This study examined 12th-grade students’ portrayals of their use of different types of languaging actions through ethnographic writing about their participation in sports teams or peer groups and explicit prompted reflections about their languaging actions portrayed in their writing. Analysis of different types of languaging actions indicated that students were most likely to portray and reflect on

This discussion advocates implementing literacy portraiture within school-based literacy curriculum when working with culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Through this approach, practitioners can attend to the learner, focus on their voice, and listen for their literacy story to create portraits of their learners from holistic, humanizing, and asset-based perspectives. While there are varied

Shifting the Conversation around Teaching Sensitive Topics: Critical Colleagueship in a Teacher Discourse Community Abstract: In this book club study designed to examine practicing teachers’ perspectives on a young adult book dealing with identity, mental health, sexuality, and family, researchers describe the tensions that arose in participants’ dialogue regarding self-censorship and the desire to

Searing in content and ambitious in form, Eric Gansworth’s (2020) multimodal memoir, Apple (Skin to the Core), compels practitioners to widen the voices that students encounter in school and to position students as critical consumers of multimodal texts. Laced with images, prose, and repurposed pop cultural allusions, Gansworth’s memoir provides a model by which students can honor their own stories

This article reports insights from a spoken word poetry workshop conducted with youth from refugee backgrounds and their teachers at a large suburban secondary school. The broad aim of engaging spoken word poetry in the educational context was to encourage and listen to student voice and creative self-expression, and to explore opportunities within the class to speak to sociopolitical issues and injustices

In this review of Arlene Fish Wilner’s Rethinking Reading in College: An Across-the-Curriculum Approach, the author explores how Wilner leverages a rich understanding of college-level reading to advocate for reading across the curriculum. By encouraging teachers to make explicit connections between discourse and disciplinary epistemology, Wilner’s book does important equity work that has the potential

In this article, we describe how eighth-grade students and teacher candidates used sound and listening to remix and attune themselves (Stewart, 2011) to the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (2011). We situate our sound inquiries in relation to critical literacy (Vasquez, Janks, & Comber, 2019; Wargo, 2019) and sound education (Schafer 1992, 2005; Oliveros, 2005). The examples we share

Promising approaches to transforming English language arts classrooms into dialogic, democratic, and critical spaces for literature discussions involve the selection of compelling young adult literature (YAL) and the use of student-centered discussion strategies (e.g., literature circles). Scholars have demonstrated, however, the shortcomings of YAL and literature circles for interrogating sociopolitical

The author explores the words and writing of Rocky, Reyna, Blanca, and Elizabeth (grades 6–12) through their participation in Somos Escritoras/We Are Writers, a creative space for Latina girls and their parents. For 6 weeks, alongside their parents, girls used drawing and personal writing to dialogue about their experiences and bring into language the issues most important in their lives and worlds

We are so proud to be incoming co-editors of the literacy policy column for JAAL. We desire to open a forum that illuminates how policy functions in contemporary settings, especially in relation to literacy teaching and learning. Our experiences as teachers, teacher educators, and literacy scholars has taught us that knowledge about policy is powerful. Such knowledge can make one feel less like a victim

The demand for evidence to support instructional practices in education is surging. Consequently, many adolescent literacy researchers and educators take guidance from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Practice Guide for Adolescent Literacy (Kamil et al., 2008). The document, however, is now 12 years old, and adolescent literacy research and practice has shifted substantially. First, I document

Dear JAAL Readers, The moment when we were writing this introduction was a bittersweet one for us because this is our last issue as coeditors of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Learning about our colleagues’ work in fostering adolescent and adult literacy has been a pure pleasure. As we wrote, the pandemic was raging amid growing vaccine distribution, the United States had inaugurated its

In this commentary, we explore contribution trends across our 5-year tenure as the coeditors of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, evaluate our successes in achieving initial goals and unforeseen challenges, and discuss the implications of this analysis for the journal’s community.

