ABSTRACT
For decades, together with his colleague and wife Yetta, Kenneth Goodman has been lionized and vilified by literacy educators and education decisionmakers on both sides of the Atlantic. It is unusual for scholars as careful and thorough to evoke such responses. However, literacy in general and literacy education in particular are highly political and contentious issues. Those who make connections, as Goodman does, between literacy activities in the classroom and the power of the individual in the wider literate society are entering hotly-contested ground.
