More than 100 whole language educators, researchers, parents, and students have contributed to this comprehensive source book of innovative approaches to student evaluation.

What are the patterns of teaching and learning that make a classroom holistic? How do children invent oral and written language? How do they create the culture and curriculum of a classroom? How does the spirit of community and collaboration develop among children and teachers? What are the relationships between literacy, schooling, and socialization as they form among the children? These are a few of the broad questions that Kathy Whitmore and Caryl Crowell answer in this absorbing portrait of Caryl's third-grade classroom, "the Sunshine Room." Over the span of a school year, we watch the students in this bicultural classroom within a bilingual, working-class neighborhood work and develop together as a community of learners. It is the story of how the Sunshine Room, like many whole language classrooms, invents itself; and how in this process the children themselves are continually inventing oral and written language, culture, and curriculum. In two separate collaborative voices, the authors carry readers through several critical events in the life of the classroom: the process through which the children and the teachers negotiate the curriculum, the creation of a theme study about the Middle Ages, and a vicarious experience of the Middle East war through children's literature and discussions. On an individual level, the deep friendship between Seaaira, an English-speaking child from the volunteer community, and Lolita, a bilingual Latina from the barrio, is symbolic of the bicultural experience fostered in the Sunshine Room.

Ken and Yetta Goodman’s professional work has been a lifelong collaboration, informed by shared philosophical strands. An overarching goal has been to provide access for all children to literacy and learning and to inform and improve teaching and learning. Each also is recognized for specific areas of focus and is known for particular concepts. This volume brings together a thoughtfully crafted selection of their key writings, organized around five central themes: research and theory on the reading process and written language development; teaching; curriculum and evaluation; the role of language; advocacy and the political nature of schooling. In the World Library of Educationalists, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself.

This seminal collection brings together the multiple perspectives of whole language educators over the course of the past thirty-five years. The essays illustrate the complex ways in which whole language teachers have been and continue to be political activists through their interactions with students; the teachers' beliefs about teaching, learning, and curriculum; their commitment to critical thinking and social justice; their collaborative engagements with other teachers; their role as leaders of change in schools and communities; and, finally, their activism in society. Although many believe that we are living in a climate where the term «whole language» is considered taboo, the contributors to this book demonstrate hopefulness for the future of whole language: as Yetta and Ken Goodman write in the concluding chapter, «whole language is alive and well.»