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If racially offensive epithets are banned on CNN air time and in the pages of USA Today, Jonathan Arac asks, shouldn’t a fair hearing be given to those who protest their use in an eighth-grade classroom? Placing Mark Twain’s comic masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn , in the context of long-standing American debates about race and culture, Jonathan Arac has written a work of scholarship in the service of citizenship. Huckleberry Finn , Arac points out, is America’s most beloved book, assigned in schools more than any other work because it is considered both the “quintessential American novel” and “an important weapon against racism.” But when some parents, students, and teachers have condemned the book’s repeated use of the word “nigger,” their protests have been vehemently and often snidely countered by cultural authorities, whether in the universities or in the New York Times and the Washington Post . The paradoxical result, Arac contends, is to reinforce racist structures in our society and to make a sacred text of an important book that deserves thoughtful reading and criticism. Arac does not want to ban Huckleberry Finn , but to provide a context for fairer, fuller, and better-informed debates. Arac shows how, as the Cold War began and the Civil Rights movement took hold, the American critics Lionel Trilling, Henry Nash Smith, and Leo Marx transformed the public image of Twain’s novel from a popular “boy’s book” to a central document of American culture. Huck’s feelings of brotherhood with the slave Jim, it was implied, represented all that was right and good in American culture and democracy. Drawing on writings by novelists, literary scholars, journalists, and historians, Arac revisits the era of the novel’s setting in the 1840s, the period in the 1880s when Twain wrote and published the book, and the post–World War II era, to refute many deeply entrenched assumptions about Huckleberry Finn and its place in cultural history, both nationally and globally. Encompassing discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Archie Bunker, James Baldwin, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Mark Fuhrman, Arac’s book is trenchant, lucid, and timely.

The purpose of this book is to make it easier for teachers and librarians to infuse curricula with multiethnic literature. The list of recommended titles, for grades 5-8, is organized by curricular area.

How well do U.S. students read? In this article, Sean Reardon, Rachel Valentino, and Kenneth Shores rely on studies using data from national and international literacy assessments to answer this question. In part, the answer depends on the specific literacy skills assessed. The authors show that almost all U.S. students can \"read\" by third grade, if reading is defined as proficiency in basic procedural word-reading skills. But reading for comprehension—integrating background knowledge and contextual information to make sense of a text—requires a set of knowledge-based competencies in addition to word-reading skills. By the standards used in various large-scale literacy assessments, only about a third of U.S. students in middle school possess the knowledge-based competencies to \"read\" in this more comprehensive sense. This low level of literacy proficiency does not appear to be a result of declining performance over time. Literacy skills of nine-year-olds in the United States have increased modestly over the past forty years, while the skills of thirteen- and seventeen-year-olds have remained relatively flat. Literacy skills vary considerably among students, however. For example, the literacy skills of roughly 10 percent of seventeen-year-olds are at the level of the typical nine-year-old. This variation is patterned in part by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background. Black and Hispanic students enter high school with average literacy skills three years behind those of white and Asian students; students from low-income families enter high school with average literacy skills five years behind those of high-income students. These are gaps that no amount of remedial instruction in high school is likely to eliminate. And while the racial and ethnic disparities are smaller than they were forty to fifty years ago, socioeconomic disparities in literacy skills are growing. Nor is the low level of literacy skills particularly a U.S. phenomenon. On international comparisons, American students perform modestly above average compared with those in other developed countries (and well above average among a larger set of countries). Moreover, there is no evidence that U.S. students lose ground relative to those in other countries during the middle school years. Thus, although literacy skills in the United States are lower than needed to meet the demands of modern society, the same is true in most other developed countries.

