“The Schooling of Gestural Listening” attends to how gestural listening—defined as all of listening’s embodied manifestations, such as nodding and nonverbal backchanneling—is used, shaped, and then evaluated by school. The author shows how gestural listening is first leveraged to help students gain literacy, then disciplined into overly-restrained embodied norms, eventually fusing with notions of classroom management and student attitude. To illustrate this trajectory, the article draws upon Nicolas Philibert’s 2002 film Être et Avoir and the work of early literacy figures Marie Clay and Megan Watkins. Throughout, the essay argues that gestural listening’s relegation to an amalgamated landscape of “good” or “correct” conduct in school inordinately affects neurodiverse students. The author investigates this phenomenon by highlighting the writing of two students with self-disclosed ADHD diagnoses, and by engaging with scholars of neurodiversity and disability such as Melanie Yergeau, Shannon Walters, and Thomas Brown. By reminding readers of gestural listening’s affordances in early literacy acquisition, and its subsequent flattening by the process of schooling, this article ultimately aims to render it visible to educators once again, especially to those working in secondary and college environments where listening’s rich gestural register is often delimited to narrow perceptions of “correct” conduct.

Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the many connections between literacy education and citizenship production (e.g. Guerra, Wan). Despite often being neglected in conversations about literacy education and citizenship training, prison education programs and incarcerated students have a unique relationship to citizenship and can make an important contribution to that scholarship. By putting literacy studies in conversation with queer studies and critical prison studies, I argue that we as literacy educators and teachers can train ourselves to notice and push back against the harmful ideologies underlying the discourse around prison literacy education programs and citizenship education. This attention to language is essential because it has a material effect on the incarcerated students we teach, as well as the futures we imagine for our classes, programs, and the wider landscape of prison education.

Drawing on two accounts of information literacy, one from American students and another from teenaged Macedonian fake news makers, I argue that developing an information literacy reflective of the monetized and hierarchical nature of networks is paramount to writing and research. Focusing on the relationship between technological discourse—what is said about technology—and literacy—what people do with technology, I argue that recognizing the influence of corporations and differences between print and digital media are paramount for the development of information literacy.

While a great many educational institutions now take part in the complex network of English language learning, this article asks what an institution expressly created to respond to and spur the transnational movement of English language learners, Intensive English Programs (IEPs), can reveal about how literacy is taught and learned transnationally. Specifically, I examine how the transnational political economy of English literacy is negotiated discursively at one US-based IEP (Northwest IEP) through teacher and student talk. From this discourse analysis, I suggest that, in addition to the difficult and time-consuming tasks of language learning, students in my study were involved in and recipients of another, much less visible type of literacy management: the ongoing valuing and defining of each other’s prior literacy-related knowledge vis-à-vis their and other students’ access to global Englishes. Thus, Northwest IEP did more than situate students in relation to privileged English literacy. That institution also served as a broker for the shifting status and subsequent privileging of global Englishes. This dynamic gives insight into how multilingual spaces come to mediate the broader transnational political economy of English literacy. Ultimately, this research shows the value of looking into institutes at the periphery of US higher education, which broadens the field’s linguistic terrain to situate US-based composition as one of many actors across the transnational landscape of higher education.