"Is This English?" Race, Language, and Culture in the Classroom

This is the story of a white high school English teacher, Bob Fecho, and his students of color who mutually engage issues of literacy, language, learning, and culture. Through his journey, Fecho presents a method of “critical inquiry” that allows students and teachers to take intellectual and social risks in the classroom to make meaning together and, ultimately, to transform literacy education. Featuring the voices, beliefs, and struggles of urban adolescents and their teachers, this important book:

• Describes how critical inquiry enabled students and teachers to cross cultural boundaries and enact a pedagogy that empowers students.
• Provides a much-needed alternative to current best-practice thinking and educational mandates that demean teacher knowledge and alienate adolescent students.
• Demonstrates how difficult realities can and should enter the classroom, showing teachers how to channel them into language, discourse, and classroom projects that improve students’ literacy and thinking.

Bob Fecho taught secondary English for over 20 years in Philadelphia before joining the Reading Education department at the University of Georgia, where he now teaches and conducts research on adolescent literacy.

“This is a book about what it means to care about both who you teach and what you teach. It is a book about what it means to understand the broader social purposes of schooling and education as possible sites for the advancement of human liberation and the cultivation of democracy. Is this English? Probably. But it is also life.”
—From the Foreword by Gloria Ladson-Billings

"At a time when most discussion of literacy focuses on either high-stakes tests or phonics, it is refreshing to read Bob Fecho's journey in doing critical inquiry, crossing cultural borders, and engaging passionately and totally with high school students in an urban school."
—Sonia Nieto, author of What Keeps Teachers Going?

"Issues of race and struggles with self-identity eloquently permeate this text. This book is a fascinating read about life in a small urban learning community. I highly recommend it to others."
—Jennifer Obidah, University of California, Los Angeles