Literacy as a Moral Imperative

Literacy as a Moral Imperative
Author: Rebecca Powell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 163
Release: 1999-09-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1461638925

In this important new book on literacy and teaching practices, education scholar and former schoolteacher Rebecca Powell argues that the decisions we make about literacy in a pluralistic society are fundamentally moral ones, either supporting inequitable power relationships, or seeking to transform them. Powell explores the underlying ideological assumptions of Oschooled literacyO and examines the ways teaching practices create tensions in the lives of students—tensions that often result in alienation and educational failure, particularly among those whose cultural knowledge and language tends to be marginalized in our nationOs schools. While primarily ground in critical theory, this volume also draws from multicultural and holistic perspectives in the teaching of written and oral language and addresses the link between whole language and critical pedagogy. Thus, the text is both theoretical and practical. Powell effectively argues that literacy instruction should encourage social responsibility and civic action, should enable students and teachers to understand the transformative potential of language, and should nurture a culture of compassion and care.

The Moral Imperative Realized

The Moral Imperative Realized
Author: Michael Fullan
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2011
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1412996104

Achieve system wide progress --

Literacy as Moral Obligation among African Americans in the Rural Southeast

Literacy as Moral Obligation among African Americans in the Rural Southeast
Author: Amy Johnson Lachuk
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2016-10-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1498511937

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.

Moral Literacy

Moral Literacy
Author: Barbara Herman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0674030524

A distinguished moral philosopher and a leading interpreter of Kant's ethics, Barbara Herman draws on Kant to address timeless issues in ethical theory as well as ones arising from current moral problems, such as obligations to distant need, the history of slavery as it bears on affirmative action, and the moral costs of reparative justice. Challenging various Kantian orthodoxies, Herman offers a view of moral competency as a complex achievement, governed by rational norms and dependent on supportive social conditions. She argues that the objectivity of duties and obligations does not rule out the possibility of or need for moral invention. Her goal is not to revise Kant but to explore the issues and ask the questions that he did not consider. Some of the essays involve explicit interpretation of Kant, and others are prompted by ground-level questions. For example, how should we think about moral character given what we know about the fault lines in normal development? If ordinary moral life is saturated by the content of local institutions, how should our accounts of moral obligation and judgment accommodate this?

The Moral Imperative of School Leadership

The Moral Imperative of School Leadership
Author: Michael Fullan
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2003-03-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1452207771

The time has come to change the context of school leadership! The role of the principal is pivotal to systemic school change. That is the fundamental message in The Moral Imperative of School Leadership, which extends the discussion begun in Fullan's earlier publication, What’s Worth Fighting for in the Principalship? The author examines the moral purpose of school leadership and its critical role in "changing the context" in which the role is embedded. In this bold step forward, Fullan calls for principals to become agents as well as beneficiaries of the processes of school change. Concepts explored in-depth include: Why "changing the context" should be the main agenda for the principalship Why barriers to the principalship exist Why the principal should be seen as the COO (chief operating officer) of a school Why the role of the principal should figure more prominently within the system

Educational Leadership and Moral Literacy

Educational Leadership and Moral Literacy
Author: Patrick M. Jenlink
Publisher: R&L Education
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2014-03-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1610487281

What makes a moral person moral? Who decides what morality means? What makes leadership practice moral? In today’s schools, what stands as moral leadership? These are questions that reflect the complexity integral to the calculus of human morality, especially in a world that is defined daily by its variant meanings of morality, its acts of immorality. The school as an educational setting is or should be a decidedly moral center of the society; it is the natural intersect between the family and the multi-dimensional nature of public life. Educational Leadership and Moral Literacy addresses these questions, situating the reader in a conversation that examines the meaning and nature of moral leadership through the lens of moral literacy and the dispositional aims of moral leadership in educational settings. The contributing authors extend an argument that the work of leader educators and practitioners alike must continuously be re-articulated around the dispositional aims aligned with a moral, democratic education. Educators must be concerned with developing the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic dimensions of the educational leader as a “moral person.”

Toward a Literacy of Promise

Toward a Literacy of Promise
Author: Linda A. Spears-Bunton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135625042

"[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.’" Lisa Delpit, From the Foreword Toward a Literacy of Promise 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.

Reconsidering Primary Literacy

Reconsidering Primary Literacy
Author: Kelly Stone
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317205650

This is an accessible guide to critical literacy, a process in which learners are encouraged to challenge and critique language and social practices and actively transform what they see as unjust or unfair. Crucial critical literacy concepts such as access, power, reconstruction and transformation are explored in respect of both the wider literature and as they relate to the experiences and practices of those educators who feature in the book. The key practice areas for developing children’s criticality are also covered, including the use of toys, children’s literature, comic books and graphic novels, photographs and new technologies. Threaded throughout the book are the intersecting social justice issues of gender, race, disability, displacement and social class. Material is drawn primarily from educators’ own narratives about transformative change in their practice – including their struggles to understand and enact critical literacy – alongside examples of their pedagogies for social change. The author identifies a number of clear directions for educators interested in using a critical pedagogical approach in their work with children and young people – helping them to understand what critical literacy is; how they can weave it into their own practices; with which ages, stages and grades critical literacy can be used; and how they can get started using critical literacy in their classrooms.

What It Means to Be Literate

What It Means to Be Literate
Author: Elisabeth L. Miller
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2022-11-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 082298895X

Disability and literacy are often understood as incompatible. Disability is taken to be a sign of illiteracy, and illiteracy to be a sign of disability. These oppositions generate damaging consequences for disabled students (and those labeled as such) who are denied full literacy education and for nonliterate adults who are perceived as lacking intelligence, knowledge, and ability. What It Means to Be Literate turns attention to disabled writers themselves, exposing how the cultural oppositions between disability and literacy affect how people understand themselves as literate and even as fully human. Drawing on interviews with individuals who have experienced strokes and brain injuries causing the language disability aphasia, Elisabeth L. Miller argues for the importance of taking a disability materiality approach to literacy that accounts for the embodied, material experiences of disabled people writing and reading. This approach reveals how aphasic writers’ literate practices may reinscribe, challenge, or even exceed scripts around the body in literacy (how brains, hands, eyes, mouths, voice boxes, and more operate to make reading and writing happen) as well as what and how spaces, activities, tools, and materials matter in literate practice. Miller pushes for a deeper understanding of how individuals’ specific bodies always matter for literate practice and identity, enabling researchers to better account for, and counter, ableist literate norms.

Good Thinking

Good Thinking
Author: Denise D. Cummins
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2021-03-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 110883048X

Make important decisions, evaluate evidence, and solve ethical dilemmas through seven powerful decision-making methods.