Urban Education Initiatives: Resources

In February 2010, IRA's Literacy Leadership for Urban Teacher Education (LLUTE) Commission produced a whilte paper titled "Improving Teacher Preparation and Development for Promoting Literacy Achievement in High Poverty Urban Schools: A Systemic Approach."

• Download the executive summary
• Download the full white paper

Click on a title to find a detailed description, and to browse contents and sample chapters.

• Improving Literacy Achievement in Urban Schools: Critical Elements in Teacher Preparation, edited by Louise C. Wilkinson, Lesley Mandel Morrow, and Victoria Chou
• Learning to Be Literacy Teachers in Urban Schools, by Althier M. Lazar
• Promising Practices for Urban Reading Instruction, edited by Pamela A. Mason and Jeanne Shay Schumm

From the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy:

• “The leisure reading habits of urban adolescents,” by Sandra Hughes-Hassell and Pradnya Rodge (Sept. 2007; vol. 51, no. 1)
• “Tagging as a social literacy practice,” by Laurie MacGillivray and Margaret Sauceda Curwen (Feb. 2007; vol. 50, no. 5)
• “A love for the thing: The pleasures of rap as a literate practice,” by Susan Weinstein (Dec. 2006/Jan. 2007; vol. 50, no. 4)
• “Setting the ‘opportunity to read’ standard: Resuscitating the SSR program in an urban high school,” by Douglas Fisher (Oct. 2004; vol. 48, no. 2)
• “Toward a critical pedagogy of popular culture: Literacy development among urban youth,” by Ernest Morrell (Sept. 2002; vol. 46, no. 1; reprinted in Reading Online)

Selected articles from Reading Research Quarterly, the field’s leading research journal:

• “Reading representations of themselves: Urban youth use culture and African American textual features to develop literary understandings,” by Wanda Brooks (July/Aug./Sept. 2006; vol. 41, no. 3)
• “The knowledge gap: Implications of leveling the playing field for low-income and middle-income children,” by Susan B. Neuman and Donna Celano (April/May/June 2006; vol. 41, no. 2)
• “Working toward third space in content area literacy: An examination of everyday funds of knowledge and Discourse,” by Elizabeth Birr Moje, Kathryn McIntosh Ciechanowski, Katherine Kramer, Lindsay Ellis, Rosario Carrillo, and Tehani Collazo (Jan./Feb./March 2004; vol. 39, no. 1)
• “Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods,” by Susan B. Neuman and Donna Celano (Jan./Feb./March 2001; vol. 36, no. 1)
• “How will diversity affect literacy in the next millennium?” by Sarah McCarthey, Mark Dressman, Laura Smolkin, Anne McGill-Franzen, and Violet J. Harris (Oct./Nov./Dec. 2000; vol. 35, no. 4)

From The Reading Teacher, which focuses on primary and elementary instruction:

• “Implementing a schoolwide literacy framework: Improving achievement in an urban elementary school,” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey (September 2007; vol. 61, no. 1)
• “Raising urban students’ literacy achievement by engaging in authentic, challenging work,” by William H. Teale and Linda B. Gambrell (May 2007; vol. 60, no. 8)
• “High-poverty schools that beat the odds,” by Patricia M. Cunningham (Dec. 2006/Jan. 2007; vol. 60, no. 4)
• “Rewriting “Goldilocks” in the urban, multicultural elementary school,” by Heather Lotherington and Sandra Chow (Nov. 2006; vol. 60, no. 3)
• “Evidence-based literacy education and the African American child,” by J. Helen Perkins and Robert B. Cooter, Jr. (Oct. 2005; vol. 59, no. 2)
• “Improving middle-grades reading in urban schools: The Memphis comprehension framework,” by E. Sutton Flynt and Robert B. Cooter, Jr. (May 2005; vol. 58, no. 8)
• “A road map for reading specialists entering schools without exemplary reading programs: Seven quick lessons,” by Alfred W. Tatum (Sept. 2004; vol. 58, no. 1)