In this article, we explore how multilingual paraprofessional teachers and students broadened the construction of personhood through literacy instruction in an English-medium school located in a Mid-Southern, semi-rural US town. Drawing upon a study that blended practitioner inquiry with an ethnographic approach, we closely examine how the construction personhood in translanguaging read-alouds was broadened beyond dominant models of personhood—as monolingual and as having Eurocentric, middle-class, and adult-sanctioned knowledges. Our findings show how students and teachers constructed broader models of personhood by constructing a model of a multilingual speaker and reader as well as Latine, working-class, and childhood popular culture knowledges as highly valued and exciting attributes of being human. We conclude by discussing what kinds of interactions these moments could foreshadow and the implications of this work for researchers and teachers to understand how both discursive and contextual factors can contribute to broadening conceptions of personhood to provide children and youth with a greater sense of dignity and belonging in their literacy learning.

Argumentation, one of the foundational pillars of writing instruction in K–12 schools, is consistently framed in literacy policy, curriculum, and assessment as a crucial skill youth need to participate in democratic deliberation. Yet the normative emphases in argument discourse on individual subjectivity, binary analysis, and competitive social scarcity stifle the development of the solidarity and relationality needed to counter rancorous political discord and to build equitable civic futures. In this conceptual essay, the authors offer a reimagined paradigm and practice of argument that fosters empathetic thinking and mutuality, moving away from the conceptualization of argument as solitary edifice and toward a vision of argument as collective architecture. Drawing upon lessons from global communicative traditions and recent turns in literacy scholarship toward participatory design, multimodality, and critical speculation, the authors provide five guiding principles for the Argument Writing as Architecture (AWA) framework, share vignettes from classroom and community learning spaces to illustrate its utility, and propose strategies for its implementation in K–12 classrooms.

This project is an interdisciplinary endeavor to connect research in the teaching of English with Critical Disability Studies, an intersection that is crucial to disrupting ableism and creating more liberatory schooling and societal contexts that embrace broader notions of human differences. Invoking critical content analysis of five young adult novels that depict characters with Tourette syndrome (TS), we asked, how are various models for understanding “disability” invoked in YA fiction that depicts Tourette syndrome? How do these various models function to reinforce, complicate, or reconstruct in a more progressive way notions about human difference in YA fiction that depicts Tourette syndrome? We focused on one of the many pervasive tropes found within all five novels using the psychodynamic construct of splitting. In particular, we call attention to depictions of TS as embodying an animal—most often a dog—that splits off into the bad/dangerous side, usually subsumed within a character’s “normal self.” This trope can be seen as part of broader, historical discourses that have dehumanized disabled people, constructing them as “other” and subsequently rationalizing exclusionary practices. We advocate for and discuss ways for scholars and educators to continue integrating disability from the margins to the center in literacy research.

Language arts and literacy curricula around the world have been advocating for the teaching and learning of literature in multiple forms. However, apparently in much of classroom practice, little attention has been given to distinguishing the literary distinctiveness of multiple forms of ostensibly the same story. Developing an appreciation of the distinctive interpretive possibilities of multi-version literary narratives may be facilitated by semiotic analyses that indicate how the deployment of image, paralanguage, and language resources have been designed to orient the audience to particular interpretive options. Understanding how to analyze texts to determine such orientations is a crucial aspect of critical literacy. In this paper, we draw on systemic functional linguistics and its extension to the description of the meaning-making resources of image and paralanguage to focus on how differences in characterization are achieved in three versions of the story of Coraline.

This paper draws on Bakhtins notion of heteroglossia to expand theorizations of community translanguaging. Ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods are used to explore the multiple voices that multilingual elementary students adopted and adapted in their digital, translingual texts. Findings illustrate how children drew from multiple voices, including popular media, family collective memories, the school/teacher, peers, and heritage languages, and how they used those voices to recontextualize ideologies about language, literacy, and schooling and to participate in the social and academic work of the classroom. Implications for emerging theorizations of community translanguaging as well as design of more equitable pedagogical practices for multilingual learners are discussed.

