With Literacy and Justice for All

The third edition of With Literacy and Justice for All: Rethinking the Social in Language and Education continues to document Carole Edelsky's long involvement with socially critical, holistic approaches to the everyday problems and possibilities facing teachers of language and literacy. This book helps education professionals understand the educational/societal situations they are dealing with, and literacy instruction and second language learning in particular contexts. Edelsky does not offer simplistic pedagogical formulas, but rather, progressively works through differences and tensions in the discourses and practices of sociolinguistics, bilingual education, whole language, and critical pedagogy--fields whose practitioners and advocates too often work in isolation from each other and, at times, at cross purposes.
 
Changes in the Third Edition: Federal intrusion into education, intensifying neo-liberalism, policymaking as political spectacle, the reappearance of McCarthyesque political repression, and increasing resistance to neo-liberal policies figure in major ways in the changing social, political, and economic conditions for language and literacy education. These are significant themes in Edelsky's rethinking, in this new edition, of the "the social in language and education." She rethinks the sociopolitical nature of language learning in the education of minority children; she rethinks a progressive literacy pedagogy (whole language) while answering its critics; she rethinks literacy theory; and she rethinks her own understandings from a decade ago.
 
In this edition, what Edelsky means by rethinking is improving and extending her own views, while at the same time demonstrating that such rethinking always occurs in the light of history. The volume includes a completely new Introduction and two entirely new chapters: one on reconceptualizing literacy learning as second language learning, and another on taking an historical view of responses to standardized testing. Throughout, in updating the volume, Edelsky uses a variety of structural styles to note contrasts in her views across time and to make the distinction clear between the original material and the current additions. This edition is a rare example of a scholarly owning-up to changes in thinking, and a much needed demonstration of the historically grounded nature of knowledge. As a whole, the third edition emphasizes recursiveness and questioning within a deliberately political framework.