This paper examines the civic and literacy practices that emerged through virtual feminista pláticas between Adri, a first-year college student and graduate of a “newcomers” high school, and her former teacher. Amidst a context in which transnational and immigrant youth often struggle to find a sense of belonging in educational and civic spaces, this article reveals the importance of relationships and spaces built on trust, care, and the co-construction of knowledge in which multilingual recently arrived youth can elevate their voices. I draw from transcripts of over seven hours of translingual virtual feminista pláticas. I draw on the concepts of border thinking (Anzaldúa, 2012, 2015; Mignolo, 2000) and futurity literacies from the margins (Cervantes-Soon, 2024) to deepen our understandings of speculative civic literacies (Mirra & Garcia, 2022). Findings reveal how Adri drew upon her border thinking to critically interrogate a deeply unjust global context and to imagine alternative futures for herself and her communities. This work highlights the epistemic ingenuity of transnational youth like Adri and the civic and literacy practices that can emerge through methodologies and pedagogies that recognize that ingenuity.

As recent history has shown, an information ecology polluted with fake news, mis/disinformation, and conspiracy theories can breed division, anxiety, and hatred—forces that pose profound challenges to nurturing a civically engaged, democratic citizenry. But is that always the case? The satirical conspiracy movement Birds Aren’t Real offers a curious example of how a faux conspiracy theory—that birds were replaced by avian drones to spy on Americans starting in the 1960s—can counterintuitively create counterpublics that engage in democratic civic action across digital platforms and real life but do so by actively increasing the noise in the system. Guided by Moncada’s theoretical work on vigilantism, this critical content analysis of Birds Aren’t Real describes how Bird Truthers enact vigilante civic literacies, authentic forms of youth-led activism in which literacy practices are deployed outside of and/or against institutional constraints in the service of collective, democratic good. Through this study, the authors suggest that beyond merely integrating Birds Aren’t Real into classroom media literacy lessons, ELA classrooms can become civic-minded counterpublics in their own right—spaces where students’ literacies are mobilized to interrogate institutional power, imagine alternative futures, and engage in novel forms of civic participation.

This article discusses early literacy instruction in China, including the impact of biliteracy education on Chinese society. This presentation is based on interviews with over two dozen scholars of Chinese literacy instruction, as well as primary early grades language arts classroom teachers from four different regions across China. The purpose of this examination of literacy education in China is to open our views of literacy instruction beyond US borders, especially in those countries with different language/literacy systems. Because of the rapid increase of emergent bilingual students in our schools, we need to gain a better understanding of literacy and biliteracy education in the countries where those students grew up. On the one hand, this insight can help us realize the literacy practices that emergent bilingual students may bring to their learning in our classrooms and the importance of biliteracy as a requisite for our education. On the other hand, this understanding will urge us, both researchers and educators, to reexamine our beliefs and scholarship in reading or literacy education, and open our vision to the plurality of languages, multiple literacies, and diverse methods of literacy instruction beyond our land.

An equitable education for linguistically minoritized and racialized-Othered youth fosters their biliteracy and critical consciousness about racial ideologies. Yet little is known about how or whether secondary-level dual-language bilingual-education programs and teachers seek to enhance students’ critical consciousness—especially as a means of grappling with racist ideologies. Drawing together literacy and race studies in education, I theorize a continuum of racial literacies, then employ it to examine dual-language curriculum and instruction practices. I use interview and classroom-observation data to reveal that a racially diverse dual-language program offered more racial-literacy practices on the hegemonic end of the continuum than the counterhegemonic end. Using teachers’ practices as an index of their program’s stance on racial literacy, I argue that the program provided a whitestream bilingual education: it offered biliteracy schooling through hegemonic racial-literacy practices that perpetuate white supremacy. The teachers’ successes and challenges speak to the need for structural attention to resources, training, and program-wide support for critical-racial-literacy practices. I conclude the article by joining calls for bilingual education to enhance youths’ critical-racial consciousness, adding racial to signal the need to be intentional in teaching about and countering racism, colonialism, and imperialism.

Literacy learning is an ideological proposition, one that privileges certain forms of language and those who speak them above others. This qualitative study utilizes critical metaphor analysis () to examine the literacy ideologies at work in a secondary remedial reading class. By analyzing the speech of Mr. Baker, a seasoned remedial reading teacher, and his ninth-grade student Angelica, three dominant metaphors in the corpus are explored: READING CLASS IS A RACE, LEARNING TO READ is a journey, and STUDENTS ARE MACHINES. Findings suggest both the limitations of the metaphors employed by participants as well as the utility of critical metaphor analysis in uncovering the ideological underpinnings of school-based literacy practices.

