Randy Bomer is an education professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also taught at Indiana University
and Queens College of the City University of New York, and was codirector of the Teachers College Reading and Writing
Project in New York City. The author of Time for Meaning (Heinemann, 1995), he has worked with school districts
all across the U.S. and has written many articles.
Bomer, Katherine : Pleasant Hill Elementary School, Texas
Katherine Bomer has taught in elementary classrooms in New York, Indiana, and Texas, and has also worked for
more than a decade at the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University. A frequent speaker
at national conferences, she has consulted across the country, and her classroom has often been a site for the
education of preservice and inservice teachers. Katherine is coauthor, with Lucy Calkins, of A Writer�s Bookshelf.
Summary
With For a Better World, Randy and Katherine Bomer present a new vision of curriculum--one that invites students
to read with important social ideas in mind and write with the purpose of making the world a better place. Developed
in years of classroom experience with diverse children, the book will help more experienced teachers take the next
step in their professional growth, while providing newer teachers with a picture of how the largest purposes in
democratic education connect to the details of teaching.
A unique, reader-friendly guide for bringing critical literacy into reading and writing workshops, For a Better
World demonstrates how to:
support students' writing for public purposes and connect their personal writing to important social issues
facilitate more meaningful talk in the classroom
develop students' language and concepts for discussing significant social and political ideas in response to
literature
help students inquire into the daily politics of classroom life
integrate social studies, writing, and literature in experiential, inquiry-based ways
assure that all students have access to a rich and meaningful education for social justice.
Table of Contents
1. Back to Basics
2. Justice in So Many Words
3. Critical Conversations in Reading
4. Democracy Beyond Words
5. Managing Vulnerability
6. Democratic Classrooms
7. Noticing the World
8. Collaboration and Craft
9. Teachers as Political Agents
10. Breaking the Silence
