A Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts

by Eileen Landay, Kurt Wootton, Shirley Brice Heath (Foreword)

A Reason to Read is the culminating work of the ArtsLiteracy Project, an ambitious and wide-ranging collaborative that aims to promote literacy through rich and sustained instruction in the arts.

At the heart of the book is the “Performance Cycle,” a flexible framework for curriculum and lesson planning that can be adapted to all content areas and age groups. Each of the book’s main chapters delineates and explores a particular component of the cycle.

A practical, readable, and inspiring book, A Reason to Read will be of immeasurable help to school teachers, education leaders, and all who have a stake in promoting literacy and the arts in today’s schools.

Genres: Education

266 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 9, 2012

Reviews

[Jenna Idenward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hey, cool, it's my graduate education all wrapped up in a little book.

[Hannah Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this professional development book extremely helpful in guiding me in planning my curriculum with arts integration. I will be using the ideas as I go forth in the next school year and years to come.

[k-os · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Like Freire, Maxine Greene's project is aimed at creating positive social change, or 'looking at things as if they could be otherwise.' Greene views the arts as a powerful tool for releasing the imagination, opening new perspectives, and identifying alternatives: 'To tap into the imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished...and to carve our new orders in experience...what might be, should be, and what is not yet'" (6).

I cried several times during A REASON TO READ—a book of pedagogy that lashes out at an ever-standardizing curriculum and breathes life into an alive classroom built around a collaborative, engaging, authentic performance cycle. I hope to make activities like "The Forum Theater" and "The Cordel" central to my work. Required reading for any humanities teacher looking to upend their classroom in all the right ways.

[Samantha]

Read for school.

This book has a lot of cool ideas and even though I had to dedicate basically two days to reading it so I could hurry up and do this project, I still enjoyed breaking it down! My only real critique is not related to the ideas in the book, but kind of a critique on the authors ignorance, maybe? There is a section where they discuss the n-word the writers (both white) write it out, not from a quote. I have to say I think this was unnecessary and could have easily just said "the n word" instead of "the word n--". They also follow this by quoting someone who claims that it is okay for people of color to say the n word, which is obviously false since not every person of color is black. I feel like if they wanted to use this quote for other reasons they should have followed by correcting it.

[Josiah Buster · Rating 4 out of 5]

As mentioned in a past update, I am reading this book for a class I will be taking this summer. This book seems VERY idealistic to me in the context of the high school classroom in 2025. That being said, I am young enough (naive enough?) in my career to be willing and even excited to try some of these approaches in my own classroom. I am also excited to discuss this book in class this summer at the Bread Load School of English with other professionals to see what their take is on the concepts.

[Jessi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually useful, full of practical techniques you can use in your classroom immediately, as well as loftier, long-term strategies that remain within the realm of possibility even for a teacher in the average public school classroom. Inspiring and important, every teacher in any discipline where reading is key (re: all of them) stands to gain something from this book.

[Colleen]

Cool approach to performance in the classroom. The book is a mixture of pedagogy and practical ideas.