Anti-immigrant legal violence and grassroots organizing against it have fundamentally shaped the lives of immigrant children and families in the US. This article inquires into the intergenerational literacy, teaching, and learning practices of Latinx immigrants’ political mobilization, drawing on qualitative data from a larger yearlong practitioner inquiry study that involved observant participant field notes, artifacts, photographs, and in-depth interviews with 11 undocumented and documented Latinx immigrants with whom I, a Latina immigrant, shared an organizing practice. Through analysis grounded on literacy as critical sociocultural practice, intergenerational learning, and Chicana/Latina education in everyday life, I argue that Latinx immigrants mobilize against oppression through critical literacy practices that facilitate what I theorize as a “communal pedagogy of resistance.” This is an intergenerational pedagogy enacted in communal spaces that grows from Latinx immigrants’facultad,meaning the critical consciousness and epistemic privilege that results from living in the liminal space of theborderlands. This pedagogy views our community’s cultural, literacy, and linguistic practices as strengths and tools of resilience and resistance, and expands our definition of family and our sense of interdependence to fellow oppressed communities, teaching us to enact inclusive justice. A key takeaway is that Latinx immigrant students’ educational and literacy practices cannot be separated from those of their wider family/community, nor from their intergenerational sociopolitical struggles and expertise. Another is that intergenerational literacy and learning are bi/multidirectional. Implications include the need for educational institutions to learn from this pedagogy, and for additional literacy research into communal sociopolitical mobilization.

Writing studies scholars have long examined how race- and class-based hierarchies shape teachers’ and students’ experiences of writing in US universities. But universities are also workplaces that profit from a racialized writing economy in which laborers of color () underpin writing production. Drawing from a yearlong qualitative case study that examines the writing practices of university custodial workers, this article addresses the following research questions: What kinds of writing do university custodial workers use and practice? What are the conditions for their writing? And what do these practices and conditions tell us about writing in race- and class-stratified workplaces, including educational institutions? Using critical race (; ; ; ; ; ; ) approaches to literacy sponsorship (), and observations and interviews with university custodians, this article discusses two main findings: (1) labor conditions restrict participants’ writing as a part of race and class hierarchies; and (2) the participants employ writing practices that run under the radar of institutional restrictions to serve their own purposes. This study’s findings have implications for workplace writing scholarship and higher education policy, because they expand definitions of and purposes for workplace writing in institutions of education.

<p>Video making and sharing have the potential to represent attitude in powerful ways and have become everyday literacy practices for many children. Research has only recently attended to the multimodal grammars of attitudinal meaning that characterize filmic media, while providing few examples of the successful teaching of these semiotic principles to elementary students. This article reports original research conducted in two schools over two years with elementary students (ages 9 to 11 years). It examines students' application of semiotic knowledge of the appraisal framework to communicate attitudinal meanings multimodally through film. Attitudinal meanings in the appraisal framework are categorized as affect, judgment, or appreciation, and can be communicated through discourse and multimodal texts. The students learned to configure multiple modes, including speech, written text, image, gaze, facial expressions, body movement, posture, gesture, and sound, to communicate attitude in their films. The findings provide an exemplar for the teaching and analysis of students' filmmaking that applies systematic, multimodal grammars for communicating attitude. The findings are significant because interpersonal language is a major semiotic system of English, and visual texts now feature prominently in digital communication environments. </p>

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Threshold concept theory can identify transformative concepts in disciplinary communities of practice, making it a useful framework pedagogically for scholars of academic literacies. Although researchers have studied how to teach thres hold concepts and how students have taken up theseconcepts in learning to write, few have looked at two aspects that are particularly important for students placed into basic writing: threshold concepts of reading and questions of learning transfer.Taking an epistemological approach to disciplinary literacies, I used case study research to trace the changing reading and writing practices of Bruce, a basic writing and first-generation college student, during his first year of college as he moved from a basic reading course into biochemis-try. Bruce leveraged audience awareness to write rhetorically and to comprehend difficult texts written for professional biochemistry researchers. Findings show that audience awareness is a threshold concept of reading, one that transforms academic literacy practices and that furthersidentity in disciplinary communities of practice. These findings support the teaching of audience awareness in secondary and postsecondary classrooms, but they also demand that we recognize the additional work basic writing students, like Bruce, must do to establish agency in a system that has labeled them underprepared.

