Inspiring and practical, this is a lovely resource for anyone looking to grow fruit trees or start an orchard, whether in your garden or as a community project. For centuries, orchards have been a compelling and important part of our landscape. The sight of a fruit tree, blushing in blossom in the spring, and then laden with fresh fruit in the summer and autumn, can be truly enchanting, inspiring folklore and art. Not only do orchards provide bountiful fruit for families and communities, they are also attractive to pollinators such as bees, and make a wonderful habitat for birds. There are many ways of incorporating orchard living into your lifestyle, no matter how busy or short of space you are. Written by esteemed horticulturalist Naomi Slade, this gloriously illustrated resource illuminates the possibilities and enables you to make it a reality – whether you have a few fruit trees already or have always wanted an orchard of your own. An Orchard Odyssey shows you how to plant and care for your trees and suggests fruit trees suitable for different spaces. It also covers the benefits of orchard for conservation and biodiversity, orchard heritage, and the role of fruit trees in garden and landscape design. The guide promotes the 'five trees' principle of orchards, and encourages the reader to embrace the orchards in a way that is personal to them. Packed with practical ideas and inspiration, let this delightful book encourage you to re-engage with tree fruit in new ways: look at it the right way and everyone can have an orchard.
Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.
The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.
Literacy is the foundation for all learning and must be accessible to all students. This fundamental truth is where Kimberly Parker begins to explore how culturally relevant teaching can help students work toward justice. Her goal is to make the literacy classroom a place where students can safely talk about key issues, move to dismantle inequities, and collaborate with one another. Introducing diverse texts is an essential part of the journey, but teachers must also be equipped with culturally relevant pedagogy to improve literacy instruction for all. In Literacy Is Liberation, Parker gives teachers the tools to build culturally relevant intentional literacy communities (CRILCs) with students. Through CRILCs, teachers can better shape their literacy instruction by * Reflecting on the connections between behaviors, beliefs, and racial identity. * Identifying the characteristics of culturally relevant literacy instruction and grounding their practice within a strengths-based framework. * Curating a culturally inclusive library of core texts, choice reading, and personal reading, and teaching inclusive texts with confidence. * Developing strategies to respond to roadblocks for students, administrators, and teachers. * Building curriculum that can foster critical conversations between students about difficult subjects—including race. In a culturally relevant classroom, it is important for students and teachers to get to know one another, be vulnerable, heal, and do the hard work to help everyone become a literacy high achiever. Through the practices in this book, teachers can create the more inclusive, representative, and equitable classroom environment that all students deserve.
Examines the widespread phenomenon of poor literacy skills in adults across the globe This handbook presents a wide range of research on adults who have low literacy skills. It looks at the cognitive, affective, and motivational factors underlying adult literacy; adult literacy in different countries; and the educational approaches being taken to help improve adults’ literacy skills. It includes not only adults enrolled in adult literacy programs, but postsecondary students with low literacy skills, some of whom have reading disabilities. The first section of The Wiley Handbook of Adult Literacy covers issues such as phonological abilities in adults who have not yet learned to read; gender differences in the reading motivation of adults with low literacy skills; literacy skills, academic self-efficacy, and participation in prison education; and more. Chapters on adult literacy, social change and sociocultural factors in South Asia and in Ghana; literacy, numeracy, and self-rated health among U.S. adults; adult literacy programs in Southeastern Europe and Turkey, and a review of family and workplace literacy programs are among the topics featured in the second section. The last part examines how to teach reading and writing to adults with low skills; adults’ transition from secondary to postsecondary education; implications for policy, research, and practice in the adult education field; educational technologies that support reading comprehension; and more. Looks at the cognitive processing challenges associated with low literacy in adults Features contributions from a global team of experts in the field Offers writing strategy instruction for low-skilled postsecondary students The Wiley Handbook of Adult Literacy is an excellent book for academic researchers, teacher educators, professional developers, program designers, and graduate students. It’s also beneficial to curriculum developers, adult basic education and developmental education instructors, and program administrators, as well as clinicians and counselors who provide services to adults with reading disabilities.
Circulating Communities: The Tactics and Strategies of Community Publishing, edited by Paula Mathieu, Steve Parks, and Tiffany Rousculp, represents the first attempt to gather the myriad of community and college publishing projects, providing not only history and analysis but extended samples of the community writing produced. Rather than feature only the voices of academic scholars, this collection features also the words of writing group participants, community organizers, literacy instructors, librarians, and stay-at-home parents as well. In libraries, community centers, prisons, and homeless shelters across the US and around the world, people not traditionally understood as writers regularly come together to write, offer feedback, revise, publish--and most importantly circulate--their words. The vast amount of literature that these community-publishing projects create has historically been overlooked by scholars of literature, journalism, and literacy. Over the past decade, however, higher education has moved outward, off campus and into the streets. Many of these efforts build from writing and publication projects that extend back over decades, are grassroots in nature, and are independent of college efforts. Circulating Communities offers a unique glimpse into how neighbor and scholar, teacher and activist, are using writing and publishing to improve the daily lives on the streets they call home.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Due to the increasingly diverse populations found in Pre-K-12 education, it is imperative that teacher educators prepare preservice teachers to meet the shifting needs of changing student populations. Through the integration of social justice education, teacher educators can challenge the mainstream curriculum with a lens of equity and collaborative equality. Handbook of Research on Integrating Social Justice Education in Teacher Preparation Programs is a critical research book that explores the preparation and teaching methods of educators for including social justice curriculum. Highlighting a wide range of topics such as ethics, language-based learning, and feminism, this book is ideal for academicians, curriculum designers, social scientists, teacher educators, researchers, and students.
Global Meaning Making disrupts and interrogates the contradictions and tensions in language and literacy global scholarship, reimagining global approaches that respect the histories, ways of knowing, needs, hopes and values of voices beyond the western, including those from the Global South.