The ways in which the African American community learned to be proficient readers and writers during the 19th century were diverse, however, the greatest impact on literacy acquisition came from family and community efforts. African American arts, churches, benevolent societies, newspapers, literacy societies, and formal and informal schools supported literacy growth, and literacy growth in turn gave rise to national and international African American literacy traditions. The underlying motivations that gave shape to the nature of their literacy behaviors and events within family and community contexts and within national and global context are examined in detail here. The beginnings of African American literacy traditions would have failed had there not been intrinsic motivations, opportunities, and a need to use all of the language arts, reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing to maintain and protect what mattered most to them as a people. The institutionalization of these traditions into family and community rituals, including songs, prayers, letters, story telling, and the like gave a visibility to the African American in ways no other cultural knowledge could. Belt-Beyan traces the development of these literacy traditions, noting the parallel progression and transformation of Africans into African Americans, slaves into freepersons, and noncitizens into citizens.

This book presents an empirically grounded argument for a new approach of teaching writing to diverse students in the English language arts classroom. Responding to advocates of the "code-switching" approach, four uniquely qualified authors make the case for "code-meshing"--allowing students to use standard English, African American English, and other Englishes in formal academic writing and classroom discussions. This practical resource translates theory into a concrete roadmap for pre-and in-service teachers who wish to use code-meshing in the classroom to extend students' abilities as writers and thinkers and to foster inclusiveness and creativity. The text provides activities and examples from middle and high schools as well as college and addresses the question of how to advocate for code-meshing with skeptical administrators, parents, and students.

Explores developmental and adult literacy in African American communities from cross-disciplinary vantage points; focuses on influences of cultural socialization and literacy values and practices among many African Americans.

The definitive encyclopedic resource on literacy, literacy instruction, and literacy assessment in the United States. Once upon a time, the three "R"s sufficed. Not any more—not for students, not for Americans. Gone the way of the little red school house is simple reading and writing instruction. Surveying an increasingly complex discipline, Literacy in America: An Encyclopedia offers a comprehensive overview of all the latest trends in literacy education—conceptual understanding of texts, familiarity with electronic content, and the ability to create meaning from visual imagery and media messages. Educators and academicians call these skills "multiple literacies," shorthand for the kind of literacy skills and abilities needed in an age of information overload, media hype, and Internet connectedness. With its 400 A–Z entries, researched by experts and written in accessible prose, Literacy in America is the only reference tool students, teachers, and parents will need to understand what it means to be—and become—literate in 21st-century America.

Literacy in America: A Cultural History of the Past Century is a history of literacy in the United States over the last one hundred years. Told chronologically and supported by hundreds of research studies done over the years as reported in scholarly journals, the work sheds new light on the important role that literacy and reading in general have played in this country since the 1920s. The subject is parsed through the voices of educators, intellectuals, and journalists who have weighed in on its many different dimensions. Literacy is a key site of race, gender, and class, offering insights related to the social and economic inequities that are embedded in our institutions. The primary argument of Literacy in America is that literacy, as a major part of education, has functioned as a means of social control of children, with authority figures dictating which reading material is acceptable and which is not. Literacy has also operated as a vehicle of citizenship for Americans of all ages, and as a symbol of the responsibilities of democracy. With its ambitious scope, the strives to be a seminal guide to literacy in America and add to our understanding of everyday life in the United States. Most interesting, perhaps, is the twisting, unpredictable journey of literacy since the end of World War I, when I argue that the subject’s modern era began. Rather than follow a straight line, both the perception and reality of reading swerved over the years, offering a trajectory that makes for a compelling narrative for anyone interested in American cultural and social history. Controversy of some kind has often surrounded literacy in the United States, this alone making it a fascinating source of interest to explore in detail.

Literacy as Moral Obligation among African Americans in the Rural Southeast providesdetailed descriptions of contemporary African American experiences with literacy and education in the rural South. In doing so, this book extends current understandings of sociocultural perspectives on literacy by illustrating how literacy practice is morally valenced, embodied, and narrative in quality. Johnson Lachuk argues that meaningful and ethical literacy instruction engages with perspectives that are embedded within a social and cultural community—that is, since literacy is linked to greater social mobility through institutional access for many persons, it is educators’ ethical responsibility to ensure that learners have the literacy knowledge required to do so. Recommended for scholars of literacy, education, and sociology.

Latin American Literacy and Numeracy Studies (LALNS) are fairly unknown in other parts of the world. This book charts new directions in LALNS and explores the relationship between these studies and international perspectives. Calling upon social practice approaches, New Literacy Studies, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and other paradigms, the contributors identify both convergent and divergent literacy and numeracy issues within the region as well as beyond the Latin American context. Literacy and Numeracy in Latin America moves the field forward by bringing LALNS into wider focus and helping readers to understand the synergy with work from other perspectives and from other parts of the world and the implications for theory and practice. A lack of translated work until now between Latin America and, in particular, the UK, US, and Europe, has meant that such important overlaps between areas of study have gone unappreciated. In this way this volume is the first of its kind, a significant and original contribution to the field.