In this article, we explore how multilingual paraprofessional teachers and students broadened the construction of personhood through literacy instruction in an English-medium school located in a Mid-Southern, semi-rural US town. Drawing upon a study that blended practitioner inquiry with an ethnographic approach, we closely examine how the construction personhood in translanguaging read-alouds was broadened beyond dominant models of personhood—as monolingual and as having Eurocentric, middle-class, and adult-sanctioned knowledges. Our findings show how students and teachers constructed broader models of personhood by constructing a model of a multilingual speaker and reader as well as Latine, working-class, and childhood popular culture knowledges as highly valued and exciting attributes of being human. We conclude by discussing what kinds of interactions these moments could foreshadow and the implications of this work for researchers and teachers to understand how both discursive and contextual factors can contribute to broadening conceptions of personhood to provide children and youth with a greater sense of dignity and belonging in their literacy learning.

Adolescents often use root word and affix knowledge to figure out unknown words. Anglin (1993) found that younger readers favor the Part-to-Whole strategy, and Tyler and Nagy (1989) confirmed the importance of root-word knowledge for middle school students. This study seeks to understand the different strategies middle school readers use so that teachers can leverage these approaches in future morphological instruction. The authors interviewed 20 seventh- and eighth-grade students from two middle schools in the Southeastern United States. Males and females were represented evenly across sites. They chose these two schools because each served populations of either proficient or struggling readers and could showcase the problem-solving strategies used by these different groups of readers. Study data were collected through 20-minute interviews led by the authors of this article. Students were asked to problem solve 12 morphologically complex words, with follow-up questions about their problem-solving processes. Because they focused on how students might use morphology beyond orthography and phonology, when students mispronounced a word, the interviewer gave them the correct pronunciation. Based on their findings, the authors discuss strategies and make instructional recommendations to support students in determining word meanings. The article concludes that although only part of comprehensive vocabulary instruction, morphological problem-solving strategies can be powerful tools in a student's literacy tool belt. Their analysis suggests students use sophisticated strategies when trying to figure out the meanings of morphologically complex words. (Contains 6 figures and 3 tables.)

Using primary sources with students has untapped potential for expanding and deepening the reading experiences of elementary and middle grade students. Primary sources expands teachers’ palette of reading materials, allows students to connect more closely to topics for learning, and deepens their understanding of the past. This article argues for the inclusion of more primary sources as a way to expand students’ world knowledge and develop their critical thinking skills. In addition, using primary sources is one way to support teachers in meeting the new common core state standards. Benefits of using primary sources and how to analyze primary documents are highlighted. Ideas for primary source collections and working with students are shared.

Health information on the Internet is popular for both adults and adolescents. Providing this information in an enjoyable manner during school may provide an alternative to teacher-led education. However, there are advantages and disadvantages of ‘edutainment'. The objective of this study was to explore these advantages and disadvantages of a health-related website which incorporated games and interactive features from the adolescents' perspective. Most features received favorable evaluations, with the exception of one in particular using an interactive map. Social interaction with ratings and scores were seen as too competitive by some.

Twenty middle school students with reading-related learning disabilities were interviewed on two occasions to better understand their perceptions about (a) their reading ability, (b) procedures used to assist with reading instruction and the extent to which they were perceived as useful, (c) purposes for involvement in explicit reading instruction, and (d) reading instruction that might improve their reading ability. Findings revealed that despite considerable past challenges in learning to read, all of the students indicated willingness to learn to read and recognized the importance of reading to later successes in getting and keeping a job. Many stated that there was something wrong with them and that is why they had difficulty. Also, the students did not mind participating in what might be perceived as elementary or basic work in reading if it would lead to better reading skills for them. They expressed concern that they would be embarrassed if friends recognized that they were learning to read.

[...]these teachers neither feel adequately prepared to work with the changing student demographic nor are disposed to do so (Amatea, Cholewa, & Mixon, 2012; Bakari, 2003; Garmon, 2004; Howard & Aleman, 2008; Kim, 2006; Watson, 2012). Conclusion Findings from this study highlight the significant role of a book club as professional development for teacher educators of color in helping provide opportunities for rich discussions that move from detachment to engagement and from individual readings of the text to co-constructed interpretations influenced by cultural self-reflection.