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The representation of Mexican American migrant farmworkers in children's literature has increased over the past 15 years, making visible a group that previously was rendered invisible in the U.S. landscape. Classifying stories about migrant agricultural laborers under the literary category of multicultural children's literature further marginalizes this population by portraying their social circumstances as private, personal, and cultural. While these stories bring the reader up close to the poverty that families endure as migrant farmworkers, they leave the socioeconomic circumstances with the families, in many ways, unlinked to power relations. In this study, I theorize a critical multicultural analysis of children's literature, which creates a space for adult and young readers alike to rethink power (i.e., inserting class into the critical dialogue on race and gender) and recognize their own social construction. Reading class, race, and gender together in children's literature about migrant farmworkers leads to reading how power is exercised in U.S. society as well as how we are implicated in its circulation: It's a waking up from the American Dream. My text collection functions as evidence of U.S. power relations of class, race, and gender—children's literature as social transcripts because a large part of U.S. ethnography is in literature (Ortner, 1991). I read these books against the history and scholarship of multicultural children's literature and the historical and sociopolitical context of migrant work in the United States. I historicize these current representations of Mexican American migrant workers within the developments of the Mexican American experience as it is rendered in children's literature. Since many of these titles fall under the genres of nonfiction and realistic fiction, I consider how these genres textually reconstruct reality by examining the discursive construction of characters and the ideological implications of how the stories close. The theoretical constructs of discourse, ideology, subjectivity, and power function as analytical tools for examining how power is exercised among the characters to locate how class, race, and gender are enacted in text, while revealing how story characters dominate, collude, resist, and take action collectively. A critical multicultural analysis of children's literature about Mexican American migrant farmworkers is a microanalysis of U.S. power relations, an examination of how power is exercised, circulated, negotiated, and transformed.

This study investigated the effects of two computerized reading programs, Headsprout and Lexia, on the early reading skills of Kindergarten students. The Kindergarteners included typically developing students, as well as students at-risk for reading problems, behavior problems, and both reading and behavior problems. Risk status was determined through the use of the Systematic Screening for Behavior Disorders (SSBD) and the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). A treatment comparison design was used, whereby 42 students in one school received computerized supplemental reading instruction via the Headsprout program, while 44 students in another school served as the comparison group and used the computerized reading program, Lexia. Both schools used the computerized programs as supplements to the Scott Foresman reading curriculum. Data were collected on early literacy skill development using the DIBELS and the Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE). The social validity of the Headsprout program was assessed through a survey administered to the teachers. Overall, the group receiving the Headsprout intervention outperformed the group receiving the Lexia intervention on all dependent measures, and statistical significance was found for two of the outcome measures. Limitations of the study, implications for educators, and suggestions for future research are also discussed.

Agencies providing literacy education have sought to introduce program innovations that more closely reflect learners' everyday lives. A growing number of studies have documented the situated nature of literacy practices and their implications for program design. The concept of learning is at the periphery. Despite innovations and new insights into literacy practices, practitioners are more attuned to diverse content than learning or literacies. Researchers are more attuned to the concept of multiple literacies and their socially situated nature than learning. The Women's Economic Empowerment and Literacy (WEEL) program integrates literacy and numeracy education, savings and credit group concepts, and livelihood training for Nepali women. This dissertation is a case study of the WEEL program, focusing on staff members', participants', and facilitators' perspectives on learning. The research questions were designed to elicit research participants' narratives of their learning experiences. Four themes emerged as the most salient: the powerful role of aspirations; the meaning of education; learning as change; and the life-long, long-term, and life-wide nature of learning. The aspirations are closely associated with Scribner's (1984) conception of the metaphors of literacy: as adaptation, as power, and as a state of grace. Education is interlinked with issues of the women's social identity; gender and caste; concepts of modernization; and the women's hopes for the future. Descriptions of learning are associated with access to knowledge, "doing" or activity, and seeing from a different perspective. An understanding of learning beyond the program's boundaries is found in the themes of life-long, long-term, and life-wide learning raised in the interviews. This research confirms and supports the movement towards more localized programs that is occurring in the field of adult literacy education. Program staff provided evidence to this effect, as the findings show how they consider a perspective of literacy and learning oriented to life-long, long-term, and life-wide learning as they engage in program design. The final chapter develops strategies to bring insights from a conception of literacy as metaphor and from adult learning theories to help strengthen program design and ensure programmatic responsiveness to learners' lives.