Several writing studies have affirmed the literacies of young Black men in schooling contexts in humanizing ways, which has importantly moved us beyond rationalizing their literacy practices in educational spaces. Less of this important research has directly focused on young Blackmen who are deemed academically high-achieving in traditional English language arts (ELA)classrooms. Thus, academically high-achieving young Black men are often silent in literacy education and research; they have “untold stories,” as described by Shawn, the focal student inthis critical ethnographic case study. In an effort to provide literacy supports for these students and their ELA educators, I developed a consequential literacy pedagogy. In this article, I focuson consequential writing—one product of the consequential literacy pedagogy. Consequential writing concurrently develops academic and critical literacies. This layered literacy approach is intentionally developed by, for, and with historically marginalized communities to equip them to act against inequity within and beyond academic spaces through the learning, teaching, and sharing of writing. The current study cultivated consequential writing with a Black male student through a critical approach to metaphor. Metaphor is ideal for developing consequential writing due to its ability to simultaneously engage critical, creative, and cognitive literacies. In this paper,I address the following research question: How did an academically high-achieving Black male secondary student utilize the generative power of metaphor to cultivate consequential writing?Next, I illuminate the transferability of this work to support ELA educators in cultivating consequential writing with students beyond this study. Finally, I discuss some unintended consequences of consequential writing for Black youth in academic spaces that do not honor their lives or minds.

This article describes an after-school family literacy program as a model of multiliterate collaboration under and against English Only and anti-immigrant conditions. The model reveals how state politics surrounding language, ethnicity, and citizenship may interact with the activity systems of family literacy programs to redefine what counts as sanctioned language and literacy learning within school spaces. This article details the findings of a qualitative study and includes the goals and curriculum of the program, as well as the recruiting mechanisms, participants, participant feedback, and participant experiences. Findings from the study reveal the role of parental investment in language and literacy learning, language co-construction, and honoring of all languages, cultures, and experiences. This family literacy model contributes to literacy studies by offering possibilities for future school-sponsored, multiliterate family literacy research collaborations to draw from and extend the language and literacy practices and funds of knowledge of ELL students, parents, teachers, and literacy scholars working within English Only and anti-immigrant contexts.

Multimodal composing can activate literacy practices and identities not typically privileged in verbocentric English classrooms, and students’ identities as particular kinds of learners (e.g.,“visual artist”) may propel—or limit—their engagement in classroom work, including in multimodal composing. Although researchers have studied the ways multimodal projects can evidence literacy learning and have argued that identity is negotiated, improvisational, and hybrid, they have offered few sustained analyses of the processes by which identities evolve during and across multimodal composing tasks. By examining how students position themselves and one another as particular kinds of learners over time, researchers can better understand the ways in which multimodal tasks help students explore new skills and roles or reify old ones. Drawing on an approach to discourse analysis from the linguistic anthropology of education, we trace the pathways of three 12th graders’ learner identities across two events as they worked in a group to compose visual responses to literary texts for their English class. We examine how one student’s robust identity as an artist emerged in tandem with the devaluing of other participants’ artist identities. Seven weeks later, these positionings led her to act as the painting’s primary author and other students to act in increasingly perfunctory ways. We call for teachers and researchers to consider how students’ identities—interacting with factors such as the teacher’s expectations for group work and the affordances of particular media and materials for collaboration—drive students’ participation in and ownership of multimodal compositions.

This article discusses findings from two interconnected ethnographic studies on the out-of-school literacy practices of Black adolescent males: 18-year-old Khaleeq from the US Northeast, and 18-year-old Rendell from the US Midwest. The data analyzed derive from their engagements in nonschool, community-based, social justice initiatives that, we argue, represent rejections of deficit narratives about who they are (their racialized and gendered identities) and what they allegedly cannot do (their literacy capacities and capabilities). Utilizing a critical literacy approach that attends to out-of-school contexts, race, and counternarratives allows us to demonstrate how they questioned narratives of failure that unfairly place blame on Black youth and not on the structural inequalities endemic to US society. These narratives include (among others): the widening gap in achievement and high school graduation rates between Black and White male students in the United States; the school-to-prison pipeline and increasing drop-out and push-out rates that impact high school–aged Black males; and the overrepresentation of Black males in special education classes. Khaleeq and Rendell used literacies to question these racialized narratives and their consequences, and to produce counternarratives to negative assumptions about Black adolescents. As a result, we focus on how they cultivated their literacies, nurtured their spirits, and charted their own trajectories within community spaces when school was not enough. This analysis offers implications for how literacy practitioners and researchers can narrow the school community divide by lovingly attending to the out-of-school literacies of Black adolescents.

