ABSTRACT
This is a terrific book, lively and informative, immersing the reader into multiple and revealing pedagogical scenarios. The authors summarize a sociocultural or “processual” approach to early language and literacy development where the children are the main protagonists, and play and imagination become the leading activities for their learning. The teachers are certainly not absent from this formulation; teachers are always key, creating and mediating the conditions under which teaching and learning become transactional, never directive or scripted, especially given the emphasis on learning about and from their students. At the heart of this book, then, are multiple “case examples” (as I call them), all sources for theorizing, which bring children's learning to life, involving classroom or community-oriented activities where the children actively create themselves, shaping their subjectivities through the use of multiple social, cultural, and linguistic resources. As Vygotsky (2004, 66) put it: “The best stimulus of creativity in children is to organize their life and environment so that it leads to the need and ability to create.” Such is the goal of the activities featured in this book. The environment, then, is considered not only as a setting but as a source of learning and development.