The purpose of this study was to examine the gender images presented to second grade students in three randomly selected second grade California state approved reading series which are currently used in the California Public Schools. Through content analysis, this study examined the following gender role variables as depicted by female and male characters in 94 stories: visibility, roles portrayed, tools/artifacts used, occupations, level of dependency, socio-economic standing, problem-solving strategies and context, and emotions and their contests. In order to establish reliability of the examiner's content analysis, every seventh story was analyzed across these variables by a panel of four independent raters. All data collected were subjected to either a chi-square analysis or summarized in frequency distributions to determine significance. The following conclusions were drawn from the results of this study: (a) male characters outnumbered female characters, (b) female characters were underrepresented in leadership positions, (c) both genders were equally depicted as followers, (d) stereotypic depictions continued in the realm of tool/implement use, (e) both females and males were shown as needing, asking for, and getting help, (f) females and males were depicted stereotypically in the work world, (g) there was improvement in depicting both genders as socio-economic equals, (h) females were shown as competent problem solvers, but in much smaller numbers than male characters, and (i) both genders were depicted as possessing and showing emotions such as fear, worry, and anger. In order to limit the impact on children exposed to such gender images, the following recommendations were made: (a) that mental health professionals consider the importance of learned gender stereotypes when dealing with child and adults clients, especially when the referring concerns deal with depression in females and aggression in males, (b) school counselors and psychologists should provide children with more balanced gender role models, (c) school boards should make the adoption of gender neutral textbooks district level policy, (d) textbook adoption committees should be provided with sensitization to gender stereotyping, (e) parents and teachers should furnish children with alternative non-stereotypic models, and (f) parents should review textbooks for gender stereotypes and to inform their school districts of the unacceptability of such materials.

This study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the Individualized Reading Evaluation and Diagnosis (iRead) Inventory for accurately assessing specific decoding sub-skill weaknesses and for informing the development of targeted interventions to improve the reading abilities of students. The iRead Inventory is a curriculum-based, specific skills mastery measurement tool for assessing specific decoding weaknesses. Students read word lists targeted to specific vowel combinations to determine weaknesses with particular combinations. The study assessed whether the iRead Inventory could distinguish specific decoding sub-skill weaknesses for students and whether the iRead Inventory was effective in supporting the development of interventions to improve those decoding weaknesses. Students were screened for dysfluency and three students were identified as having primarily decoding issues were selected for the intervention phase of the study. The intervention phase of the study involved using a multiple baseline, randomization design with the three participants receiving interventions beginning at randomly selected times. The iRead Inventory was utilized to identify specific vowel combination difficulties for intervention and the participants were provided direct, sequential instruction targeted to the identified specific decoding weaknesses. The participants' reading progress was monitored using Reading-CBM (R-CBM) and Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) measures. In addition, their progress with learning the specific sub-skills was monitored using the iRead Inventory. The iRead Inventory was found to reliably assess specific decoding deficits. Interventions that were developed using the iRead Inventory were shown to improve the decoding abilities of all the participants. The two participants who received interventions earlier showed gains in oral reading skills and mastered a number of specific vowel combination decoding skills. The participant who began interventions last showed less gain in both abilities. In addition, there seemed to be a learning curve phenomenon whereby participants did not exhibit gains associated with the interventions until approximately two and one half weeks after interventions were initiated. Further research can include assessing the reliability of the iRead Inventory, researching its utility for designing interventions for a broader population, and assessing the implications of a potential learning curve phenomenon for making educational decisions.

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