This article takes up an area of central concern for educators in an era of global connectivity: howto account for the mobility of people, texts, and practices while simultaneously addressing persistent educational inequalities. In attending to the ways people participate in unequal globalized contexts,even educational contexts constructed to bring students and teachers together, we examine how resources such as time, space, materials, national identity, genre, and language are all unequally distributed and unequally ordered in various hierarchies. We propose the notion of scale to offer literacy researchers a flexible conceptual tool with which to examine educational inequities by capturing how movement and mobility are not simple processes of relocation; rather, literacies and texts are always dynamically constructed in relation to hierarchical orders of varying spatial and temporal dimensions. Through multisited ethnography, we engage in a scalar analysis of teachers’ cross-cultural collaborations to illustrate how they produced various categories of space and time (e.g., local, national, global) through routine literacy engagements. In explaining how different scales are invoked, implicated, and constructed in interaction, we find that participants engaged in six scalar moves-upscaling, downscaling, aligning, contesting, anchoring, and embedding-and offer these in response to the pressing need to develop sensitive analytical toolsthat can bring to the surface the ways inequalities are inscribed in literacy practices and texts.Implications of conceptualizing scaling as literacy activity include disrupting smooth narratives of global connectedness in educational collaborations and highlighting the multiscalar nature of all literacy practice.

Much of the research on youth digital literacies relies on the experiences of exceptional cases, while less is known about more typical youth who share their writing in online spaces. Through the examination of a novice writer in an online space, this article explores the convergence of factors shaping young people’s networked writing and addresses recent critique of the New London Group’s(1996) Designs of Meaning framework. Data were gathered during a two-year ethnographic investigation of an online affinity space, The Sims Writers’ Hangout, and analyzed through a Designs of Meaning lens. Data sources include the writer’s posts on the site, responses she received from others, her Sims fan fiction texts, interview responses, and researcher field notes. Findings of this study make visible the multiple factors influencing this writer’s choices, revealing how Available Designs from within and outside the site shaped her creations and how she leveraged her online participation to Design products that met the expectations of this audience. This analysis contributes to the field’s understanding of how online affinity spaces influence youth digital literacy practices and argues that a Design perspective makes such shaping more visible. The article also argues for a more complicated notion of affinity space audiences as collaborators, rather than just supportive reviewers. These findings suggest the need for continued study of typical participation in online spaces and future research to examine networked writing within classroom contexts.

Educational literacy scholars have demonstrated the rich possibilities of the English language arts, and of queer-inclusive and critical literacy practices in particular, to disrupt heteronormativity and affirm gender and sexual diversity (GSD). However, there are few empirical studies that report what’s involved in preparing literacy teachers to organize classrooms in which recommendations for inclusive practice can land safely. In this article, we provide an account of what happened when we endeavored to prepare a group of secondary preservice literacy teachers for GSD-inclusive education in the context of a university-based literacy methods course and the negotiation of discomfort that ensued. Drawing on queer theoretical perspectives and Kumashiro’s (2001) framework of anti-oppressive education—which figures an important relationship among the concepts of desire, resistance, and crisis in unlearning common sense—we explore how the methods curriculum put many students into a state of emotional crisis. The sources of participants’ discomfort included learning that teachers have been complicit with the oppression of queer youth and wrestling with questions about how to bring their commitments to GSD-inclusive literacy instruction to bear in practice. Our findings suggest that participants who were willing to move toward their discomfort—what we call a deliberate move to lean in—positioned themselves to become strong advocates for queer youth. We argue that emotional discomfort should be figured as a productive tension in queer interventions in English education. Toward that end, we offer leaning in as a generative tool for grappling with the dynamics of heterosexism, homophobia,and broader oppression.