The immigration of Black people from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to the United States can be described as a phenomenon that is not of recent origin (Konadu-Agyeman, Takyi, & Arthur, 2006). The review of legislative policies at the height of the Civil Rights movement in 1965 and the subsequent abolition of restrictive immigration laws made it possible for immigration from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to occur (Hamilton, 2020; Konadu-Agyeman & Takyi, 2006). Cultural practices, epistemologies, ontologies, semiotic resources, and axiologies have been introduced into these new environments as a result of these waves of Black migration (Amoako, 2006; Benson, 2006; Bryce-Laporte, 1972; Dei 2005; N’Diaye & N’Diaye, 2006; Shaw-Taylor & Tuch, 2007; Watson, 2020). This essay proposes the use of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding such phenomena. Black immigrant youth cultural practices and values are explored through Africana phenomenological theoretical perspectives and Sankofa and Tete wo bi kyere conceptual frameworks. This article highlights the importance of studying the experiences of Black immigrant youth through the use of African frameworks as crucial tools for investigating and understand the experiences of Black immigrant youth.

Although a growing body of research recognizes the importance of viewing argumentation as a means of understanding rather than combating others, little is known about how teachers cultivate this practice in classroom conversations when teaching argumentation. This study examines how argument can be taught in classroom discourse with an empathizing stance and generates associated pedagogical constructs. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, this study examines the key instructional events in an argumentative writing unit in two high school English language arts classes. The analysis demonstrates that the empathizing stance is introduced in the relationship between arguers and their warrants and the differences existing between arguers. It also generates four pedagogical constructs related to the teaching of argument with the stance: (1) identifying the connection between arguers’ warrants and backgrounds; (2) transposing oneself into others’ backgrounds; (3) exploring interlocutors’ common and divergent grounds; and (4) situating argument in a broader context. It concludes with a discussion of the affordances of teaching argument with an empathizing stance.

The recent speculative turn in literacy, English education, and other ELA-related fields has brought renewed energy for redesigning English teaching and learning through genre awareness. However, extant work on speculative genres of reading, writing, and literary study assumes that ELA teachers are prepared or, more fundamentally, aware of these genres and their unique features. Addressing this gap, this article presents a single intrinsic case of Carlos, a queer man of Color and bilingual elementary teacher, as he cultivated genre awareness through an interactive approach to genre pedagogy through restorying. Based on a rhetorical genre studies approach, Carlos’s case demonstrates how English teachers might expand their genre repertoire to include speculative genres and integrate them into their classrooms. This article concludes by advocating for the integration of speculative literacies into English teacher education, doing so to disrupt normative realities tied to white supremacy and homophobia within the field.

Using interpretive phenomenological analysis of oral history interviews, this study explored poetic experiences of nine US secondary English language arts teachers who participated in a month of online poetry writing during COVID-19. The manuscript explores how poetic relationality created space for these secondary English language arts teachers, mostly in rural school districts, to reflect on their realities during COVID-19. These teachers came to understand themselves not just as teachers but also as poets, an understanding that helped sustain them as they taught in digital contexts, during social distancing and school closures.

Against the backdrop of White Christian nationalism, which fomented an intensifying atmosphere of religious marginalization and violence toward transnationals in the US between 2015 and 2020, and in the context of teachers responding to this atmosphere of marginalization and violence with their writing curriculum and pedagogies, this study compared how three transnational youth wrote to express religious being and belonging in secondary classrooms. Adapting portraiture research approaches in a narrative study, we explored the how, who, and why of transnational youth writing across three classrooms where teachers made room for their cultural identity meaning-making through composing in diverse modes, genres, and media. In dialogue with pluriversal theorizing about the religious, specifically individual experiences of religious being and collective experiences of belonging, the research composed and compared portraits across three different public school settings. Working with three previously generated data sets, we retroactively asked: How, for whom, and to what purposes did three transnational youth express religious being and belonging through writing in public US secondary classrooms? The portraits illuminate how these youth wrote to accurately portray Islam, to poetically express and analytically discuss the fears and vulnerabilities Muslim women experience in wearing the hijab, and to share and interpret Christian familial experiences with ethnoreligious violence. In conclusion, we highlight complexities and further questions facing literacy teachers seeking to cultivate curiosity about youths’ religious being and belonging and to make room for these aspects of students’ experience as part of cultural assets approaches to writing curriculum and pedagogy.

