ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores about over three decades of collaborative research with classroom teachers to provide a unique time-scale on the productive relationships between literacy learning and place-conscious pedagogy, particularly in schools located in high poverty locales. The intention is to leave a little legacy of these cumulative inquiries to literacy educators and researchers by bringing emerging insights together. The book explains selected key theories, those signaled in the keywords and phrases, that inform teacher's work for social justice through literacy pedagogy. The conceptual synergies between theories of critical literacy, space and place-conscious pedagogy are particularly generative for designing and researching pedagogies of possibility in places of poverty. Similarly, work in literacy studies concerns with social justice and literacy education. Socio-cultural approaches to literacy demonstrate that literacy involves situated practice: that meanings are made in the historical and cultural contexts of situations.