A growing body of research suggests that adolescents’ reading identities play a significant role in how they make decisions about their involvement with classroom literacy practices. In this yearlong study in an eighth-grade English classroom, I used a formative design to consider how an instructional model intended to support students’ reading identities and development influenced their talk about classroom reading practices. I closely followed five students with varying reading identities and abilities, documenting how they talked about texts within the context of the instruction they received. I found that both the quality and quantity of students’ talk shifted over the course of the study. All students, but particularly those with reading difficulties and negative reading identities, increased how often they talked about texts. They also changed the ways they spoke about texts, shifting from asking questions primarily about assignments to asking more questions about the content they were reading about. However, as students began to change their talk, others responded by attempting to silence them or limit what they said. This study shows that while teachers can create a context that helps students reconstruct their reading identities, they will need to foster a climate where students support each other’s growth as readers and development of reading identities. Therefore, changing the habitus as it relates to reading and being a reader becomes the responsibility of everyone in the class.

Textbooks are commonly used to teach English in Africa, and most often are designed either by Westerners who are native speakers or by the Western-trained educators who took over the education of Africa’s children after colonialism. The issue is whether these educators can emancipate learners through the curricular choices they make in the versions of textbooks endorsed by their governments. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This article examines the content of nonfiction passages in four textbook series that have been used or are currently in use for English language and literacy education in Anglophone Cameroon to understand the shift in educational philosophies that might have occurred between the colonial period of the first textbook and the modern globalization period of current textbooks. It also questions the criteria for selection of passages to be included in these textbooks and their possible ramifications for learners’ identities as Africans,Cameroonians, and global citizens. Informed by postcolonialism, with a particular bent toward decolonial theory, the study utilizes content analysis, a qualitative research method that validates textual interpretations through inference (Krippendorf, 2004) and that seeks to understand meanings embedded in texts and their sociocultural/political significance. Findings reveal that while the Oxford English Readers for Africa of the colonial times are long gone, this series’ ideology of white superiority lingers in contemporary textbooks. They also reveal that there is an attempt to standardize cultural practices and belief systems based on Western models. This draws attention to minority rights, reminding educators to acknowledge pluralism in their literacy practices.

Literacy scholars have long studied migrant literacies in host countries, but have largely overlooked how emigration shapes literacy learning in migrants’ homelands. Yet homelands are crucial site sof literacy research, as left-behind family members of migrants learn new literacy practices to communicate with loved ones laboring or studying abroad. This article examines this overlooked phenomenon by reporting on an ongoing qualitative study of migrants’ family members and return migrants in a midsized town in Brazil. Further developing a sociomaterial framework for transnational literacy, it demonstrates that emigration promotes literacy learning among homeland residents via the circulation of “writing remittances”—the hardware, software, and knowledge about communication media that migrants often remit home. As objects of emotional and economic value, writing remittances demand literacy learning as one condition of their exchange. Because such learning, like money, is fungible, homeland residents often circulate and reinvest it locally, with varying returns. Writing remittances mediate both intimate interpersonal communication and the larger context of global economic inequity in which migrant families are implicated, making such remittances rich sites of print and digital literacy practice across borders.

English educators are contending with the proliferation of mobile devices in students’ lives, and with the imminent integration of mobile devices into classrooms. Concurrently, literacy researchers using social semiotic theories of multimodality to investigate adolescents’ digital composing have focused on screens, paying scant attention to the bodies moving with them. Responding to recent critiques of multimodality that have centered on a lack of attention to embodiment and affect, this article leverages the concept of real virtualities to avoid artificially bifurcating screen and body, and to contribute a beginning theorization of the embodied experience of composing with mobile devices, which includes feeling-histories, affective atmospheres, and the felt experience of time. The data analyzed in this article come from a 12-week enrichment course in which five adolescents composed digital narratives with iPods. The overarching analysis describes all literacy practices with mobile devices in the course, and the microanalysis, using multimodal interaction analysis, compares two students with contrasting histories of mobile device use. Findings show these students’ literacies as more body-centered than techno-centered, and evince tensions between institutionalized learning environments and adolescents’ affective, cultural histories of being mobile while engaged in literacy. Further, findings describe how the feeling of tools and semiotic material influenced the trajectories of students’ bodies and narratives. Theories of digital composition should continue expanding to account for connections between mobility and affect, and the pedagogical importance of motility. The changing nature of literacy in the milieu of mobile computing compels researchers to consider the role of the moving, feeling body in literacy with more scrutiny.

