ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows a variety of ways to approach the design of learning environments, and to center peer and community ways of knowing, doing, and speaking. It provides substantive examples of interventions that go beyond superficial and folkloristic celebrations of cultural and linguistic difference. The book demonstrates that the literacy processes and competencies that people often assume can only be found and developed in the classroom are indeed occurring in these youth’s communities and peer groups on an everyday basis. It explores direct issue with the ideological trappings of what counts as academic literacy in schools. What’s more, young people’s everyday proficiencies often transcend—in socially relevant and expansive ways—the narrow framing of the skills that they generally encounter in schools. The language gap discourse is but one example of the many harmful orientations that abound in the world of educational practice and policy.