Previous research has revealed that U.S. schools are hostile and unsafe for queer youth, yet school-based supports, such as LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum, are associated with more welcoming schools. Studies focusing on inclusive curriculum have implicitly characterized this curriculum didactically, in other words, as a direct intervention into the homophobia, transphobia, and ignorance of straight, cisgender

In this article, I focus on the critical literacies of Black and Latinx youth participating in a youth participatory action research project, as well as the pedagogies that engaged those literacies. Critical ethnographic study of the Youth Equity Agents’ literacy practices revealed that they enacted a practice of reading school, wherein they investigated and acted on racial injustices in their local

In this practitioner research study, I explored how a pedagogy of multiliteracies supported the civic learning of eight middle and high school Indonesian American youth in a summer literacy program. Tracing how transnational youth face barriers to civic learning and engagement in times of rising inequality and xenophobia, I analyzed the ways in which program participants engaged with a curriculum featuring

Drawing from Appadurai’s notion of mediascape, in which global cultural flows simultaneously construct local/global perspectives, I explored how youth and young adults across the globe make sense of digitally shared space, with a specific focus on the Webtoon reader discussion forum. Findings illustrated that the participants constructed the notion of care as standing up for others, raised awareness

This article contributes to research on equity in award-winning and honor books by offering a paratextual analysis of 14 immigration-themed young adult books that were included on the USBBY Outstanding International Books list between 2006 and 2019. Findings reveal that paratexts—all parts of a book excluding the narrative—frame authors who are not members of the cultures they describe as having authority

This article offers a way to leverage young adult literature in guiding students to consider the meanings of continuity and change within their own development. Borrowing theories of change from the evolutionary sciences, we developed a critical lens focusing on the role of technology in young adult literature. Based on a comprehensive review of Michael L. Printz Award and Honor titles and YALSA Teens’

In this article, we use a case study to provide suggestions and lessons for considering mathematical literacy instruction. Preservice teachers in the study were provided coursework and support in designing mathematical literacy instruction, and then they incorporated that instruction into a field-based practicum experience. We then studied their perceptions to consider how teachers might be supported

This department explores the concept of disciplinary literacy—the conceptual understandings and ways of reading, thinking, and writing involved in critiquing and constructing knowledge in a discipline—and its intersections with aspects of culturally sustaining pedagogy. Columns highlight high-quality disciplinary literacy learning opportunities across subject areas that engage students in critically

Young people in literacy classes sometimes think their teachers are not listening to them. The practitioners featured in this column listen to questions posed by their students and respond to them, with the goal of enhancing English language arts instruction for a range of young people and educators.

Authors and columns in this department explicitly focus on adult literacy, addressing issues of research, policy, and practice relevant to a wide range of adult learners in different contexts.

Authors featured in this department share anthropological perspectives and qualitative insights to redefine community in adolescent and adult literacy practice.

Discussions about literacy assessment can often be polarizing for teachers, school administrators, and other stakeholders. Given the diverse and often charged perspectives on assessment within both the profession and the broader public discourse, it can be difficult to engage in productive dialogue about the role that literacy assessment plays in promoting or inhibiting effective models of literacy

This forum reviews youth literature from around the world to examine the diverse settings and social, historical, and political contexts that shape youth identities and experiences.

This forum reviews a mix of resources to inform pedagogy and related educational practices that foreground representations of youth and their literacy practices within and outside of school.

