Routledge Critical Literacies and Young Learners: Connecting Classroom Practice to the Common Core

Many pre-service and beginning early childhood teachers question if critical literacy is do-able with young children, particularly in the current top-down educational climate. Critical Literacies and Young Learners shows how it is possible, even in the context of the mandates and pressures so many teachers experience, and honors the sophisticated and complex social theorists that young children are. Featuring a mix of groundbreaking work by iconic researchers and teachers and original contributions by emerging scholars and educators in the field, the text illustrates a range of approaches to doing critical literacy with young children and, at the same time, addresses the Common Core Standards. Part I provides several orienting frameworks on critical literacy, giving specific attention to its relationship to the Common Core Standards. Part II features chapters describing critical literacy in practice, grouped in 4 thematic clusters: using texts from popular culture and everyday life; focusing on issues-oriented texts and cultural identity; functional linguistic analysis of texts; interdisciplinary that engage young learners in critical social action projects. Part III addresses the micro-political contexts of teaching critical literacy. Review "'Defying Piaget's cognitive theory position that younger learners are unable to think abstractly in the lower stages of development, the critical literacy researchers Winograd (Oregon State Univ.) assembled present actual classroom practices designed to bring critical thinking skills to curricular practice while meeting the Common Core Standards requirements ...Overall, Winograd and his associates articulate ways to teach meaningfully and effectively through the standardization of the Common Core. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals and practitioners."- D. D. Bouchard, Crown College, for CHOICE, August 2015 "Finally, a book for early childhood educators that demonstrates the wide variety of approaches to living-out critical literacy with young children―that there is not ‘one’ right way to do it ―and situates the numerous classroom examples in a larger discussion of the current socio-political educational climate, which emphasizes testing and ‘basic literacy skills.’"- Candace R. Kuby, University of Missouri, USA "This volume of seminal and new work in critical literacy gives readers a view of where the field has been and contains exciting new research and voices showing us where critical literacy in early childhood is headed."-Tasha Tropp Laman, University of South Carolina, USA About the Author Ken Winograd is Associate Professor, College of Education, Oregon State University, USA.