This article posits the need for literacy research on teachers’ and students’ use of systems thinking for studying climate change. Drawing on sociocultural activity theory of learning, it perceives the need for engaging in systems thinking given the negative impacts of energy, transportation and community design, agriculture and food production, and economics and politics systems themselves on ecosystems—for example, the negative effects of fossil fuel energy systems on emissions production. Researchers could analyze teachers’ and/or students’ use of the following components derived from activity theory for analyzing these systems: objects and outcomes, roles, tools, rules and norms, and beliefs and discourses. For example, teachers and students may employ language for naming phenomena about climate change, responding to literature, engaging in media production, or using emissions mapping tools to critique status-quo systems and use those tools to portray ways of transforming those systems. They may also engage in critical inquiry of rules and norms or beliefs and discourses derived from capitalist economic systems that promote excessive consumption with detrimental environmental impacts and attempts in the political system to resist instruction on climate change.

In this article, I center the voices and experiences of Yazmin, Valeria, Guadalupe, and Monet, four escritoras that participated in Somos Escritoras, a creative space for Latina girls (grades 6–12) that invites them to share and perform stories from their lived experiences using art, theater, and writing as tools for reflection and examination of self and world. For two weeks, these escritoras created art and composed personal stories from their lives that addressed the tensions and contradictions at the intersections of age, language, culture, and ethnicity they navigate daily as Latina girls. For my inquiry, I explored the following questions: How do Latina/Chicana girls use writing and art to describe their experiences, histories, and identities? What can we learn from their voices? In their embodied art and writing, the girls wrote toward the foundation that their mothers had paved for them through their hopes and dreams, sometimes deferred. Rewriting narratives of self, the girls drew on creative acts to examine their lives and reclaim their experiences. Theorizing the future, the girls construct a world for themselves rooted within the stories and voices of their ancestors and those of the writers, poets, and storytellers whose writing has carved out a place for us in the world. Their words offer important perspectives into the ways that we design spaces and literacy curriculum that centers their intellectual, cultural, and gendered ways of knowing and being as important resources for teaching and learning.

Research has shown the benefits of peer interaction to scaffold learning of disciplinary literacies. We extend knowledge in this area to examine peer interaction and the affordances it creates when emergent bilinguals engage with multimodal texts in disciplines to make meaning. Using discourse analysis of the interactions of a small group of third graders carrying out a project in science class, we explored how four emergent bilinguals collaborated to design, produce, and distribute traditional and alternative texts. We found that translanguaging and transmodal collaborative structures support learning processes and comprehension to make sense of and contextualize disciplinary knowledge. A dynamic and recursive translanguaging pattern emerges in which the introduction and contextualization of knowledge happens in Spanish, the interaction occurs mainly in English, and the creation is in both English and Spanish. We discuss the affordances of these collaborative structures for supporting students in science and promoting Spanish and student bilingualism.

With funding from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Marva Cappello, Jennifer D. Turner, and Angela M. Wiseman convened a group of critical multimodal scholars in April 2022 to initiate a national agenda that prioritizes the use of visual and multimodal methodologies to promote educational equity and racial justice for youth of color. Our conference gathering included Reka Barton, Darielle Blevins, Justin Coles, Autumn A. Griffin, Stephanie P. Jones, Alicia Rusoja, Amy Stornaiuolo, Claudine Taaffe, Tran Templeton, Vivek Vellanki, and Angie Zapata. The dialogue presented in this article centers around a collaboratively composed image (see ) created three months after our initial convening. Participants from the conference chose an image that reflected our time together and represented our hopes and dreams moving forward. Inspired by kitchen-table talk methodology (), we share our ideas through images and text reflecting on how critical visual and multimodal methodologies facilitate access, equity, and hope in education and educational research.

