Nina Zaragoza

What does it mean to have high expectations for five-year-old learners? In one of the author's classrooms, children are treated as authors, as world citizens, and as confident, responsible community and family contributors. Kindergartners publish their own stories and keep them on the same shelves as books from libraries and bookstores. In addition to books, these young students also produce their own plays, thank-you cards, and math problems. Zaragoza, Dwyer, and Brownie (the class mascot) invite new teachers along as they take one class of children through a month-by-month journey of authorship, literacy development, poetry, positive interaction, and imagination. This book is appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate students of education, early childhood, and teachers of English-language learners. It can also be of value to scholars of constructivist and/or critical theory.

In Rethinking Language Arts: Passion and Practice, SecondEdition, author Nina Zaragoza uses the form of letters to her students to engage pre-service teachers in reevaluating teaching practices, thus bringing to life a vision of an alternative classroom environment in which the teacher is the prime mover and creative leader. Zaragoza discusses and explains the need for teachers to be decision makers, reflective thinkers, political beings, and agents of social change in order to create a positive and inclusive classroom setting. This book is both a critical text that deconstructs the way language arts are traditionally taught in our schools as well as a visionary text with clear, no-nonsense directions on how to provide much needed change in our schools.

In Rethinking Language Arts: Passion and Practice, SecondEdition, author Nina Zaragoza uses the form of letters to her students to engage pre-service teachers in reevaluating teaching practices, thus bringing to life a vision of an alternative classroom environment in which the teacher is the prime mover and creative leader. Zaragoza discusses and explains the need for teachers to be decision makers, reflective thinkers, political beings, and agents of social change in order to create a positive and inclusive classroom setting. This book is both a critical text that deconstructs the way language arts are traditionally taught in our schools as well as a visionary text with clear, no-nonsense directions on how to provide much needed change in our schools.