As society becomes increasingly globalized and networked, online participatory cultures provide youth with experiences to foster dispositions and skills required to engage in virtual spaces. This 5‐year longitudinal case study explores the role of affect in the composition practices of an adolescent girl in Scratch, an online programming community. The author applies affect theory to examine why a

In this case study, ELA teacher candidates used video editing software to create mash‐ups of popular YouTube videos in order to express critical commentaries about a range of educational issues and perspectives. Operating from a critical media literacies framework, candidates researched dissenting ways teaching and school(ing) were represented on the site. After collecting and downloading videos across

Framing sports culture as a viable site for research and inquiry in the English language arts classroom, this article documents an investigation into the opportunities for research and inquiry teachers provided for students in selected secondary sports literature classes. Data collection involved gathering teacher‐ and student‐generated artifacts, observing classroom instruction, and conducting interviews

Dear JAAL Readers, Dialogue is typically defined as a conversation between two or more people, often among characters in a novel or as an exchange of ideas on an issue, particularly political or religious ones, with an eye toward agreement. It is in the spirit of this last usage, which we see as embracing the others, that we selected the term dialogue to describe this issue’s content. In a contentious

As teachers of writing, we carry knowledge about the centrality of students’ experiences and the power of writing to provide culturally sustaining and supportive learning in uncertain times and unfamiliar teaching contexts.

Over the course of a year, student authors in the Juntos NC Writing Project participated in the Literary and Community Initiative to write, publish, and share their lived experiences and identities as Latinx immigrants and first‐generation high school students in North Carolina. Throughout the publication process of their collaborative bilingual book titled The Voices of Our People: Nuestras Verdades

Learning how to teach in a hybrid space, such as a museum, opens up possibilities for preservice teachers to expand their definitions of literacy and experience teaching and learning with adolescents in new ways. This two‐year study reports findings from a university‐museum partnership in which preservice teachers (N = 81) worked with sixth‐grade students each week in a museum setting. Findings suggest

In this study, I explored how a high school English class’s multimodal project broadened student and teacher participation. Previous research has established that multimodal composing expands the nature of classroom texts, opens opportunities for identity expression, and extends access to audiences. Less is known about how affordances work together to increase options for more students and teachers

In this article, the author describes utilizing Instagram as a reading response activity in an undergraduate English course to increase student engagement with challenging texts. Using a shared class account, students created a menu of prompts that they then chose from to create posts after reading fictional, theoretical, and philosophical texts; students’ choices of prompts are analyzed as well as

An African American teacher and students engaged in meaningful reading and writing that included African American literature. These literacy experiences allowed the development of cultural models through exploring identity, questioning dominant narratives, and building capacity for literary analysis. This study shows how meaningful literacy pedagogy for African American students can be implemented

Communication is the result of meaning making based on one’s frames of knowing. For students, those frames of knowing derive heavily from multimedia communication, including social networking sites, that allow them to be the makers of content. In this study, I followed an eighth‐grade student who fluidly negotiated a multitude of available social technologies, integrating them in unique and personal

In Japan, the workshop‐style approach for teaching reading has drawn recent attention. However, the obligation to use Ministry of Education–approved textbooks makes applying this method in classes difficult. In this study, we aimed to investigate the possibilities of incorporating workshop‐style lessons into a Japanese language arts class and its benefits for high school students. Based on findings

This department explores the concept of disciplinary literacy—the conceptual understandings and ways of reading, thinking, and writing involved in critiquing and constructing knowledge in a discipline—and its intersections with aspects of culturally sustaining pedagogy. Columns highlight high‐quality disciplinary literacy learning opportunities across subject areas that engage students in critically

Young people in literacy classes sometimes think their teachers are not listening to them. The practitioners featured in this column listen to questions posed by their students and respond to them, with the goal of enhancing English language arts instruction for a range of young people and educators.

Authors and columns in this department explicitly focus on adult literacy, addressing issues of research, policy, and practice relevant to a wide range of adult learners in different contexts.

Authors featured in this department share anthropological perspectives and qualitative insights to redefine community in adolescent and adult literacy practice.

Discussions about literacy assessment can often be polarizing for teachers, school administrators, and other stakeholders. Given the diverse and often charged perspectives on assessment within both the profession and the broader public discourse, it can be difficult to engage in productive dialogue about the role that literacy assessment plays in promoting or inhibiting effective models of literacy

This forum reviews youth literature from around the world to examine the diverse settings and social, historical, and political contexts that shape youth identities and experiences.