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This paper highlights the perspectives of first-generation students of color in their first year of college, and the ways in which they exercised agency in their writing. Framed by definitions of agency as mediated action that creates meaning, the paper reports on qualitative data collected from a summer writing program for first-generation students and students of color, and from writing samples and follow-up interviews with six students who participated in the summer program. Findings suggest that students in their first year of college leveraged their social and discoursal identities to offer new ways of understanding an issue. They also wrote using a translingual approach, integrating different discourses and forms of knowledge, and challenging views of academic writing as monolithic. The findings also suggest the link between awareness and action, meaning that what and how students wrote were informed by their awareness of writing and awareness of themselves as writers and cultural beings. The study’s findings have implications for advancing more nuanced views of agency and academic literacies, and redesigning writing instruction at the high school and college level.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction, the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes, interviews, and student writing, this study asks, (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking () and politicized funds of knowledge (), positioned themselves as change agents, and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.

This paper examines the multiliteracies practices () of 20 high school students who participated in a weeklong summer research institute at the start of a 6-month-long community-based youth participatory action research (YPAR) initiative. Data analyzed included 20 digital multimodal compositions produced by youths, individual interviews with youths, and observations of youths’ participation in the YPAR initiative. Data analysis utilized theories of multiliteracies practices () and culturally sustaining pedagogies () enacted across contexts of YPAR (). Findings contribute new insights about students’ multiliteracies practices in YPAR in two ways. First, we examine how learning about research methods shifted students’ understandings of research and the role their experiences could play in YPAR. Second, we examine how students’ digital literacies practices () supported them in generating new narratives about their community in digital multimodal compositions. Finally, we consider how insights gained from our examination may support educators in developing and enacting culturally sustaining () learning contexts that build with students’ multiliteracies practices as strengths while challenging persistent educational inequities.

This study builds on research of multimodal storytelling in educational settings by presenting a study of a youth-produced documentary on immigration. Drawing from a video documentary project in a high school class, we examine students’ representational processes of scaling in documentary storytelling, and the kinds of resources they use to construct multiple spatiotemporal contexts for understanding their experience of immigration and immigration policy. Our theoretical framework relates the concept of scale to the Bakhtinian concept of voice to consider the semiotic resources that are used to index and connect multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in storytelling. Focusing on a documentary produced by some students in the class, we analyze how the young filmmakers used particular speaker voices (characters) and their social positioning to invoke and construct relevant scales for understanding the problem of deportation. Our analysis extends the study of scaling to multimodal texts, and the strategies that people use to represent and configure relationships among different socially stratified spaces. By conceptualizing the relations between voice and scale, this work aims to contribute to literacy learning and teaching that support young people in bringing their knowledge, experiences, and narrative resources to engage with societal structures.

The prevalence of high-stakes testing, scripted curricula, and accountability measures in schools discourages experimentation with curriculum. This article encourages curriculum design experimentation in teacher education by proposing playful practices, game-like activities for designing curriculum that draws on students’ out-of-school literacies. We explore the benefits and challenges of game-based curriculum design with preservice teachers (PSTs; N = 19) in two public university secondary English education courses and trace one PST’s take-up of the curriculum design moves through incorporation of these playful practices into her classroom. Data collection occurred across one academic year and included field and observation notes, written reflections, interview data, and artifacts. Findings show the potential for game-based curriculum design in literacy teacher education to (1) create an imaginative space between teacher and student, (2) encourage collaborative production, (3) connect PST university coursework to classroom practice, (4) support students’ creative language production, and (5) create playful social contexts for participatory learning. Challenges highlight the importance of attending to power dynamics in game play and design. Implications include how game-based pedagogical invitations in teacher education can help PSTs imagine new ways to organize classroom structures and literacy learning experiences that value an interplay of youth cultures and classroom curriculum.