The 2013 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year's award recipients, Maureen Kendrick, Margaret Early, and Walter Chemjor, for their article Integrated Literacies in a Rural Kenyan Girls' Secondary School Journalism Club, which appeared in the May 2013 issue of RTE (Vol. 47, No. 4). This qualita- tive study examines an after-school journalism club held at an all-girls school in Kenya and reveals the ways that literacy practices can foster professionalization and identity formation for students. Kendrick et al. apply Turner's (1967) notion of liminality the realm of pure possibility (qtd. p. 395) to understand the transformation they witnessed in the students, especially in relation to the pres- ence of such materials as digital voice recorders and press passes. These items, in terms of Blommaert's (2003) theorizing of placed resources, assume a particular, local, situated meaning within the context of the club: they empower the students to do investigative journalism in their school and community. The intersection of a liminal space with placed resources allowed the girls to move from performance to competence in their journalistic roles, resulting in transformed identities. This study pushes all educators to consider the classroom as liminal space in order to locate and support such transformative literacy practices and opportunities.We applaud the authors' self-reported shift from a sole emphasis on the po- tential of the donated digital communication to facilitate students' acquisi- tion of digital literacies (p. 393) to the wider exploration of the journalism club as a resource-infused place that afforded the development of integrated literacy practices and experimentation along with new writer identities of empowerment (p. 394). Such a move celebrates the persistent agency of students and teachers who, together in their given space, make sense of the tools available-be they digital recorders, press passes, books, or standardized tests. Further, Kendrick et al. suggest that in making sense of those tools and how they might authentically be put to use, the teacher and his students also make sense of themselves as users of these ideologically rich tools.We particularly appreciate Kendrick et al.'s description of the students' meaning-making process as play; they take interest in students' experimentation with the resources made available to them and with the identities associated with those tools. In this conceptualization of what happens in the journalism club, the students and their play are ultimately more important than the particular tools with which they play. …

This essay explores the lived literacy experiences of four multilingual immigrant writers in the US, showing first, how they have moved their literacy practices among multiple languages andlocations in the world, and second, how these practices have been destabilized and redefined by the social contexts they have met along the way. Aiming to unsettle the assumed durability ofliteracy practices on the move, the essay argues that multilingual literacy practices do indeed travel with writers across locations and languages, but to uncertain effect. These multilingualpractices appear to be too contingent on social dynamics to be easily accessed and deployed. Thus, even when writers migrate with fully developed multilingual repertoires—including fluency in English—they do not always experience the social mobility often promised.

This article draws on a four-year practitioner research study of a university partnership with an all-boys public elementary school to analyze students’ socially situated literacy practices thatoccurred on the margins of a curriculum driven by high-stakes testing. We bring together critical literacy (Freire, 2007; Janks, 2010; Luke, 2000), realist theory (Alcoff, 2006; Mohanty, 1997;Moya, 2001), and Gramsci’s (1971) conception of the organic intellectual to provide a layered framework for understanding how students at our research site mobilized their cultural identitiesfor critical ends, what we define as “organic critical literacies.” Through illustrative examples of third- and fourth-grade African American boys’ interactions with fiction and nonfiction texts,we examine how students critiqued common ideologies that devalued them, their school, and their city, and enacted more humanizing visions. The elementary students whose work we featurewere realizing their capacities as emerging organic intellectuals, translating their singular critical insights and observations into a broader dialogue that had more universal resonance. Weconclude by discussing the educational, epistemological, and ethical implications of our study.

Within this ethnographic case study, I examine the ways that a Migrant Head Start program failed to build on the funds of language and literacy knowledge of a group of socioculturally and linguistically marginalized preschool children. Using a literacy-as-social-practice lens, I explore the children’s early literacy knowledge by focusing on the ways that reading and writing mediate the lives of the migrant farmworker community—their parents’ and community members’ lives. Observational and interview data analysis revealed literacy practices in the migrant camps that reflected their lives of bureaucratic regulation, family and community relationships, and spirituality in the migrant camps. Participant observation in the Migrant Head Start program revealed a school-based focus on only surface features of early literacy, delivered in an unfamiliar language and reflecting culturally specific beliefs and values about literacy practice that did not match those of most of the children. Analysis also revealed the ways that literacy practice among the migrant farmworkers moved and changed as the individual life experiences of the families changed, particularly in relation to increased geographic permanence over time.

