The Most Important Work

Stories of Sovereignty in the Struggle for Literacy

This book is a collection of essays that reflect the desire and determination guiding many practitioners and researchers as they work together in more meaningful and relevant ways for literacy. The essays are organized as three series of dialogues in which an academic scholar works with a practitioner, or community leader, on a particular struggle toward teaching, learning and literacy. Together they portray the reflexive relationships involved in their shared endeavor, the different struggles for sovereignty they encountered, what they accomplished together, and what they learned by honoring one another’s knowledge and skill.

The work presented in this book reflect intentional connections among practitioners and researchers in terms of how they engaged with children, youth and families to compose their language, lives and culture into literacy for personal, political and practical purposes that both pertain to, and transcend, contexts of school. Moreover, these narratives highlight a shared commitment to frame and forge such work in nuanced terms of solidarity and sovereignty, rather than as stark assertions of this is what needs to be done and this is how to do it.