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Educators and researchers from a range of fields have devoted their careers to studying how reading develops and how to support students who find reading challenging. Some children struggle specifically with learning to decode print, the central issue in what is referred to as dyslexia.However, research has failed to identify unique characteristics or patterns that set apart students identified as dyslexic from other readers with decoding challenges. Nevertheless, an authoritative discourse that speaks of a definitive definition, a unique set of characteristics, and a specific form of intervention saturates policy and practice around dyslexia, and teacher educators are under increasing pressure to include this state-sanctioned information in their classes. Literacy educators’ experiences teaching reading in schools and preparing literacy professionals can add valuable perspectives to the conversation about dyslexia; however, currently their voices are largely silent in conversations around dyslexia research, policy, and practice. The current research was designed to address this gap through an intensive interview study, in which we employed a Disability Critical Race Studies framework, along with Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to explore the perspectives, understandings, and experiences of literacy teacher educators regarding dyslexia.

To counter inequitable, hierarchical classroom structures, research in the fields of language and literacy studies often looks to the affordances of online spaces, such as affinity spaces, for learning that is collaborative and knowledge that is distributed; yet, researchers continue to locate theirstudies in virtual spaces, outside classroom walls. This study, situated in a high school writing class, repositions the familiar classroom practice of peer feedback as a way to access affinity space features. Using qualitative case study design and grounded theory analysis, the study reveals that,when supported by an emphasis on social connection, the practice of peer feedback served as a portal for students with a range of writing experience and interest to collaborate and exchange honest feedback, practices indicative of affinity space features. Yet, traditional expectations preserved teacher roles and student roles in ways that prevented the class from more fully accessing the affinity space features of distributed expertise, porous leadership, and role flexibility. Discussion expands the field’s understanding of affinity spaces and their application in physical classrooms by outlining new features, theorizing these classroom spaces, and advocating for a reimagine dvision of peer feedback in ELA classrooms where role reciprocity and flexibility resist traditional,inequitable classroom structures.

In this article, I propose Critical Race English Education (CREE) as a theoretical and pedagogical construct that tackles white supremacy and anti-black racism within English education and ELA classrooms. I employ autoethnography and counterstorytelling as methods that center my multiple identities and lived realities as I document my racialized and gendered experiences in relation to my journey to Ferguson, MO and my experiences as a secondary ELA teacher. The research questions guiding this study are the following: (1) As a Black male English educator and language and literacy scholar, how am I implicated in the struggle for racial justice and what does it mean for me to teach literacy in our present-day justice movement?; (2) How are Black lives mattering in ELA classrooms?; and, (3) How are we using Black youth life histories and experiences to inform our mindset, curriculum, and pedagogical practices in the classroom?This article explicates findings from three interconnected stories that work to show how CREE can be operationalized to better understand the #BlackLivesMatter movement in its historical and contemporary dimensions. The data analyzed stem from my autobiographical narratives,observations, social media artifacts, and images. I aim to expand English education to be more synergistically attuned to racial justice issues dealing with police brutality, the mass incarceration of Black people, and legacies of grassroots activism. This analysis suggests implications that aim to move the pedagogical practices around the intersections of anti-blackness and literacy from the margins to the center of discussion and praxis in ELA contexts.

In the first installment of our In Dialogue section, we recognize the generations of scholars who have paved the way for literacy research, teaching, and activism committed to equity. We feature three of the field’s luminaries—Celia Genishi, Sonia Nieto, and Carol Lee—as each reflects on her professional journey as it intertwines with key moments in history. We begin with Celia Genishi’s recollection of the ways that her experience as a child speaker of Japanese in the United States during a period of pronounced state-sanctioned xenophobia led her to become a researcher of early childhood bilingual education. Next, Sonia Nieto recounts her own “political coming of age” and dedication to “inclusion, equity, and social justice” as she learned about the role of institutional racism in creating failure for Black and Puerto Rican children in New York City schools, where she herself was both a student and teacher. Finally, Carol Lee describes her own conceptual and methodological orientations, exemplified by her Cultural Modeling frameworkand idea of the “problem space,” in helping to create equitable learning conditions, particularly for students from nondominant backgrounds. All three of our featured essayists trace their professional commitments to their experiences as young people and educators in the US during times of tumult and change, to their own mentors, and to their ongoing relationships with colleaguesand students. Taken together, the essays serve as a powerful reminder of the importance of his-tory, place, and intergenerational learning as we imagine new directions for research and more just educational futures.

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.

