Toward a Literacy of Promise: Joining the African American Struggle

Bringing together theoretical perspectives on critical theory, literacy theory, and history, and analyses of qualitative data and qualitative research data from classroom research, this book examines popular assumptions about literacy and challenges readers to question how it has been used historically both to empower and to oppress. It offers an alternative view of literacy - a "literacy of promise" - that charts an emancipatory agenda for literacy instructional practices in schools.