Building Literate Communities - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Building Literate Communities: In Conversation with Sheridan Blau offers a rich collection of essays that honors and extends the contributions of Sheridan Blau to the fields of English education. It is required reading for educators and researchers committed to advancing learning, instruction, and practice. It is an essential resource for anyone invested in writing studies, literature instruction, literacy, or teacher education.

Blau and his work invite all of us into a conversation about how to best serve learner needs. This volume demonstrates the beauty of and need for building literate communities through collaboration, discussion, and action.

This collection includes:

• An account of Blau's impact: Learn how Blau's work has influenced communities of students, teachers, and scholars since the 1960s, promoting a richer, more collaborative approach to literacy learning and education.
• An in-depth examination of key issues in English education: Explore how Blau's principles and practices continue to inform fields such as Composition and Literature Studies, Professional Learning, and Mentorship. Read about Blau's leadership and legacy in the work of Professional Communities--including both the National Writing Project (NWP) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
• New work from leading voices in writing and literacy studies: Hear from scholars in the field about both the history of and projected future for English education.
• Inspiration and support for new and veteran educators: Wade into current pedagogical debates and discover innovative approaches to meet the needs of students and teachers in a rapidly changing educational landscape.

About the Author

Kathleen (Buchan) Kelly has been an educator for over twenty-five years in public and independent school settings. She has taught at the middle school, high school, college, and graduate school levels on the east and west coasts. Along the way, she has earned two master's degrees and a PhD. What it means to think, read and, write with and alongside others defines her work in the ELA classroom. Kelly's writing has appeared in journals such as English Journal and Knowledge Cultures. She has also recently coedited two books on James Moffett. Kelly has chapters forthcoming within The Legacy of James Moffett and What is College Writing 2.0? She took up this Festschrift project so that others in the field would come to know the magic of Sheridan Blau. Kelly currently teaches English at a small independent school in Southern California.

Ruth Vinz is the Morse Endowed Professor in Teacher Education and professor of English education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the author of seventeen books and numerous articles, written over the fifty-seven years of her teaching career. Vinz taught high school English and humanities courses for twenty-four years, where she came to understand teaching and learning as restless cartography, journeying with students through landscapes filled with possibility, promise, and poignancy. In her thirty-three years at Teachers College, she continues to learn with others through coursework, collaborative (re)search/writing projects, and community engagements. She suggests that her writing is intended as an invitation to others and a reminder to herself of the need to continuously move beyond familiar boundaries and to (re)cognize that we are always in the making, always becoming through a process of learning, un-learning, questioning, and revising ourselves anew. Vinz calculates that she has provided feedback to at least 38,500 students' poems, essays, stories, research reports, and dissertation drafts, from which she continues to learn and--thrilled by the power of imagination in combination with the resources of language--to craft writing into exhilarating and intimate portrayals of our hopes, fears, and dreams.

Paul M. Rogers is an associate professor of writing studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the former director of the Northern Virginia Writing Project, a cofounder and former chair of the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research, and the coeditor of eight collections, including International Models of Changemaker Educa-tion (2022), Toward a Re-Emergence of James Moffett's Mindful, Spiritual, and Student- Centered Pedagogy (2023), and Writing as a Human Activity (2023). He is a recipient of the K. Patricia Cross Award for leadership in higher education and a corecipient of the Janet Emig Award for research in English education.