- The Girl with the Brown Crayon
- Vivian Gussin Paley
- As she enters her final year of teaching, Vivian Paley tells in this book a story of her own farewell, as well as a story of the self-discovery of Reeny, a little girl with a fondness for the color brown. Led by Reeny, Paley and the children develop a passion for the books of Italian author Leo Lionni, and reinvent their classroom around discussions of these stories. Through Frederick the mouse and Lionni's other characters they explore themes of race, identity, gender, and the essential human needs to create and to belong.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998
- Judging School Discipline
- Richard Arum
- Judging School Discipline is a powerfully reasoned account of how decades of mostly well-intended litigation have eroded the moral authority of teachers and principals and degraded the quality of American education. In a rigorous analysis enriched by vivid descriptions of individual cases, the book explores 1,200 cases in which a school's right to control students was contested.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- Point of Words
- Ellen Winner
- Psychologist Ellen Winner studies the creative, nonliteral discourse of children's spontaneous speech, examining how their abilities to use and interpret figurative language change as they grow older, and what such language shows us about the changing features of children's minds.
- Paperback 1997
- Print Literacy Development
- Victoria Purcell-Gates
- Erik Jacobson
- Sophie Degener
- Is literacy a social and cultural practice, or a set of cognitive skills to be learned and applied? Literacy researchers, who have differed sharply on this question, will welcome this book, which is the first to address the critical divide. The authors lucidly explain how we develop our abilities to read and write and offer a unified theory of literacy development that places cognitive development within a sociocultural context of literacy practices.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
- Psychological Tools
- Alex Kozulin
- The concept of "psychological tools"--the signs, symbols, texts, formulae, and most fundamentally, language that enable us to master psychological functions like memory, perception, and attention in ways appropriate to our cultures--is a cornerstone of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of cognitive development. In this lucid book, Alex Kozulin argues that the concept offers a useful way to analyze cross-cultural differences in thought and to develop practical strategies for educating immigrant children from widely different cultures.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2001