KVS: Invitations

From:

Van Sluys, K. (2005). What If and Why? Literacy Invitations for Multilingual
Classrooms. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Properties of Critical Invitations (pg. 5-6)

1. Occur in social learning environments
2. Focus on making meaning around one experience
3. Welcome varied experiences, languages, and resources
4. Represent our best current understandings
5. Embrace opportunities to use multiple ways of knowing to construct and contest meaning
6. Value alternative responses
7. Promote the social aspects of learning by taking up issues in students' lives and placing inquiries within social contexts
8. Encourage practices that reach across all dimensions of critical literacy
9. Invite further inquiry
   

KVS: 4 Elements of Critical Literacy

pg 20-21

Elements of CL that should be considered...

1. Disrupting the Commonplace
2. Considering Multiple Viewpoints
3. Focusing on the Sociopolitical
4. Taking Action
   

KVS: Invitations - 4 Common Features

Invitations usually have 4 common features... (pg 30)

1. An initiating experience - position the invitations in relation to participants' current understanding and within their social contexts. Definitions, perrspectives, quotations, histories, sample scenarios, and/or questions may frame this element of the written invitation

2. A formally presented invitation: "You are invited to..." - these 4 words signal to participants that they are the decision-makers, able to chart their own course

3. Possible questions to pursue. Since all teaching, learning, and human interactions are political, suggested questions often encourage participants to place their personal experiences w/in social contexts and/or approach issues from critical perspectives

4. Related resources - Assemble diverse resourcves related to invitation issues to facilitate rich inquiries. Allow for a variety of ways in which to construct meaning - language, art, drama, math, etc...