The Education for All policy is one of the Indonesian government’s solutions to return children who work in the street to formal schooling. Unfortunately, access to higher education, which can enable vertical mobility for these children, is constrained by many factors, including financial opportunities. This study examines the constructions of future selves through street children’s writing about their future careers, or cita-cita, in a writing activity conducted on a street median in Bandung, Indonesia. Through analysis of four focal children’s writings and observations of and interviews with the children and their parents, the study juxtaposes the children’s imagined future selves with the “realistic selves” revealed through their accounts as well as through their parents’ understandings of higher education circumstances in Indonesia. This study hopes to enrich the New Literacy Studies framework by examining literacy practices in a setting of urban poverty and their role in the construction of identity within the reproduction of schooling discourse.

In this article, we show how two transnational youth, with the instructional support of their teacher, recruited their languages and lifeworlds, particularly their border-crossing experiences, as tools for engaging with school-based literacy practices. We analyze literary texts that the students composed, showing how the students’ uses of their linguistic repertoires and experiences of border-crossing enhanced their compositions. Through our study, we seek to contribute a more thorough understanding of the combinations of student agency and teacher support that permit secondary school literacy learning to become a bridge from students’ past experience, existing knowledge, and everyday lifeworlds into work that is visible and valued in the world of school. More particularly, we offer border zones as an analytic framework for several dimensions of school literacy work for our focal students, and also as a potentially useful framework for curriculum and instruction.

Despite a growing awareness among teachers of the importance of recognizing and valuing a broader range of students’ literate resources and experiences, including those that are culturally and linguistically linked, in many language arts classrooms students’ literacy practices continue to be marginalized—remaining peripheral to, if not at odds with, the central work of the classroom. This ethnographic study, featuring a sixth-grade African American girl, examined one such case of marginalization that occurred in an urban English language arts classroom during an integrated novel study unit. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, the study considers how a student-authored play showcasing cultural and linguistic resources disrupted the planned curriculum and how tensions were negotiated by the teacher, student, and researcher. In spite of the student’s efforts and the teacher’s best intentions, hegemonic centripetal forces resisted and ultimately marginalized students’ literate interests and agendas in this classroom. Recommendations from this research include planning on, and for, dialogism by deliberately structuring curricula so there is both time and space for students’ literate interests, resources, and abilities.

Young adults represent the most avid users of social network sites, and they are also the most concerned with their online identity management, according the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Madden, 2012). These practices represent important literate activity today, as individuals who are writing online learn to negotiate interfaces, user agreements, and personal data, as well as rhetorical situations. Examining the social, technological, and structural factors that influence digital literacy practices in online environments is crucial to understanding the impact of these sites on writing practices. Applying Brooke’s (2009) concept of an “ecology of practice” to writing in digital environments, this article examines the digital literacy practices of one undergraduate student through his self-presentation strategies. In considering the roles that social network sites play in individuals’ literacy and identity practices, writing researchers and educators can better understand the literacy practices that students engage in outside of the classroom and the experiences they bring to their academic writing.

In this methodological and theoretical article, we address the need for more cross-case work on studies of literacy in use within different social and cultural contexts. The Cultural Practices of Literacy Study (CPLS) project has been working on a methodology for cross-case analyses that are principled in that the qualitative nature of each case, with its layers of context and interpretive meaning making by the researcher, is maintained while still allowing for data aggregation across cases. We present a model of a literacy practice that emerged from this work as one that may contribute to the work of other literacy researchers who are looking for theoretically driven ways to analyze and interpret ethnographic accounts of literacy practice on a larger scale and to answer questions about literacy practice across studies. We describe our theoretically based coding scheme, as well as the development of a large ethnographic database of literacy practices data and the technical aspects of lifting ethnographic data into a large database. We also provide a description of a pilot cross-case analysis as an example of the promise of such qualitative cross-case databases.

In this article, I consider the literacy practices that emerged in an in-school elective course centered in the literacy tradition of African American women. Drawing from spatial perspectives (Leander & Sheehy, 2004), I explore what it means to consider this course an “Other space” (Foucault, 1986), as a space created without the constraints of a mandated curriculum or standardized test pressures and as a space informed by an understanding of the connections among literacies, lived experiences, and identities. Through the presentation and analysis of five vignettes, I consider how the students shaped the course to their own ends and pursued agentive literacy work resonant with the epistemologies in the literacy tradition of African American women. While I situate these contributions and literacy practices within Black feminist and postpositivist realist theories of identities, I contend their full measure cannot be understood without a look at the physical aspects of the space, the travel of texts into and out of it, and its relational and affective dimensions. I conclude with considerations for pursuing literacy pedagogies attentive to social identities and for creating ”Other spaces” within a time of standardization and testing.

