Reading Students’ Lives documents literacy practices across time as children move through school, with a focus on issues of schooling, identity construction, and how students and their parents make sense of students’ lives across time. The final book in a series of four that track a group of low-income African American students and their parents across a decade, it follows the same children into high school, bringing to the forefront issues and insights that are invisible in shorter-term projects. This is a free-standing volume that breaks new ground both theoretically and methodologically and has important implications for children, schools, and educational research. Its significant contributions include the unique longitudinal nature of the study, the lens it casts on family literacy practices during high school years, the close and situated look at the experiences of children from communities that have been historically underserved by schools, and the factors that alltoooften cause many of these children to move further and further away from school, eventually dropping out or failing to graduate.

Product Description: ''The analysis here runs deeper than other contemporary critiques of accountability regimes and standardization, inviting us instead to consider how time, schooling, and literacy have always been co-constructed. . . . Reading Time features compelling examples of literacy practices that traverse generations, which could only be understood through interviews and observations extending over time...read more

Product Description: Four years after publishing her provocative study, "Reading Families: The Literate Lives of Urban Children", Compton-Lilly revisits the same group of urban students (then first graders, now fourth and fifth graders) and their families...read more

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This dynamic text offers a rare glimpse into the literacy development of urban children and their families' role in it. Based on the author's candid interviews with her first-grade students, their parents and grandparents, this book challenges the stereotypical view that urban parents don't care about their children's education. By listening closely to the voices of her students and their families, the author helps us to move beyond negative assumptions, revealing complexities that have previously been undocumented. (view table of contents)