Identity texts, literacy engagement, and multilingual classrooms: What do these terms mean and encompass, and how do they play out with today's highly diverse school-aged population, their teachers, and their families?The articles included in this volume of Writing & Pedagogy deal with the educational experiences of individuals from marginalized social groups, adding names and faces to individuals who teach and learn in multilingual classrooms.The latter term refers to classrooms that are multilingual by virtue of the large number of home languages spoken by students in these classrooms, home languages that are not the same as the language of instruction.The articles in this special issue illustrate how and why multilingual learners' literacy engagement, or personal investment in schooling, increases when teachers, peers, and their own parents view students' literacy productions positively.The term used for these productions or "texts" -be they written, spoken, visual, musical, or any combination thereof -is identity texts to emphasize that they express the learner's identity.taken together, these articles offer readers a global view of the relationship between providing spaces that honor marginalized groups' languages and cultures, of why marginalized individuals invest themselves in those spaces, and of how such investment influences children's subsequent academic achievement.The contributors draw on Cummins' (2001; this volume) academic language learning and literacy engagement frameworks to capture, untangle, and illustrate the dialectical interplay and

This article reports findings from an ethnographic action research study of Deaf and hearing parents and young children participating in a family American Sign Language (ASL) literacy program in Ontario, Canada. The study documents the context for parents’ and children’s learning of ASL in an environment where resources for supporting early ASL literacy have been scarce. Through semi-structured interviews and observations of six individual families or parent-child dyads, the study documents participants’ encounters with professionals who regulate Deaf children and their families’ access to ASL. At the same time, the setting of the ASL Parent-Child Mother Goose Program is presented as a Deaf cultural space and thereby a counter-discourse to medical discourses regarding Deaf identity and bilingualism. This space features the Deaf mother participants’ ASL literacy and numeracy practices and improvisations of ASL rhymes and stories to enhance their suitability for young children. The practices of the ASL Parent-Child Mother Goose Program leader also serve to define and support emergent ASL literacy. In addition, a Deaf cultural space inside a broader context of public services to young Deaf children provides a means for the hearing mother participants to facilitate critical inquiry of issues surrounding bilingualism, ASL, and a Deaf identity.

This issue is focused on the importance of students writing and reading texts that incorporate their own specific experiences and identities, including as minorities or speakers of English as a second or additional language. I see this orientation as related to arguments others (e.g. Archibald, 2009) have made about the need for writing in academic contexts to be less bound to the strict conventions of the essay form, and indeed for concepts of text to be interpreted to include non-print forms. The field of academic writing, coming from both the Rhetoric and Composition side of the house and the Applied Linguistics-ESL side of the house, is increasingly consolidating a view that all students should be involved in writing themselves into their texts and, further, into the educational curriculum. This is the essential insight of the notion of identity texts which is central to this issue All of the articles in this issue derive from the influence of Professor Jim Cummins and his career-long focus on education in bilingual and multilingual contexts, academic language learning and literacy, and especially his Empowerment Framework Cummins' Featured Essay adds to the ongoing critique (including in some editorials and articles previously published in this journal) of misguided educational policy impacting learning and literacy in negative ways. He argues and advocates for approaches that will ensure literacy engagement for students from marginalized groups and backgrounds where English is not the primary language, as illustrated in each of the approaches

Policies designed to improve educational outcomes in the United States (and many other countries) over the past decade have failed to raise overall achievement or close the gap between middle-class and low-income students in any significant way. Little tangible impact is evident despite the expenditure of billions of dollars ($6 billion for the Reading First program alone). Alienated adolescents, primarily from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, continue to drop out of high school in large numbers. I argue that the persistent failure of educational policies designed to close the achievement gap is largely a result of implementing evidence-free policies and instructional practices. Policy-makers have chosen to ignore extensive empirical evidence suggesting the following: (a) factors associated with socioeconomic status (SES) and broader patterns of societal power relations exert a major influence on educational outcomes; (b) literacy engagement is a stronger predictor of reading performance than socioeconomic status (SES), and low-income students have significantly less access to books and print than do higher-income students; (c) students will engage academically only to the extent that classroom interactions and academic effort are identity-affirming. The framework proposed for stimulating school-based policy discussions argues that school polices need to maximize print access and literacy engagement among marginalized group students and in addition that they need to enable students to use language and literacy in ways that will affirm their identities and challenge the deficit orientation that is frequently built into programs and curriculum for low-income and bilingual learners.

