This volume explores literacies in the lives of urban children, youth, and adults of color using various methodological approaches and critical perspectives on languages, learning, and community. Ten well-known scholars, researchers, and teacher educators in the field of literacy present their concerns, crossing three interesting areas: “research on family and community literacies, in teaching and teacher education, and in popular culture, digital media, and forms of multimodality” (3).

The book consists of an introduction, ten chapters divided into three parts, and a conclusion. In Part I, Ch. 1 is an investigation of how twenty-three bilingual teacher candidates study local community language and literacies by adopting previously learned research methods. These methods are highly recommended for future urban teacher preparation programs. Ch. 2 reports on a study of the role of Rasul's, a forty-year-old Black bookstore, using a sociocultural and ethnographic approach to reveal this store's counterpublic traditions. Ch. 3 deals with two separate qualitative studies from a critical sociocultural perspective, analyzing narrative and identity development. In Ch. 4, results of a study of thirteen CLIP (a community literacy program for African American middle and high school youth) scholars are examined to show how racial identity construction is realized when confronting whiteness.

Part II concerns teaching and teacher education. Ch. 5 explores how eight early childhood teachers utilize multicultural abilities to solve conflicts and struggles in a diverse urban community, using the idea of Freirean cultural circles. From a poststructural perspective, Ch. 6 focuses on the importance of critical literacy in the curricular and pedagogical practices of teachers who teach adolescent literature in urban schools. Ch. 7 is a study of how incarcerated or formerly incarcerated girls use playwriting and performance to resist constitutional power. Teachers and teacher educators should be aware of opportunities for youth, especially girls of color, in the classroom “through innovative writing activities that are based in collaboration, performance, dialogue, empathy, and reflection” (140).

Part III includes studies of popular culture and forms of multimodality. Ch. 8 uses the example of P4P (Poetry for People) to explain theories of empowerment and critical pedagogy in the complexities of teaching and learning in classrooms. Ch. 9 reports a case study of one high school teacher who engages with hip hop in the classroom. This critical pedagogy can convey its resistance tradition into classroom discussion so as to improve students' academic achievements. In Ch. 10, two kinds of vernacular literacies, text messages and Twitter conversations by youth of color, are revealed to show their identities in online spaces. This chapter also features pedagogical methods and literacy practices for teachers. This book is groundbreaking for contemporary urban literacy research and would be an asset to students and researchers interested in this topic.