ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the kindergarten classroom where students are examining, critiquing, and creating powerful literacy practices that emerge from learning about workers' rights. It presents a unit of study that focuses on the collaborative achievements of people working for human rights. The chapter illustrates how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was used to provoke and study powerful literacy practices with kindergarten students. It attempts to coordinate the theoretical work of third-generation activity theory with that of CDA to offer a conceptual lens that can provide explanatory power for moments of learning, solidarity, and transformation. The chapter discusses the continuous flow of collaborative transformative practice from literature, to drama, discussion, writing, designing protest signs, and back to rereading literature. It explains the structural constraints of a neoliberal work order and the creative agency that was cultivated in the critical literacy classroom through the study and design of powerful literacy practices.
