Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning

Description

This represents a multidisciplinary collaboration that highlights the significance of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories to modern scholarship in the field of language and literacy. Book chapters examine such important questions as: What resources do students bring from their home/community environments that help them become literate in school? What knowledge do teachers need in order to meet the literacy needs of varied students? How can teacher educators and professional development programs better understand teachers' needs and help them to become better prepared to teach diverse literacy learners? What challenges lie ahead for literacy learners in the coming century? Chapters are contributed by scholars who write from varied disciplinary perspectives. In addition, other scholarly voices enter into a Bakhtinian dialogue with these scholars about their ideas. These 'other voices' help our readers push the boundaries of current thinking on Bakhtinian theory and make this book a model of heteroglossia and dialogic intertexuality.

Arnetha F. Ball is Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University. Her research interests focus on the oral and written literacies of culturally and linguistically diverse populations in the United States and South Africa. She has served on many boards and committees in her field and has published widely, with numerous book chapters and articles in journals that include Linguistics and Education, Applied Behavioral Science Review, Language Variation and Change, and Written Communication. Sarah Warshauer Freedman is Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and was Director of the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy from 1985-1996. She is the author of Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures: Lessons in School Reform from the United States and Great Britain [Harvard University Press], Response to Student Writing [National Council of Teachers of English] and the editor of The Acquisition of Written Language [Ablex]