I am writing in response to the recent Forum essay “Taking the Long View on Writing Development,” authored by Bazerman, Applebee, Berninger, Brandt, Graham, Matsuda, Murphy, Rowe, and Schleppegrell (2017; and hereafter “The Long View”). I argue that “The Long View” was driven by the aim of identifying consensus rather than working through difference, that the principles represent commonplaces rather than a principled synthesis of research, that questions of epistemology and theory central to research agendas are essentially ignored, and that views of writing as semiotically exceptional and writing development as centered in school represent serious flaws in setting the agenda. The semiotic exceptionalism of “The Long View” represents a serious category mistake (Ryle, 1949). Taking “writing” as the unit of analysis occludes the diverse semiotic activity that necessarily shapes all textual artifacts and acts of inscription. Viewing writing as sharply distinct from orality risks reigniting Great Divide theories that had so many problematic effects on research, pedagogy, and people. Seeing school as the primary context for writing development ignores the rich roles of life outside school. In short, “The Long View” takes too narrow and problematic a view on issues of epistemology, theory, and literate lives to serve as the foundation for the critical research enterprise it aspires to conjure in our collective future. Instead, I suggest that research on the lifespan development of writing needs to begin with embodied, mediated, dialogic semiotic practice as its unit of analysis and to trace what people do, learn, and become across all the deeply entangled domains of their lives.

Two disabled researchers draw from their experiences conducting an interview study with a population of self-identified disabled faculty members to question some long-held commonplaces about qualitative interviewing. They use the phrase centering disability to emphasize disability as a critical lens and form of embodied experience that has theoretical and methodological implications for qualitative interviewing research design, implementation, and analysis.

Since the publication of Wendy Bishop’s Released into Language (1990), the disciplinary boundaries of composition and creative writing have been in question. More recently, as Douglas Hesse’s “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies” (2010) suggests, creative writing has been assumed to exist as a subdiscipline of composition despite efforts during the past decade to develop a new discipline, Creative Writing Studies. The research reported on and analyzed here argues for creative writing’s disciplinary status by using Toulmin’s (1972) definition of disciplinarity as a basis for claiming writers’ aesthetic documents as data and reporting those data in an aesthetic form. In our study, 57 students in first-year composition were asked to write a creative piece concerning how they came to the present place in their lives. Students produced 57 artifacts, including 55 poems, one script, and one visual narrative. These data were subsequently represented in fiction—that is, we used a novel to present our findings in an effort to assert the differences between the ways findings might be rendered in composition as opposed to creative writing. This paper examines what each subject area views as evidence and how that evidence might be most profitably analyzed and discussed in an aesthetic document. We suggest that the process of writing the novel is a method, a mode of analysis, with the novel itself as the articulation of the researchers’ analysis of the original data. Using this method, we studied creative writing aesthetically as creative writing and offer a justification for doing so.

The notion of translingual practice has gained much currency within college composition and sociolinguistics over the last few years. Translingual practices challenge structuralist conceptualizations of language as discrete, bounded, impermeable, autonomous systems, conceptualizations that unfortunately (1) privilege linguistic codes over nonlinguistic ones, and (2) contribute to the hierarchization and separation of languages, leading some languages and their corresponding users to be valued more than others. To counter such a stance, we advocate the use of translingual pedagogy, which values the fluid communicative practices of learners who mobilize multiple semiotic resources to facilitate communication. By sharing examples from our own classrooms,we also underscore the need for teachers to recognize and expand the communicative repertoires of their students. This pedagogical shift, as we illustrate, is accompanied by an instructional commitment to develop students’ metalinguistic awareness and cultural sensitivities in order to create inclusive and equitable learning environments.

