Literacies, Literature and Learning

In this brave and inspiring book, Karin Murris and Joanna Haynes break new ground as they enmesh the complex worlds and experiences of teachers, children, researchers, scholars, and artists, to explore children's literacy learning from a critical post-humanist orientation. Richly infused with diverse perspectives from theory and their own empirical research, Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently confronts us head-on with the inadequacies of current educational policy that derive from an entrenched anthropocentric perspective. Presented as an alternative way for scholarship and research, this ambitious and generous text provides a stunning model for new and exciting approaches to researching and being with children and children's literacy learning. Dr Clare Dowdall, Lecturer in Literacy Education, Plymouth University; Associate Editor, Literacy: Journal of the United Kingdom Literacy Association. Literacies, Literature, and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently is a luminously composed text in which the authors playthink with several videos from a grade two reading of a single picturebook. The authors (re)turn to these videos as a way to help us image literacy otherwise and in doing so also rethink teaching and researching. The very way the book is written exemplifies posthumanist theories in the sense we are reading chapter after chapter about the same literacy event and yet newness emerges in each. One cannot think about literacy, literature, and learning the same after reading this book! Candace R. Kuby, PhD, Associate Professor, Learning, Teaching, & Curriculum , University of Missouri. This fascinating and provocative book provides new ways of looking at what happens in classrooms. The first part outlines what a posthumanist approach to thinking entails and the second offers a series of posthumanist readings of a single lesson. Together, these capture the rich complexities of classroom learning. In addition, the book provides a language for describing the multiple and shifting entanglements of the human and non-human participants in a lesson, so useful for researchers and teachers. Although focused on Philosophy for Children in a privileged setting, the carefully visited and re-visited data contains insights about teaching, learning and research for all levels and in all disciplines. The book is inspiring, challenging and alternative. Professor Denise Newfield, English and Education, University of the Witwatersrand.