The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy (Language and Literacy Series) - Hardcover

Dutro, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807763136 ISBN 13: 9780807763131

Publisher: Teachers College Press, 2019

Synopsis

What is trauma and what does it mean for the literacy curriculum? In this book, elementary teachers will learn how to approach difficult experiences through the everyday instruction and interactions in their classrooms. Readers will look inside classrooms and literacies across genres to see what can unfold when teachers are committed to compassionate, critical, and relational practice. Weaving her own challenging experiences into chapters brimming with children’s writing and voices, Dutro emphasizes that issues of power and privilege matter centrally to how attention to trauma positions children. The book includes questions and prompts for discussion, reflection, and practice and describes pedagogies and strategies designed to provide opportunities for children to bring the varied experiences of life, including trauma, to their school literacies, especially their writing, in positive, meaningful, and supported ways.

Book Features:

• Offers a reconceptualization of trauma as a source of connection, reciprocity, knowledge, and literacy engagement.
• Identifies three key tenets that teachers can follow to ensure that children’s experiences and perspectives are honored.
• Shares classroom stories and literacy lessons, including many examples of children’s writing.
• Includes sum-up reflections and discussion prompts.
• Provides up-to-date lists of resources.

About this title

Book Description

"Elizabeth Dutro’s scholarship makes an urgent intervention into current discussions of trauma and education. As a researcher who has been thinking about the intersections of trauma and literacy teaching and learning for decades, Dutro views all students themselves as writers, poets, critics, and literate beings who have the interpretive agency to make meaning out of difficult life experiences."
—From the foreword by
Gerald Campano,
University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

"This stunning book about
trauma
interrogates the very notion. Dutro excels at interweaving her stories with those of teachers and students and at challenging readers to find their way into the fabric. I recommend this book to teachers so that they might accept her challenge to explore and understand the importance of both witnessing and testimony in relation to trauma in literacy curriculum and pedagogy.”
—Mollie Blackburn,
The Ohio State University

“Elizabeth Dutro’s writing is meant to be read aloud, each word demanding attention, each metaphor leaving a taste in your mouth, each story lingering in the thick air into which you speak it. She is a writer who has gifted us with a stunning guide for writing with children in classrooms that honor life, loss, joy, devastation, and everything in between. This is the book on justice-oriented writing workshop that we’ve all been waiting for and it is delivered in a foil-wrapped soft and warm burrito that you will feel in your hands for a long time.”
—Stephanie Jones,
Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and codirector of the Red Clay Writing Project, University of Georgia

About the Author

Elizabeth Dutro is a professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Edition details

• Publisher: Teachers College Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0807763136
• ISBN 13: 9780807763131
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 144