This ethnographic study explored the ways in which media, particularly television, connected with English language and literacy practices among Sudanese refugees in Michigan. Three families with young children participated in this study. Data collection included participant observation, interviews, and collection of artifacts over 18 months, with a focus on television events as the units of analysis. Data analysis focused on television practices connected with literacy practices for adults and children. Results indicated that television offered important cultural connections with participants’ beliefs, values, and attitudes regarding their Sudanese heritage, the new U.S. context, and religious practices. Both adults and children believed television was an important resource for learning and recognized potential problems with too much viewing. Most significantly, analysis suggested important connections between television practices and the development of both English language abilities for all family members and the development of real-world literacy practices, especially for the children.

In this article, the author takes a close look at the discursive ways that Black and Latina preservice teachers reconcile tensions between their racial and linguistic identities and the construction of teacher identities in the current context of preservice teacher education in the United States.Through the study of language as representative of teacher identities, the author presents a critical discourse analysis of the language and literacy practices of Black and Latina preserviceteachers “all nonstandard language and dialect speakers” across diverse contexts within and beyond the university and school setting. This examination of their literacy and language practices elucidated a move beyond marginalization and inferiority toward agency and linguistic hybridity.

In what ways can teachers incorporate young people’s home and community literacy practices into classrooms when such practices vastly differ from the teachers’ literacy experiences? How can teacher education curriculum and teaching influence teachers’ pedagogical practices? How can children’s roles be pedagogically reframed and become meaningful strengths in classrooms? Grounded in these interrelated research questions, this article documents some of the influences of Freirean culture circle as an approach to inservice teacher education on the ways in which two Head Start teachers and a teacher educator negotiated and navigated within and across home and school literacy practices, co-creating a curriculum based on generative themes and making early education meaningful to children from multiple backgrounds. Further, it proposes that conducting extensive ethnographic studies is not a prerequisite to creating pedagogical spaces that honor children’s home literacy practices and cultural legacies. Findings indicate that as teachers seek to build on young children’s language and literacy strengths, it is pedagogically beneficial to engage in documenting glimpses of home literacy practices within and across contexts while simultaneously challenging and (re)positioning ethnocentric definitions of literacy by engaging young children as authentic curriculum designers.

Changing Conceptions and Uses of Computer Technologies in the Everyday: This study focused on 189 sixth and seventh graders in two large suburban schools and their use of computer technologies as part of their everyday literacy practices. We were especially interested in the students’ conceptions of computer technologies and how computer use varied across grade and reading levels. Findings showed that many students, especially sixth graders, were far less interested in computer technologies than is suggested by common conceptions. Findings also showed an important shift between sixth and seventh graders toward more interest in practices that provided social interaction or entertainment.

This article examines the role of intergenerational relationships in the lives of experienced poets and writers (“soldiers”) and emerging poets and writers in what the author terms Participatory Literacy Communities (PLCs). Drawing from Wenger’s (1998) concept of communities of practice, the author uses data from two examples of PLCs—Black bookstore author events and spoken-word poetry “open mics”—to complicate notions of reciprocity and mentoring in the out-ofschool literacy practices of people of African descent. Three soldiering traditions are discussed: soldiers as literacy activists and advocates, soldiers as practitioners of the craft, and soldiers as historians of the word.

Drawing on data gathered during a seven-month study of the literacy practices of a group of White, working-class girls who have successfully navigated their high school’s English curriculum, this ethnography investigates (1) how gender and class influenced the girls’ uses of literacy in the classroom and (2) how the girls used texts from English class to construct gender.

The basics of child writing, as traditionally conceived, involve “neutral” conventions for organizing and encoding language. This “basic” notion of a solid foundation for child writing is itself situated in a fluid world of cultural and linguistic diversity and rapidly changing literacy practices.

This article reports results from a year-long study of the specific ways that children’s literacy practices enhanced their understanding of themselves and their social worlds in a classroom where they were encouraged to read, write, and talk about personally and socially relevant subjects. Throughout the school year the researchers documented the nature of classroom activities and the ways that they were taken up by children in their reading and writing practices. In response to various classroom activities and in relation to many out-of-school experiences, children’s reading and writing were found to function for them in a variety of personal and social ways, enabling them to understand the complex urban landscape they inhabited, to explore new roles and social identities, to wrestle with vexing social problems, and to envision ways of reconstructing their lives and their worlds. The strengths and limitations of this particular integration of action research and critical literacy are also discussed.