Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering

This powerful book demonstrates how culturally responsive teaching can make learning come alive. Drawing on his experience as a fifth-grade teacher in a multiethnic school where children spoke over 14 different home languages, the author reveals how he created a language arts curriculum from the students’ own rich cultural resources, narratives, and identities. Illustrating the challenges and possibilities of teaching and learning in a large urban school, this book:

• Documents how a culturally engaged pedagogy improved student achievement and increased standardized test scores.
• Examines the literacy practices of children from immigrant, migrant, and refugee backgrounds, and includes powerful examples of their voices and writing.
• Provides an invaluable model of reflective practice, including a wide array of student-centered strategies, to generate powerful learning experiences
• Demonstrates a way for teachers to tap into the various forms of literacy students practice beyond the borders of the classroom.

Gerald Campano is an assistant professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, School of Education.