This article describes the findings of our review process for core reading programs and provides a preliminary rubric emanating from this process for rating core reading programs. To our knowledge, this is the first published review of the current Reading First guidelines and includes all five components of scientifically based reading research (SBRR): phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. A research team independently examined all six core reading programs, completed a coding sheet, and recorded field notes. The research team was reliable in rating whether all five components were present and if the instructional routines were of good quality. Core programs aligned with Reading First shared several features that could support teachers in their mission to leave no child behind: a clearly articulated theoretical rationale for SBRR, explicit instructional strategies, and consistent instructional routines and organization.Most teachers are concerned that too many of their students have not acquired adequate literacy skills to enjoy reading and successfully complete grade-level work by the time they leave elementary school.

The term ‘intercultural’ (as in ‘intercultural creativity’) acknowledges the complexity of locations, identities, and modes of expression in a global world, and the desire to raise awareness, foster intercultural dialogue, and facilitate understanding across and between cultures. In a globalized world faced with unprecedented challenges, intercultural communication and dialogue is considered key to facilitating possibilities that, previously, might not have been available to us. In this chapter, we identify how intercultural creativity can be recognized and evaluated in the practice of community musicians. The notion of ‘translation’ is related to the interrogation, not only of what intercultural creativity is, but also how it is experienced. This chapter features the work of Netherlands-based Musicians without Borders and UK-based Music Action International, and the voice of a Malaysia-based composer working in an intercultural environment. We examine collaboration between diverse communities and musicians. The chapter concludes with implications for educating and developing the community musician.

In the phenomenon of the divided city – urban environments partitioned along ethno-religious lines as a result of war or conflict – projects seeking to bring segregated people together through community music activities face many operational and psychological obstacles. Divided cities are politically sustained, institutionally consolidated, and relentlessly territorialized by competing ethno-nationalist actors. They are highly resistant to peacebuilding efforts at the state level. This article uses an urban peacebuilding lens (peacebuilding reconceptualized at the urban scale that encompasses the spatial and social dimensions of ethno-nationalist division) to examine the work of community music projects in three divided cities. Through the examples of the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Mitrovica Rock School in Mitrovica, Kosovo, and Breaking Barriers (a pseudonym) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, we consider the context-specific practices and discourses that are deployed to navigate the local constraints on inter-communal cooperation, but that also contribute to the broader goal of building peace. We find that music-making is a promising strategy of peacebuilding at the urban scale, with both functional and symbolic contributions to make to the task of transforming an ethnoscape into a peacescape.

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