In the second and third sections of this chapter, participants Kathy Highfield and Karen Damphousse describe their experiences in and responses to the adult book club course. We conclude with a discussion of the promises that autobiography book clubs hold for us as teacher educators and teachers, as well as for our students. This learning is situated within and inseparable from the social context of the peer-led book conversations and the nature and content of the autobiographies. Thus, by means of this experience, participants learned a powerful lesson about literacy and literacy education. Nor is it simply a repertoire of skills and strategies for decoding and encoding print.
Literacy is situated, meaningful, text-based interaction with others.
As such, literacy teaches us about humanity reflected in and seen through the looking glass of our own and others' stories. All rights reserved.