Looking for a way to increase engagement, differentiate instruction, and incorporate more informational text and student writing into your curriculum? Teaching with Text Sets is your answer! This must-have resource walks you through the steps to create and use multi-genre, multimodal text sets for content-area and language arts study. It provides detailed information to support you as you choose topics, locate and evaluate texts, organize texts for instruction, and assess student learning. The guide is an excellent resource to help you meet the Common Core and other State Standards.

Following on from the widely acclaimed The Actor and the Text - which was addressed directly to the actor - Text in Action is drawn from Cicely's group work experiences, encompassing the viewpoint of the director as well. To begin with, the author explores language from a cultural and personal perspective. In these days of management jargon and internet technology are we losing touch with the ability to communicate fully?' Is the deeper imaginative world being left unexpressed? The main body of the book contains detailed, practical exercises for actors and directors during the rehearsal process. All exercises will be tied to specific scenes, leading to a fuller exploration of the rext. Text In Action analyses the imagery of plays, speech structures, the physicality of language and emphasises the importance of finding a collective voice. Cicely's guidance on the matter of voice will help actors find relationships and situations through the text in a unique way, in order to make it more dynamic and creative.

"Text Sets in Action inspires and supports teachers as they create language arts, science, math, and social studies lessons, using multimodal, multigenre text sets. These sets are comprised of high-quality children's nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and real world texts of all genres and modalities. When the texts are juxtaposed with one another, students and teachers discover different ways of seeing and understanding the world around them, asking and answering important questions and then creating their own unique texts in response to their learning"--

On any given day, a visitor to Mary Shorey's classroom will find elementary students using a variety of learning tools, from books to wikis and blogs, to pose critical questions about the world and take action to make a difference in the lives of others. Whether sponsoring a book drive for victims of Hurricane Katrina, using a multimedia presentation to persuade the principal to adopt their recycling plan, or challenging a senior citizen's eviction, it's all in a day's work for Mary's students. Her young learners are becoming conscious consumers, creative thinkers, and effective communicators even while fulfilling the mandated curriculum and Common Core Standards. As Shorey and coauthor Penny Silvers write in Many Texts, Many Voices, "Critical literacy requires that the reader/consumer examine multiple perspectives and ask, 'Whose interests are being served?' and 'Whose voice is heard--or silenced?'...Rather than an addition to a lesson or curriculum, critical literacy is a way of thinking, communicating, analyzing, and living a literate life. Critical literacy also implies the possibility of taking some kind of social action in order to support a belief, make a difference, or simply help during a time of need." Always mindful of what is appropriate for young children, Shorey and Silvers continually search for opportunities to embed critical literacy and inquiry in the everyday lives of primary students. Through a rich array of rubrics, sample lessons, text sets, unit designs, and professional resources, Silvers and Shorey share their reflective practices so that all teachers can use print, visual, and digital tools to transform student learning.

With his writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideology, and religion, Paul Ricoeur has single-handedly redefined and revitalized the hermeneutic tradition. From Text to Action is an essential companion to the now classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its own philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K.O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own theorization of ideology to their version of ideology critique.

"Reading to Make a Difference shows teachers how to move beyond including diverse literature in their classroom to become caring citizens and agents of change. With examples from many classrooms across grade levels, Lester and Katie engage students in critical conversations around topics that arise in literature and in life. They share concrete steps for how teachers can support students to take action and make a difference in their classroom, school or community"--

Finding ways to organize your classroom instruction for knowledge building and literacy learning can be challenging. How can you incorporate more nonfiction and informational text in your content area curriculum while expanding and deepening representation with diverse texts? What can motivate student learning while providing equity and access for different learning styles and needs? Text sets are the answer!In Text Sets in Action: Pathways Through Content Area Literacy, authors Erika Thulin Dawes and Mary Ann Cappiello demonstrate how text sets offer students the opportunity to build critical thinking skills and informational literacy while generating interest and engagement across the content areas. Put your students in the center of the meaning-making in your classroom with multimodal multi-genre text sets in action. In Text Sets in Action, the authors: Model how text sets build foundational skills and metacognitive strategies as students experience a carefully scaffolded and sequenced exploration of ideas, academic, and content vocabulary Explain how text sets encourage classroom discussion by having students ask questions about what they read, debate different perspectives, and relate the texts to their own personal experiences and the changes they would like to see in the world Show how children's literature and multimodal, multi-genre texts can serve as mentor texts for student writing and inspire creativity and advocacy Demonstrate how to curate text sets that can introduce diverse and underrepresented voices into the classroom, fostering appreciation for different points of view and generate deeper critical thinking Provide resources and suggestions for designing text sets a multimodal, multi-genre text set can include children's literature of all genres, as well as digital texts, YouTube videos, news articles, podcasts, and more Text Sets in Action will help you create a collection of text sets that can be added to or edited over the years to align with your lesson plan goals. Teachers who have adopted this approach saw greater student reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. By introducing a multitude of text, teachers will ignite a spirit of inquiry and engagement for lifelong learning.