This book is quite stunning. Powell's thoroughgoing discussion of the non-neutrality of texts, skills, views of literacy, and instructional methods is clearly a tour de force. Through that discussion, Rebecca Powell invites us-with care, passion and grace-to consider how morality is infused with issues of hegemony and equity, and, therefore, how all aspects of literacy are both moral and political phenomena.

Carole Edeslky, Arizona State University

This is a welcome, refreshing, and intensely thoughtful examination of literacy. This book is especially needed during this time of standards, testing, and the reduction of literacy to the ability to decode sounds. Powell has provided a lucid and very well-grounded framework for helping teachers build a democratic literacy program that enables teachers and students to own literacy, rather than a program under which they are owned by it. Readers will find this book very inspiring!

Christine Sleeter

Makes a strong case for learning to teach critical literacy to students.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

Rebecca Powell comes of age in her lovely book Literacy as a Moral Imperative. . . . Powell's appeal for a transformative methodology by school systems is laudatory.

Vincent R. McGrath, Mississippi State University, Educational Forum

The earnestness of language, the unashamed invocation of morality, and its sense of hope-all combine to make this book most satisfying.

College English

Literacy as a Moral Imperative offers powerful arguments intended to inform educators' hearts, heads, and hands-a rare feat for so scholarly a book. Powell shows us the limits of neo-conservative concerns for a moral literacy and displays remarkable opportunities available in more democratic praxis.

Patrick Shannon, Pennsylvania State University