Learning to Read the Numbers: Integrating Critical Literacy and Critical

Being a critical reader of data is an integral part of being fully literate in today's information age. Children need to know how to challenge conclusions, uncover assumptions, and analyze how data can both reveal and conceal certain kinds of relationships. This text shows prospective and practicing K-8 teachers how to help students develop a critical perspective involving knowledge of essential skills and concepts in both mathematics and language, and the ability to use this knowledge to both effectively compose statistical texts and critique the texts of others. Data-related texts are multimodal, incorporating language as well as visual and numerical information. Arguing that these texts must be interrogated for their biases and limitations, and underscoring the interdisciplinary importance of this stance by drawing on theoretical perspectives from both the fields of language and mathematics, "Learning to Read the Numbers": uniquely addresses both mathematics and language issues as they relate to developing a critical perspective toward data-related texts in the elementary classroom; presents a heuristic outlining key parts of the data-gathering process and important questions that teachers can pose to nurture this critical orientation; and examines the dimensions of this process in depth, drawing on examples from a range of elementary school classes, as well as some examples from the media. It also suggests questions that teachers might consider as they think about fostering a critical perspective in their classrooms; features a close look at a fifth grade class as it engages in a long-term study of the school lunch program and their experience illustrates how the various aspects of the heuristic are developed over time. Engaging, concise, rich with examples and clear connections to classroom practice, this text is designed for teacher education courses in the areas of language arts, mathematics, and curriculum studies, and for elementary teachers, administrators, and literacy and mathematics coaches.