Previous research has documented the potential of digital projects for immigrant students to capitalize on their transnational knowledge. Yet, there are only limited insights on the practices and perspectives of immigrant adults in digital/multimodal composition. In this article, we explore how visual media are used by adults and adolescents as resources in the production of digital texts, and as artifacts to elicit accounts and memories. We draw from transnational approaches to theorize the role of technology in facilitating connections with students’ home countries. We use social semiotics and testimonio lenses to examine media they selected to represent their hometowns in (or nearby) the Mexican state of Michoacán. Lastly, we adopt methods of practitioner inquiry and artifactual literacy to elicit information about participants’ understandings and choices in the composition process. Our findings show that while transnational ties were relevant for all participants, their understandings about their hometowns differed across generations. Adults represented the homeland as a source of healing and miracles, while youth focused on concerns about crime and corruption. We also document the complexities of access to visual media through search engines. We show the ways family networks, travel, and media consumption shaped the composition choices students made, as well as how their current circumstances, roles, and concerns led them to share testimonios of struggle and faith. We discuss contributions to digital writing research across generations, and implications for pedagogical practices that leverage students’ transnational ties and migration histories

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.

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.

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.

Teachers and students often express an aversion to poetry based on their experiences with printbased poetry texts that typically dominate school curricula. Given this challenge and the potential affordances of new and multimodal technologies, we investigate how preservice and inservice teachers enrolled in a new literacies master’s course began to interpret poetry multimodally, through PowerPoint.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, people began filing into a community movie theater in Oakland, California known for its alternative films and sofa seating. They had gathered to watch the digital stories created by young people from the community—three-to-five minute multi-media compositions consisting of a narrative recorded in the author’s voice accompanied by photographs, video, and music. The event began with a story by Randy, “Lyfe-n-Rhyme.” “Mama’s only son is mama’s only gun with a guillotine tongue,” rang one rhythmic powerful line, as images of Randy and his mother morphed into photographs of the county jail, while the music of Miles Davis floated in the background. So proceeded Randy’s social critique and commentary on life and opportunity, or the lack thereof, in his city and country.