Brett Elizabeth Blake - Böcker

Examines public and private writings of low-income, urban, pre-adolescent girls, illuminating ways that girls' voices are often silenced in schools and society.She Say, He Say reveals the development of fifth-grade urban girls' voices through their own writing in the classroom. This book underscores the importance of including all of the girls' voices into the curriculum where their voices can be nurtured, cultured, and responded to in potentially productive ways.Through an exploration of two major writing contexts, the public and the private, Brett Elizabeth Blake chronicles how the girls learned through their writing not only how to name issues salient to them, such as domesticity and racism, but also how to resist the underlying notions of such important issues. The girls' stories are based on nearly three years of study, and the traditional notion of a process approach to writing is challenged by addressing how such an approach must become a site for significant tension and struggle over issues like ownership and voice. Blake suggests several curricular strategies, such as reader response techniques and a violence-prevention unit, as additional approaches that support girls' voices. This book explores and challenges us to look more closely at how the intersection of gender, race, and class is crucial for understanding not only how and what girls write about, but also why they write so deliberately and poignantly about their lives.

Becoming a Teacher revisits the concept of Teacher Lore (Schubert and Ayers, 1992), by providing a cross-disciplinary approach linking elements of narrative theory to all aspects of pre- and in-service teaching. In essence, it embraces the notion that what teachers say matters. The rationale behind this text is the idea that narrative can not only be a conceptual lens through which a particular discipline can be re-examined, but also an aid to help preservice teachers understand the potential importance of personal experience and reflective ways of knowing as they learn to become teachers. In addition, this book serves as a reminder to those of us in teacher education that the very mandates that control so much of our curricula, funding, and publishing decisions can be reconstructed to reflect what we know is good teaching – and what we know works, in spite of standardized testing and accountability measures that declare the opposite.

A Road Less Traveled: Critical Literacy and Language Learning in the Classroom, 1964–1996 takes us through what Robert W. Blake calls the "jaunty journey" of the English/English Language Arts classroom from its linguistic and literature foundations, to emphases on close reading techniques and structures to composing and responding to literature. A Road Less Traveled heads bumpily into the path of learning how to work with "non-native speakers" and other "basic" students toward a (re)-burst of a renewed interest in poetry and drama, reader response, a process approach to writing, and the diverse student, showing through the often winding and blurry road along the journey of our literacy travels over 30 years, that what we understood best about reading and writing has stood the test of time.

A Road Less Traveled: Critical Literacy and Language Learning in the Classroom, 1964–1996 takes us through what Robert W. Blake calls the "jaunty journey" of the English/English Language Arts classroom from its linguistic and literature foundations, to emphases on close reading techniques and structures to composing and responding to literature. A Road Less Traveled heads bumpily into the path of learning how to work with "non-native speakers" and other "basic" students toward a (re)-burst of a renewed interest in poetry and drama, reader response, a process approach to writing, and the diverse student, showing through the often winding and blurry road along the journey of our literacy travels over 30 years, that what we understood best about reading and writing has stood the test of time.

Teaching Writing for All: Process, Genres, and Activities offers educators an informative anthology about writing instruction in the K-12 school setting. The collection provides articles, discussion questions, and activities to deepen educators' understanding of the writing process, genres of writing, and the uses of writing.The text begins with articles that explore the evolution of writing instruction and effective practices which can help educators teach the process of writing to students. The proceeding sections provide readings on the various genres of writing which are typically used in K-12 classrooms, including narrative, poetry, expository, and persuasive writing. The book also addresses writing for the English language learner and students with learning disabilities. The anthology leads the reader into writing in a technological world by closing with an article about facilitating online writing through the practice of journaling.Teaching Writing for All is a valuable resource which provides students of the education profession with a collection of articles that offers information on history and genre writing for students in elementary, middle, and high school settings. It is well suited for courses in education, especially those with an emphasis on writing instruction.

A state-of-the-art compendium of resource materials and current practice that answers two basic questions: "What is literacy?" and "How do individuals become literate?"Not long ago, literacy simply meant knowing how to read and write. Today, the study of literacy is a complex field encompassing many different areas, from computer literacy to geographic literacy, and including several degrees of competence such as functional, pragmatic, and cultured. In addition there are six kinds of readers: the submissive, the active, the semiotic, the subjective, the psychoanalytic, and the interpretive community reader, and at least two distinct ways of reading: aesthetic reading and rational reading.In this comprehensive, accessible volume, two literacy experts not only help readers understand the latest theories and the heated controversies in this exciting field, they also show readers how this vast new knowledge is being applied in successful literacy programs.Detailed discussion of reader response theory and the different types of readersContact information for a variety of literacy organizations along with a list of websites offering lesson plans, teaching resources, and literacy research

Writing can be a tortuous process in any discipline. However, it can be particularly daunting in science, technology, engineering, the arts or architecture, and mathematics (henceforth, STEAM). In fact, it is not uncommon for most STEAM professionals to say things like, "As an engineer, I write only when I have to…" or "engaging in science is easy for me but sitting down and writing my manuscripts are so painful" or "I’m really good at math but I’m a terrible writer…" However, writing can become an easier process in STEAM especially when one’s ideas are fleshed out and organized in a systematic manner. While there are a number of books or articles on reading and writing in specific STEM disciplines, at present, there are no books or supplementary materials that serve to support STEAM learners, practitioners, and even researchers in becoming better critical writers. Writing Critically in STEAM will be the first book of its kind to focus primarily on what the scientist, technology specialist, engineer, artist, art historian, or architect, and mathematician needs to know in order to become a finer writer in one’s field. In addition, given the current post-truth zeitgeist, Writing Critically in STEAM addresses the essential issue of evidence as a means of supporting scientific and scientifically related claims.

It’s Not Rocket Science! Designing Meaningful Learning Experiences in the Elementary Classroom is a hands-on manual that streamlines the curriculum design process by utilizing a four-step approach: deconstructing, reconstructing, lesson planning, and assessing. Grounded in a theoretical framework that all students, regardless of background, are entitled to high quality learning, this step-by-step method allows teachers to create structured, cohesive units of study that impact students’ lives, while at the same time providing the opportunity for teachers to thoroughly analyse a content area before creating learning experiences. Included are concrete examples, strategies and templates that help educators create active and engaging lessons for students."In It’s Not Rocket Science! Designing Meaningful Learning Experiences in the Elementary Classroom Robert Blake and Lisa Trattner pare down the planning process to five central questions that need to be internalized by teachers, educational leaders, all who engage in the educational process, even including students. Far too much is wasted by the drudgery of requiring educators to pursue endless hours of writing lesson plans, only to find that they don’t meet the ever-changing needs of educational situations. Like living a good philosophy of life, embodying these questions nourishes seeds of imagination and improvisation that enrich teaching and learning moment by moment by enhancing the meaning that students experience. Although it may not be as technically sophisticated as rocket science, it may be more important. It collaboratively reconstructs the next (and hopefully better) generations of human beings!"—William H. Schubert. Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction, and Former University Scholar, University of Illinois Chicago; Fellow of The International Academy of Education; recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award in Curriculum Studies of the American Educational Research Association, former President of the John Dewey Society, the Society of Professors of Education, and the Society for the Study of Curriculum History; author of Love, Justice, and Education, co-editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies (with Ming Fang He), and more than 25 books and 250 articles and chapters