Toward a Literacy of Promise

<p><em>[This book] gives us strategies for bringing life back to school; it allows us to think creatively about connecting instruction to the lives of children who have not been well-served; it helps us learn to value the gifts with words our children of color bring; and it gives us hope for educating a generation that can change the status quo that will build the America we have yet to see...the one that made that as-yet-unfulfilled promise of ‘liberty and justice for all.’</em><strong>Lisa Delpit From the Foreword</strong></p><p><em>Toward a Literacy of Promise </em>examines popular assumptions about literacy and challenges readers to question how it has been used historically both to empower and to oppress. The authors offer an alternative view of literacy – a literacy of promise – that charts an emancipatory agenda for literacy instructional practices in schools. Weaving together critical perspectives on pedagogy language literature and popular texts each chapter provides an in-depth discussion that illuminates how a literacy of promise can be realized in school and classrooms. Although the major focus is on African American middle and secondary students as a population that has experienced the consequences of inequality the chapters demonstrate general and specific applications to other populations. </p>