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This book focuses on how ideologies of literacy influence literacy instruction and bilingual education policies. While classroom teachers in both English and other languages are given a wealth of curriculum guides and texts and are coached and trained as to how to best teach their subjects, issues of policy, ideology, or politics are rarely engaged or explored. The Literacy Curriculum and Bilingual Education offers a critical look at how literacy is defined, by whom, and for what purposes - illustrating not only how ideology influences policy and curriculum, but how our own ideologies relate to curriculum and teaching. Utilizing critical theory, this book demonstrates how functional, cultural, progressive, and critical ideologies - informed by particular social, political, and historical contexts - develop and situate policies for literacy programs and bilingual education.
About the author
The Author: Karen Cadiero-Kaplan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Policy Studies in Language and Cross Cultural Education at San Diego State University. She received her Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction jointly from Claremont Graduate University and San Diego State University. She has published articles in the areas of critical literacy, language policy, and critical uses of technology in K-12 classrooms.
Report
"Karen Cadiero-Kaplan provides a superb historical analysis of particular ideologies that impact the teaching of literacy. More importantly, the book carefully examines the inextricable relationship between ideology, public policy, and schooling practices, while providing a practical framework for evaluating this relationship within schools. A must read for educators and policymakers who are firmly committed to educational justice for all students." (Antonia Darder, Professor of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
"Karen Cadiero-Kaplan's far-reaching text invites teachers to critically interrogate and understand their ideological orientations toward marginalized students as well as the instructional practices they utilize with their students. The author provides a detailed historical overview of literacy and bilingual education theories and methods while juxtaposing them with current-day instructional practices. In doing so, she persuades teachers to consciously link their unexamined practices to particular theoretical and ideological schools of thought so as to more clearly understand the ramifications of their practice. Cadiero-Kaplan comprehensively and critically weaves together various bodies of literature with her own ethnographic classroom research in order to model for teachers what it means to struggle to become a coherent, critical, and ideologically clear educator." (Lilia I. Bartolomé, Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Boston)
