Literacy is not a unitary skill, but one that involves using language and reasoning strategically for many different purposes in different situations and communities. It is essential that students in secondary schools become adept at doing so. This edited volume makes a clear and cogent case for why this is so critical and, even more importantly, provides useful and powerful examples of how to make “high literacy” a reality.

Steve Graham, Warner Professor of Educational Leadership & Innovation, Arizona State University

All of the authors share a concern for how high literacy can serve as a blueprint for engineering English language arts pedagogy that is more rigorous, inclusive, and relevant than what most secondary students encounter today. The chapters offer well-theorized and classroom-tested ideas about how to achieve that goal, and the editors frame that work with an optimism that is both clear-eyed and inviting.

Kelly Chandler-Olcott, Laura J. & L. Douglas Meredith Professor of Teaching Excellence, Syracuse University

This edited book addresses the conceptualization and implementation of high literacy practices in ways that inform a variety of important stakeholders (e.g., policy-makers, practitioners, researchers, teacher educators). Using numerous examples based on literacy research from secondary English Language Arts classrooms, the authors share instructional practices for all components of high literacy development. In doing so, readers not only learn about individual components (i.e., reading, writing, dialogic engagement, and epistemic cognition in literacy reasoning) but also how these components relate to each other for the overall conceptual framework.

Virginia J. Goatley, University at Albany, State University of New York