Courtney B. Cazden is the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, Emerita, Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA. She is a member of the National Academy of Education, a recipient of a Fulbright research fellowship to study minority education in New Zealand, and a past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education and of the American Association for Applied Linguistics.

• Introduction: Beginnings and endings: An intergenerational conversation, Allan Luke and Courtney B. Cazden Section I Communicative competence 1. Problems for education: Language as curriculum content and learning environment, Cazden 2. How knowledge about language helps the classroom teacher, or does it? A personal account, Cazden 3. Vygotsky, Hymes, and Bakhtin: From word to utterance and voice, Cazden 4. Socialization, Cazden 5. ‘Analyses’ and ‘interpretations’: Are they complementary?, Cazden 6. Dell Hymes's construct of "communicative competence", Cazden Section II Classroom interaction 7. Peer dialogues across the curriculum, Cazden 8. Spontaneous repairs in Sharing Time narratives: The intersection of metalinguistic awareness, speech event, and narrative style, Cazden, Michaels, and Tabors 9. Spontaneous and scientific concepts: Learning punctuation in the first grade, Cordeiro, Giacobbe, and Cazden 10. A Vygotskian interpretation of Reading Recovery, Clay and Cazden 11. Visible and invisible pedagogies in literacy education, Cazden 12. Two meanings of ‘culture’ in formal education, Cazden Section III Educational equity 13. Language, power and development: The significance of doing what comes UNnaturally, Cazden 14. The New York Teachers Union: A very short history, Cazden 15. A descriptive study of six high school Puente classrooms, Cazden 16. Teacher and student attitudes on racial issues: The complementarity of practitioner research and outsider research, Cazden 17. The value of principled eclecticism in education reform: 1965–2005, Cazden 18. A framework for social justice in education, Cazden

"This is a thought-provoking and challenging book to review from the perspective of voice professionals. Practiced linguists would find more technical and theoretical references easier to access, and elementary and high school teachers would have more experience to view the kinds of classroom experiences and decisions that are recounted."-Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer, Voice and Speech Review