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

As theorization of multimodal text processes and productions continues to outpace classroom practices, research that contributes understandings of how composers are living out multimodal processes is needed. In response, we turn to thinking with theory (Jackson &amp; Mazzei, 2012) as both a methodological and an analytic approach to understand how multimodal composing processes and products come to be. We provide strategic sketches (Leander &amp; Boldt, 2013) focused on third graders “Efrain” and “Trinidad”, not aiming to display the data in a traditional sense, but instead to ask of ourselves, the data, and theory: What material intra-actions emerge among two young picture book makers? What social, cultural, and material worlds are performed in their final picture book productions? Thinking with theory and data was an effort to experience some of the moment-to-moment nuances of young children’s multimodal processes, to appreciate the lived social, cultural, and material realities animated in their picture books, and to develop sensitivities to the possibilities of the material turn in post-humanist studies for literacy research. The analytic questions produced point to the saliency of diverse literature as aesthetic inspirations for multimodal texts, and of improvisations with varied art tools and media as openings for multimodal processes. This paper advances previous related scholarship through strategic sketches that invite readers to experience the complexity and the cultural significance of the multimodal processes and products that emerge when classroom expectations of a proficient writer include the ability to improvise and become with diverse materials and meanings, not just to command “standardized written English.”

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.

More than four generations ago, Nancy Coryell’s (1927) study revealed that an extensive approach to reading instruction is more effective than an intensive approach, yet the reading establishment then continued to promote intensive, close reading methods. Recently, the writers of the Common Core State Standards renewed this debate by advocating that teachers implement more intensive, close reading strategies. I replicated a portion of Coryell’s (1927) study to determine the effectiveness of intensive and extensive reading instruction; to do so, I examined the impact each method had on students’ comprehension and analysis of literature. The study used a quasi-experimental, nonrandomized, pretest-post test comparison group research design. I used test procedures to measure the difference in pretest-to-post test scores within and between both groups for both comprehension and analysis. No statistically significant differences existed in the gains on the subtest measuring reading comprehension; however, statistically significant differences in gains on the subtest measuring analysis of literature were found within both instructional methods. At a time when policy seems to drive English instruction toward an intensive approach, this study suggests that we need more research before the field of English education can properly debate the issue.

It is common practice to enroll adolescents in classes designed to improve their reading. Previous studies of literacy intervention classes have focused on students’ acquisition of reading skills and strategies, but few studies have considered how reading identities may contribute to literacy learning. To address this gap, I used theories of positioning and identity to answer the question: How did students’ understandings of literacy and their own reading identities interact with the figured worlds of their literacy intervention classrooms? I analyzed interviews, field notes, and artifacts for two students and teachers in different classrooms, focusing on students’ acts of agency. Analyses revealed that both students’ identities as good readers conflicted with the figured worlds of their classrooms, but they responded differently. One challenged the norms of his classroom in a manner contrary to his teacher’s expectations and was unable to disrupt his positioning as a struggling reader. The other acquiesced to the norms of her classroom in ways her teacher recognized as characteristic of a capable reader, ultimately upsetting her struggling reader subject position. The findings reveal that students’ acts of agency and teachers’ interpretations of those acts are informed by students’ perceptions of themselves as readers and teachers’ understandings of literacy and learning in intervention classrooms. The findings problematize the practice of placing students in classes that position them as deficient. Additional research that attends to sociocultural factors in classrooms is necessary to understand the academic, social, and personal implications of particular approaches to literacy instruction and intervention for individual students.

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.

The Common Core State Standards accords great importance to close reading, but offers no specific guidelines for how it can or should be taught. This essay provides a critical review of existing instructional models of close reading and addresses issues related to their implementation in content area classrooms. It shows that current models of close reading offer different ways of engaging students in their interaction with complex texts, with some focusing on reading and rereading for understanding and others providing more intensive linguistic support. It argues that effective close reading practices must attend simultaneously to all key elements involved in the complex process of reading, including the reader, the text, the task, and the context, with a special emphasis on developing students’ understanding of how language and other semiotic systems construct meaning, embed ideology, and structure discourse in genre- and discipline-specific ways. The essay demonstrates that the contention about what close reading is and how it could be implemented stems from its varied interpretations by scholars with different theoretical and epistemological beliefs about reading, language, text, literacy, and schooling. It further suggests that an awareness of the critical issues that have been raised about close reading can help teachers avoid potential pitfalls and maximize effectiveness when implementing the practice.

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.

