Inventing a Classroom: Life in a Bilingual, Whole Language Learning Community

✍ Scribed by Kathryn F. Whitmore, Caryl G. Crowell

• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 285
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

What are the patterns of teaching and learning that make a classroom holistic? How do children invent oral and written language? How do they create the culture and curriculum of a classroom? How does the spirit of community and collaboration develop among children and teachers? What are the relationships between literacy, schooling, and socialization as they form among the children?These are a few of the broad questions that Kathy Whitmore and Caryl Crowell answer in this absorbing portrait of Caryl's third-grade classroom, "the Sunshine Room." Over the span of a school year, we watch the students in this bicultural classroom within a bilingual, working-class neighborhood work and develop together as a community of learners. It is the story of how the Sunshine Room, like many whole language classrooms, invents itself; and how in this process the children themselves are continually inventing oral and written language, culture, and curriculum.In two separate collaborative voices, the authors carry readers through several critical events in the life of the classroom: the process through which the children and the teachers negotiate the curriculum, the creation of a theme study about the Middle Ages, and a vicarious experience of the Middle East war through children's literature and discussions. On an individual level, the deep friendship between Seaaira, an English-speaking child from the volunteer community, and Lolita, a bilingual Latina from the barrio, is symbolic of the bicultural experience fostered in the Sunshine Room.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 10
1 Stories Are So Important: An Introduction......Page 14
2 Meet the Sunshine Room......Page 32
3 Inventing Negotiation: The Year Begins......Page 60
4 Language and Literacy Events in the Sunshine Room......Page 88
5 Inventing Curriculum: From Cinderella to the Middle Ages......Page 104
6 Inventing Classroom Discourse: Children’s Questions About War......Page 142
7 Inventing Culture: Bicultural Best Friends......Page 184
8 Inventing a Classroom: The Tension Between Invention and Convention......Page 224
A: Middle Ages Bibliography......Page 246
B: War and Peace Bibliography......Page 252
C: Individual Whole Language Check Lists......Page 254
D: Excerpt from The Little Red Riding Hood Script......Page 264
References......Page 266
B......Page 278
C......Page 279
I......Page 280
L......Page 281
P......Page 282
S......Page 283
W......Page 284
Z......Page 285