Exploring Diversity through Multimodality, Narrative, and Dialogue awakens educators to the ways in which values, beliefs, language use, culture, identity, social class, race, and other factors filter approaches to teaching and expectations for students. Designed as a guide to help educators engage in dialogic interactions, the text articulates a theoretically grounded and research-based framework related to the use of personal narratives as learning tools. Educators are encouraged to consider their own positions, explore topics of diversity and social justice, and identify ways to better address student needs. Drawing on theories from multiliteracies, multimodality, embodiment, and narrative, chapters are framed around book discussions and the use of personal narrative to define and provide examples of dialogic interactions. Unique to this book is its focus on embodied learning and multimodality as well as myriad artifacts produced by educators; listening, not just dialogic talk; writing (both traditional print texts and multimodal composition) that supports dialogic interaction; and not merely responding to literature but developing empathic responses to texts, students, and others whose opinions may differ from one’s own viewpoints. The specific techniques and approaches presented can be used within educational and professional development settings to help readers enhance their journey toward greater awareness of others and of their own beliefs and experiences that lead toward social justice for all.

Examines use of ethnically diverse published autobiographies in a teacher educ. book club & course. Focuses on autobiography as site of teacher learning about culture & role of conversation in that learning. Blends personal narrative w/ analysis & descri.

This book offers a array of essays with challenging ideas and provoking new analyses of power asymmetries, multiple epistemologies and vital con-cerns for the education of a different America, the America of new immi-grants, people of color with other cultures, languages and values. The new American that many want to ignore and is becoming the only America. This book also forces us to reflect on the educational challenges we must face, especially in teacher education and the preparation of intellectual leaders. None of the major agenda items associated with a new era of social justice can be either comprehended or accomplished without a profound understanding of multicultural literacy, and of its relationship to ethnic, racial, cultural and linguistic diversity. While in previous decades we used frequently a rhetoric of multiculturalism (at a safe distance), today we are living multiculturalism and practicing ethnic, cultural and racial diversity in our daily lives as we seek a marriage partner, a business associate, a friend, a church. Most of all, we must live multiculturalism as we go school and see children’s faces. There is no way to escape the reality of ethnic, racial and linguistic diversity as it comes entangled with many other cul-tural and class differences between and within each group we encounter. Suddenly, an abrupt awakening for many mainstream educators, what was peculiar of some areas in the Southwest, has become common scenario in most metropolis and large cities. The present volume brings us face to face with issues and challenges we can no longer sweep under the rug. This outstanding volume lays down a solid general conceptual foundation that permits us to link our theoretical past with the post-modern era. It also provides a clear context for the dis-cussion of contrasting notions of monocultural literacy and the relation-ship of literacy and power. The volume goes on to deal with the relationship of literacy and culture (actually to specific cultures, especially African American). At this point the discourse turns to strategies for incor-porating minority perspectives into the literacy curriculum and including the home cultures of disenfranchised peoples. The last section of the book offers help on the practical issues of teacher education for student popula-tions often ignored, and linkages between schools and homes in order to empower the disenfranchised and isolated.

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

Within a clear conceptual framework, this book explores ways that teachers, reading specialists, administrators, and teacher educators can provide more effective literacy instruction to K-9 students from diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. Cutting-edge theory and research is interwoven with detailed case studies that bring to life the complexities of teaching in today's multicultural and multilingual classroom. Topics covered include: *How and why culture matters in literacy instruction *Drawing on students' multiple literacies in the classroom *Motivating and engaging English-language learners *Steps that teachers can take to heighten their cultural awareness and skills *Tapping into family and community resources for literacy learning