The voices of teachers, parents, and students create a compelling ethnographic study that examines the debate between traditional and progressive pedagogies in literacy education and the mismatch of cross-cultural discourses between mainstream schools and Asian families. This book focuses on a Vancouver suburb where the Chinese population has surpassed the white community numerically and socioeconomically, but not politically, and where the author uncovers disturbing cultural conflicts, educational dissensions, and "silent" power struggles between school and home. What Guofang Li reveals illustrates the challenges of teaching and learning in an increasingly complex educational landscape in which literacy, culture, race, and social class intertwine. Advocating for a greater cultural understanding of minority beliefs in literacy education and a more critical examination of mainstream instructional practices, Li offers a new theoretical framework and critical recommendations for teachers, schools, and parents.
"Guofang Li presents a fascinating study that will challenge many mainstream views of teaching and learning." from the Foreword by Lee Gunderson, author of ESL Literacy Instruction: A Guidebook to Theory and Practice
"This topic is of considerable importance for the field of multicultural education and critical pedagogy, and there is significant potential for this study to contribute in important ways to theory building in this field. The data that Li has for middle- and upper-middle class and educated immigrant families and their interaction with the Canadian school system departs provocatively from the categories of analysis used in most multicultural education and critical pedagogy studies and research." Pia Lindquist Wong, coauthor of Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in São Paulo
About the Author
Guofang Li is Assistant Professor of Second Language and Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author of "East is East, West is West"? Home Literacy, Culture, and Schooling and the coeditor (with Gulbahar H. Beckett) of "Strangers" of the Academy: Asian Women Scholars in Higher Education.
