LITERACY AS A MORAL IMPERATIVE: Facing the Challenges of a Pluralistic Society (Culture and Education Series) - Softcover

Powell, Rebecca

3.83

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780847694594: LITERACY AS A MORAL IMPERATIVE: Facing the Challenges of a Pluralistic Society (Culture and Education Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0847694593 ISBN 13: 9780847694594

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999

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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 "schooled literacy" and examines the ways teaching practices create tensions in the lives of studentstensions that often result in alienation and educational failure, particularly among those whose cultural knowledge and language tends to be marginalized in our nation's 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.

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About the Author:

Rebecca Powell is associate professor in the College of Education at Georgetown College.

Review:

This book is quite stunning. Powell's thoroughgoing discussion of the non-neutrality of texts, skills, views of literacy, and instructional methods is clearly a tour de force. Through that discussion, Rebecca Powell invites us―with care, passion and grace―to consider how morality is infused with issues of hegemony and equity, and, therefore, how all aspects of literacy are both moral and political phenomena. (Carole Edeslky, Arizona State University)

This is a welcome, refreshing, and intensely thoughtful examination of literacy. This book is especially needed during this time of standards, testing, and the reduction of literacy to the ability to decode sounds. Powell has provided a lucid and very well-grounded framework for helping teachers build a democratic literacy program that enables teachers and students to own literacy, rather than a program under which they are owned by it. Readers will find this book very inspiring! (Christine Sleeter, professor emerita, California State University, Monterey Bay)

Makes a strong case for learning to teach critical literacy to students. (Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy)

Rebecca Powell comes of age in her lovely book Literacy as a Moral Imperative. . . . Powell's appeal for a transformative methodology by school systems is laudatory. (Vincent R. McGrath, Mississippi State University Educational Forum)

The earnestness of language, the unashamed invocation of morality, and its sense of hope―all combine to make this book most satisfying. (College English)

Literacy as a Moral Imperative offers powerful arguments intended to inform educators' hearts, heads, and hands―a rare feat for so scholarly a book. Powell shows us the limits of neo-conservative concerns for a moral literacy and displays remarkable opportunities available in more democratic praxis. (Patrick Shannon, Pennsylvania State University)

Literacy as a Moral Imperative is an outstanding text. It is timely not only in its political significance in addressing the moral decisions made implicit through the uses of and decisions about literacy that educators and administrators make daily, but also in its solid critical theory foundation and muliticultural and holistic perspective which is woven throughout the text's examples and vignettes. (Encounter: Education For Meaning & Social Justice)

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