ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores what happened when inquiry group of K-6 educators shared texts, teaching experiences, and emergent analyses of their practice within the inquiry community and offers descriptions of the pedagogical practices and inquiries that took place within the teachers' classrooms. It also explores how other teachers have conceptualized global literature and incorporated global perspectives into their classrooms. The book provides rich descriptions of how students and their teachers engaged with global literature across a range of urban and suburban settings and how the context of a teacher inquiry community became a generative site in which to explore the complexities and possibilities of doing so. Text-centered approaches also run contrary to decades of scholarship documenting the efficacy of reader-based and inquiry-based classroom practices and theoretical understandings of reading as transactional, as situated in the social world, and as a social practice.
