Julia Lopez-Robertson

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of South Carolina

Through juxtaposing images and text, picturebooks have the unique power to facilitate critical reading and critical literacy. This article presents three analytical approaches to develop critical reading and critical literacy skills through picturebooks: (1) critically analyzing broad representation, (2) critical visual analysis, and (3) analyzing...

Critical reading and critical literacy are skills that preservice teachers need to cultivate not only in their future students, but also in their own literacy practices. Picturebooks have the unique power to facilitate critical reading and critical literacy with preservice teachers. This chapter analyzes critical reading, critical literacy, and the...

Five Latina mothers were engaged in pláticas literarias/literature discussions about Latino children’s literature at their children’s school. The pláticas served as means to build the links from personal experiences to school learning and to help the mothers recognize that their ways of knowing and making meaning of the world-their multiliteracies-...

Profiling human beings occurs daily throughout our society, typically grounded in inaccuracies, misperceptions, and biases related to race, faith, sexual orientation, language, family structure, and other factors. This article appropriates discriminatory profiling in conjunction with conceptualization of diversity as a verb to vividly convey the ne...

In this issue, the authors explore language and cultural brokering through reviews of three books. The first book draws from teachers across the US to show how the arts can be used to facilitate the learning process of emergent bilingual youth. The second book invites critical thinking about the role of race in language. It also offers practical id...

The books reviewed here communicate that as educators, we can support academic success for all students by expanding understandings about home/community literacies. We can do this by tapping into the valuable resources that communities and families can provide. In particular, these texts focus on the expertise in communities too often marginalized...

This column highlights books that provide practical and theoretical approaches for “going green.” Some of the strategies include school gardens, eco literacies, and how to address environmental issues both locally and globally. These books foster students’ critical thinking about ways to save their world by becoming eco-conscious.

This teacher research study took place in a bilingual second-grade classroom in the southwestern United States. The study investigates the cuentos told during pláticas literarias /literature discussions and explores how five young Latinas used their cuentos to communicate meaning through intertextual connections. These intertextual connections reve...

Each book reviewed in this issue moves the field of literacy forward in important ways. De la Reyes’s collection of narratives provides insights into the institutional and instructional barriers faced by many students of color and strategies they used to overcome them as they sought to develop biliterate identities in the monolingual cultures of sc...

Because schools place such high importance on text-based analysis often devoid of opportunities to draw on home knowledge, diverse ways of making meaning from books are often ignored. This qualitative study of a bilingual second-grade classroom examined the manner in which four young Latina students told stories about their life experiences in orde...

This qualitative study examines what early childhood preservice teachers enrolled in a field-based literacy methods course deemed relevant regarding teaching, literacy, and learning. This study is based on postcourse interviews with 7 early childhood preservice teachers. Findings suggest that contextualized field experiences facilitate preservice t...

Gabriela Montserrat (pseudonym) is a Mexican–American child classified by her school district as an ‘emerging bilingual’ and is the focus of this qualitative case study that took place at a public elementary school located in a suburban community in the southwestern US in Mrs Pérez's (pseudonym) second-grade classroom. The student's use of personal...

Countering the position that colorblindness is desirable for teachers and children, this article encourages early childhood education teachers to engage in conversations about race and racism with young children. We discuss why the early childhood years are important for interrupting racism and make suggestions for helping children develop tools f...

This column features books that reflect strong convictions about teachers’ and teacher educators’ “nonnegotiable and moral imperative and mandatory professional responsibility” (Gay, 2010, p. 250) to “act now, without a moment’s hesitation” (p. 247) to transform classrooms and teacher education programs so that no child is lost in the so-called ach...

The avenue for enacting a critical literacy curriculum in this primary bilingual classroom was through literature discussions about critical social issues that impacted the children's lives. These discussions provided the children the space to discuss and question social issues that were significant to them and with which they identified. The analy...

While we say we believe in every child, the teachers in this article demonstrate that we each have hidden biases that require examination, and it is diffi cult to recognize those biases when we know so little about our children's lives outside of school. I pictured Latina women in such roles as housekeepers and maids. Letting them speak Spanish in...

A bilingual mother and literacy researcher reflects on raising her son to be bilingual. She wonders why adults insist on viewing children’s bilingualism as a deficit while children themselves value other languages and want to learn them from each other.

Tim O’Keefe, Rise Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, Bruce Morgan, Julia López-Robertson, Donna Santman, JoAnn Wong-Kam, Sharon Hill, and Linda Christensen provide short essays describing their personal visions of possibility about literacy and how they maintain that passion and vision. Across a range of contexts, they reflect on the ways in which their...

This article will focus on the use of small group literature discussions as a curricular engagement that challenges children to think critically and to share the opinions they are forming about the books they read. This teacher research study took place in a bilingual second grade classroom and describes the discourse of four young bilingual childr...

Discussion about literature in the primary grades, especially with young bilingual children, may need closer examination.

Tells the story of a primary classroom in which bilingual children engaged in thoughtful dialogue about critical issues, such as racism and discrimination, through small group literature discussions. (SR)