model for critical literacy instruction and many examples of how critical practices can be enacted in daily school life in elementary and middle school classrooms, Creating Critical Classrooms meets a huge need for a practical, theoretically based text on this topic.

Pedagogical Features
Vignettes. Each chapter begins with a vignette written by a teacher researcher. The vignette highlights an example of how the model of critical literacy instruction works in real life.
Theories that inform practice. After each vignette the authors present the theories they see as informing the classroom practice of the teacher-researcher featured in the vignette. These theories make explicit the assumptions that guided the choices the teacher made with students and also provide insight into the underlying beliefs that this teacher associated with enacting a critical literacy curriculum.
Critical literacy chart. A chart in each chapter reviews the classroom vignette and explicates which cultural resources were drawn upon, what critical social practices were enacted, and how the teacher took up a critical stance.
Thought Pieces. In an essay in each chapter related to its theme, Jerome Harste urges readers to step back and interrogate everyday assumptions about teaching and learning.
Invitations for Disruption. These mini-inquiries designed for teachers are related to the theories that teacher researchers employed in each vignette and also are related to the thought pieces. They can be done alone or with a colleague, and also provide interesting topics for study groups or classes to pursue.

New in the 2nd Edition
New section in Chapter 1 on the Common Core State Standards focused how to maintain your critical literacy values
New features: End- of- chapter "Voices from the Field" and "Conversation Starters"
More upper elementary-grade examples
New text sets drawn from "Classroom Resources"
Streamlined, restructured, revised, and updated throughout
Expanded Companion Website now includes "Classroom Resources," full "Invitations, " and "Classroom Resources: An Annotated List of Picture Books, Chapter Books, Videos, Songs, and Websites" from the 1st edition; Syllabi Examples; "Literature Response Strategies" from the authors' Teaching Children's Literature: It's Critical