This is the second part of a two-part article on how Web 2.0 tools freely available afford so many opportunities for collaboration among writers in the context of social networking, creating the means for student writers to write purposefully for worldwide audiences. Part I set the stage by placing writing in the context of new views of literacy due in part to revoluntionary changes since the turn of the century in how content finds its way to the Internet. It explained how artifacts created with such tools are aggregated and harvested as learning objects with potential to promote and augment communication and collaboration online, and to promote writing by giving students interesting and meaningful ideas to write about, thus significantly changing how the teaching of writing might be re-envisaged in the digital age. Whereas Part I examined the production side of this dynamic, Part II explains how the Internet resolves the marketing side of the role once played by traditional publishing and how writers and audiences can navigate this seemingly chaotic preponderance of content online by tagging their work and using RSS and other aggregation tools to find one another's written work and carry on conversations about it, thus providing truly authentic motivation for their writing.

Rationality and the Literate Mind Harris, Roy (2009) New York: Routledge. pp.190 ISBN10: 0-415-99901-4.

Writing pedagogy and civic literacy can form an interactive, interdisciplinary partnership beneficial to students. Students learn to compare the classical rhetorical genres of epideictic, forensic, and deliberative rhetoric to modern ceremonial, judicial, and legislative rhetorical genres. Elements essential to writing pedagogy – ethos, logos, pathos, claims, warrants, and enthymemes – become meaningful as students engage in civic-themed reading and writing assignments designed for first-year composition. Writing pedagogy enriched with a civic literacy motif encourages students to practice writing to authentic audiences for genuine civic purposes.

Writing courses increasingly incorporate Internet and online learning activities as part of the syllabus and teaching materials. How does this change our teaching practices, and which free and collaborative online tools can be most appropriately applied in online and blended writing courses? This is the first part of a two-part article focused on freely available Web 2.0 tools and how they can promote collaboration in the context of social networking. Part I places writing in the context of new views of literacy due in part to revolutionary changes since the turn of the century in how content finds its way to the Internet. Web 2.0 and cloud computing have made it possible for writers to publish not only prose but a range of other media online without having to pass through traditional gate-keepers, and tools and mechanisms have evolved for networking communities of like-minded writers online. Among the many impacts of this development is the possibility now for student writers to write purposefully for worldwide audiences. Part I examines the production side of this dynamic, while Part II (to appear in the first issue of this journal in 2011) explains how the Internet resolves the marketing side of the role once played by traditional publishing and how writers and audiences can navigate the seemingly chaotic preponderance of content available online to find one another’s material and carry on conversations about it, thus providing truly authentic motivation for their writing.

This essay describes a literacy project involving college students who are preservice teachers and students in an urban alternative public school. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” served as a touchstone or linchpin for the development of literacy skills and identity construction for both the college and secondary school students. Utilizing the idea of “a new neighborhood” as a metaphor and a goal, all students were given opportunities to engage with language, opening them up to a variety of new experiences and a new sense of belonging within a safe classroom environment.

Critical Literacy and Urban Youth: Pedagogies of Access, Dissent, and Liberation. Ernest Morrell (2008) New York & London: Routledge. pp. 256 ISBN 978–0-80585–664–4 (9780805856644).

Developing Academic Literacies: Understanding Disciplinary Communities’ Culture and Rhetoric. Dimitra Koutsantoni (2007) Vol. 4, Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics. Oxford: Peter Lang. pp. 302 ISBN: 9783039105755

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long (2008) West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press. pp. 316 ISBN: 978–1-60235–056–4

Though sometimes seen as remedial in nature, writing centers have pedagogical missions that are far broader in scope in most educational institutions. This reflection traces both the growth of writing centers since their origins in the early 1900s and their current points of intersection with other writing programs – first year composition, writing across the curriculum, and community literacy initiatives. In spite of the economic and administrative difficulties they will face in the future, writing centers will continue to thrive.

Advances in technology, such as the word-processor, have long supported the pedagogy of composition. However, in the Internet environment a variety of electronic tools and multimedia can further enhance best practices in teaching writing: the integration of reading and writing, recursive drafting, targeted grammar and vocabulary study, peer review, and publication.