This forum reviews a mix of resources to inform pedagogy and related educational practices that foreground representations of youth and their literacy practices within and outside of school.

Dear JAAL Readers, The word confluence is often used to refer to the gathering at a single point of several flowing bodies of water. We chose Confluence as the theme for this issue because it offers a collection of articles that merge streams of ideas to address adolescent and adult literacies. The ideas in this issue flow from various kinds of educator and student collaborations. These collaborations

Literacies researchers have long argued that the new literacies made possible by the internet facilitate global connectedness. However, much of the research about digital literacies has centered the experiences of participants and researchers from only certain parts of the world. The field needs to embrace a more inclusive understanding of global, acting intentionally to seek out, include, and learn

This department explores the concept of disciplinary literacy—the conceptual understandings and ways of reading, thinking, and writing involved in critiquing and constructing knowledge in a discipline—and its intersections with aspects of culturally sustaining pedagogy. Columns highlight high‐quality disciplinary literacy learning opportunities across subject areas that engage students in critically

Young people in literacy classes sometimes think their teachers are not listening to them. The practitioners featured in this column listen to questions posed by their students and respond to them, with the goal of enhancing English language arts instruction for a range of young people and educators.

Authors featured in this department share anthropological perspectives and qualitative insights to redefine community in adolescent and adult literacy practice.

This forum reviews youth literature from around the world to examine the diverse settings and social, historical, and political contexts that shape youth identities and experiences.

Parenting while transitioning out of incarceration, homelessness, or drug addiction has received inadequate attention despite the fact that these factors affect more and more of the U.S. population each day. This article is about a family literacy program implemented in a residential treatment facility where the fathers, most of whom were previously incarcerated and now receiving treatment for substance

The evolution of a pervasive negative view of immigrants and its role in classroom achievement in the United States is described in this paper; beginning in the crowded urban secondary classrooms of the 1800s, to IQ testing in the 1920s that identified many as morons, imbeciles, or idiots, and to an English‐only view that permeates public and political views of teaching and learning. It is argued that

Conducting Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) is more than a methodology; it is an epistemology—a way of positioning adolescents as agents for critical civic praxis. Educators attempting to use YPAR in traditional spaces often must navigate tensions between this type of critical pedagogy and systems that limit the definition of citizenship to civic engagement and position adolescents as passive

This paper describes how the literacy achievement of low socioeconomic status 17 Black male middle school students in one classroom was influenced by culturally responsive teaching. The study employed a concurrent transformative mixed‐methods approach. Quantitative data consisted of pretest and posttest reading scores from the computer adaptive interim assessment, Measurement of Academic Progress during

Purposeful academic conversation engages students as active agents in the process of making meaning from text, negotiating perspectives, and achieving mutual understanding. However, educators often report difficulties in engaging students in talk‐based pedagogies. This concern can be partially addressed by ensuring that students and teachers have similar understandings regarding the purposes of academic

Although ubiquitous in academic discourse for over a decade, disciplinary literacy scholarship has only recently begun to explicitly interrogate critical literacy as a discipline‐dependent set of dispositions, discourses, skills, and practices. Drawing from critical disciplinary literacy (CDL) theory, this article presents findings from a mini‐unit co‐designed and co‐taught by an Iowa state district

Dear JAAL Readers, We write this introduction at a time when many people in the United States, where we are based, are participating in protests and other intense conversations about race, many of them sparked by ongoing policing of Black people and the disproportionate impact of COVID‐19 on communities of color. Although it remains to be seen whether lasting change will result from these conversations

In this commentary, we use the occasion of the proliferation of dual enrollment to examine the discursive construction of difference between high school and college literacies, and its effects on teachers and students. This discursive divide has real, material consequences. It informs (and constrains) literacy practices and pedagogies, becomes a barrier to access (particularly when operationalized