Every day in classrooms, teachers and students think about and with text. Their beliefs about what text is, who created it, and how to evaluate it are an influence, often a profoundly important one, on how they use text. This book brings together research on epistemology, belief systems, teacher beliefs, and text -- research that is usually presented separately, and in different disciplines. The editors illustrate what a cross-disciplinary body of work looks like, what varied insights are possible, and when the central concerns are beliefs and text.

Written by respected researchers in the fields of psychology and education, the chapters are clustered thematically into three sections:

* childrens' and adults' beliefs about text.

* beliefs about what should be taught and how particular content should be taught and assessed in classrooms.

* commentary on knowing versus believing, on the literatures that inform this body of work, and on belief systems.

The first to address this important topic in a single volume, this book provides an essential synthesis of current research in an active area of inquiry. The chapters are pieces framed in a time and place with particular intentions -- one of those intentions is that they separately and as a whole stimulate discussion about beliefs and text.