”Every class is touched by the hard parts of life, and The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy has the potential to help teachers build them into students’ literacy engagement so that their writing is meaningful and helps them navigate the emotional challenges that inevitably face them in life.”
—Journal of Language and Literacy Education
"Elizabeth Dutro’s scholarship makes an urgent intervention into current discussions of trauma and education. As a researcher who has been thinking about the intersections of trauma and literacy teaching and learning for decades, Dutro views all students themselves as writers, poets, critics, and literate beings who have the interpretive agency to make meaning out of difficult life experiences."
—From the foreword by Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
"This stunning book about trauma interrogates the very notion. Dutro excels at interweaving her stories with those of teachers and students and at challenging readers to find their way into the fabric. I recommend this book to teachers so that they might accept her challenge to explore and understand the importance of both witnessing and testimony in relation to trauma in literacy curriculum and pedagogy.”
—Mollie Blackburn, The Ohio State University
“Elizabeth Dutro’s writing is meant to be read aloud, each word demanding attention, each metaphor leaving a taste in your mouth, each story lingering in the thick air into which you speak it. She is a writer who has gifted us with a stunning guide for writing with children in classrooms that honors life, loss, joy, devastation, and everything in between. This is the book on justice-oriented writing workshop that we’ve all been waiting for and it is delivered in a foil-wrapped soft and warm burrito that you will feel in your hands for a long time.”
—Stephanie Jones, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and codirector of the Red Clay Writing Project, University of Georgia