Current research suggests that attention to language variation in teacher preparation can promote equity and narrow achievement gaps, particularly for African American students. However, persistent ideologies about language and race can stymie teachers’ desires for equitable teaching.Teachers who take up linguistically responsive positions that value student language variation still struggle in the moments of enactment due to expectations that they serve as gatekeepers for “standard” English(es). In this article, I conceptualize these struggles as linguistic ideological dilemmas (LIDs) and use discourse analytic and qualitative methods to present illustrations of preservice English teachers’ LIDs as they grapple with deficit language ideologies in relation to course work about language variation. In the focal illustration, I use positioning theory to illustrate the LIDs faced by a student teacher when responding to a student’s blog writing that included features of African American English. The findings show how this participant and others hadlimited awareness of how they were positioned racially until the moment of teaching in which they struggled to articulate and enact linguistically informed principles; in some cases, this positionality led to avoidance of future discussions of race and language. The findings advance past scholarship through generative description of students’ internalized deficit language ideologies and teachers’ struggles with implementation related to valuing language variation. Findings show the affordances and limitations of code-switching for addressing language variation in classroom interactions and the need for preparation about when, how, and why to have conversations about language variation, including greater understanding of language-related ideological triggers.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

For at least the last several decades, argumentative writing has been of central importance in secondary and higher education, and this emphasis has been heightened by argumentation’s designation as a “cornerstone” of the Common Core State Standards. Moreover, this focus on argumentation has been encouraged by extensive scholarship that investigates how argumentation is learned and deployed in various settings and how the teaching of argumentation might be improved. However, far less attention has been paid to determining why so many literacy educators,researchers, and policy makers believe that privileging argumentative writing is justified.Using a methodology that combines ethnographic case study of writing pedagogy in an urban high school with theoretical analysis of scholarly writings that endorse argumentation, in this essay I demonstrate that the prominence of argumentation is underwritten by three commonly held assumptions: (1) that argumentative writing promotes clear and critical thinking, (2) that it provides training in the rational deliberation that is essential for a democratic citizenry, and(3) that it imparts to students a form of cultural capital that facilitates their upward academic and socioeconomic mobility. My findings are that these assumptions are unwarranted and that schools’ overemphasis on argumentation imposes severe limits on what counts as valid thought,legitimate political subjectivity, and a feasible strategy for addressing economic inequality. This study’s implication is that educators should reassess the value of argumentation and revise ELA curricula to include more diverse genres and discursive modes.

In this article, I report on the results of a case study of two students with self-identified Asperger Syndrome (AS) in first-year university writing courses. After exploring existing conversations that tend to ignore the voices of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), I propose a methodology based on the concept of ASD as insight, rooted in critical disability studies, in which the perspectives of neurodiverse students are prioritized. My findings reveal the neurotypical assumptions of some traditional writing pedagogies, such as those based on a process model and the understanding of writing as a social activity. These approaches often do not value the critical literacies and social activities involved in writing done by neurodiverse students outside the classroom. Drawing from my participants’ insights, I explore the potentials of critical pedagogy for valuing the neurodiverse social literacies of ASD students. I demonstrate how a critical pedagogy better attuned to neurodiversity can support the alternative social literacies of neurodiverse students and resist stereotypes of ASD writers as asocial.

Literacy research has not yet revealed how bilingual learners develop coherent and robust theories of language. Translation, however, provides emergent bilinguals (EL students) with opportunities to develop metalinguistic awareness, which can lead to a more complete conceptual framework for thinking about language and literacy. This preliminary research study sought to formulate an instructional approach (TRANSLATE: Teaching Reading and New Strategic Language Approaches to English learners) focused on using translation to ultimately improve ELL students’ reading comprehension. Using design research methods and qualitative analytical techniques, researchers asked middle school students described as struggling readers to work collaboratively and use various strategies to translate key excerpts from their required English literature curriculum into Spanish. Analysis of students’ statements, decision making, and interaction indicated that students’ conceptual understandings about language played an important role in their learning. Students reflected on the nature of vocabulary, syntax, and the ways that different languages communicate ideas. These findings extend conversations in literacy studies concerning the unique affordances of bilingualism to increase metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, known contributors to higher levels of reading comprehension.