Meeting today's challenges in education requires more than adopting new standards. We must ask ourselves if our schools are intellectual communities, places where students are challenged to become the creative, collaborative, questioning thinkers we need them to be.

This article argues that exploration of media coverage of a story like the Boston Marathon bombings, including online comments posted by readers, can support youth in reflecting on and thinking critically about a tragedy while offering opportunities for literacy pedagogy consistent with the goals of the Common Core State Standards for English…

This article introduces Critical Literature Pedagogy (CLP), a pedagogical framework for applying goals of critical literacy within the context of teaching canonical literature. Critical literacies encompass skills and dispositions to understand, question, and critique ideological messages of texts; because canonical literature is often…

The Internet is the dominant text of this generation, and through intentional use it may provide opportunities for the critical literacy infused pedagogy. As we consider the online and offline literacy practices that our students will need as future events warrant, the one constant is change. This requires a continual re-defining, and…

This column explores the idea of using 21st-century mentor texts to guide students in the development of critical literacy. The column focuses on one example from the U.S. presidential election of 2012 to illustrate how teachers might engage students to unpack the socially constructed nature of literacy. The author argues that the changing reading…

The recently released Common Core State Standards increase classroom emphasis on informational texts in high school and recommend a three-part measurement for text complexity when selecting texts for classroom use. In this commentary I argue that fictional narratives can not only meet these stated criteria for complex texts and result in critical…

We examined middle years adolescents' (ages 12-13) responses to reading and viewing advertisements as part of integrated language arts and health education lessons. We report here on the qualitative results from student and teacher focus groups, and from student journals. Three regular classroom teachers co-developed (with university…

In the current testing environment, high school reading teachers may often rely on a multiple-choice assessment as the best practice. This study suggests that a visual arts assessment of reading comprehension can rigorously measure critical thinking. This action research study follows 21 high school juniors through the selection, creation, and…

In this article, the authors analyze representations of social issues within contemporary memoirs written for and marketed to a young adult audience and multimodal zines produced by homeless youth. To read across these distinctly different texts (mass marketed and do-it-yourself cultural productions) and genres (memoir and zines), the authors…

This column addresses the importance of developing critical thinking to meet the demands of 21st-century literacies and participatory democracy. The author argues for a critical approach to digital literacies that explores the sociological nature of literacy practices. Students examine examples of new literacies and analyze how ideologies are…

A history teacher examines what is successful and not successful in group work in his high school classroom and gives concrete suggestions for improving group practice. Topics discussed include preparing students for group work, supporting collaboration, inviting critical analysis, and assessing both group and individual performance. (Contains 2…

In a six-week literature circle unit in a tenth-grade classroom, one group of students discussed Dorothy Allison's novel "Bastard out of Carolina." By criteria frequently used to judge the quality of discussion, this literature circle was successful. However, several key moments are highlighted that point to the limits of literature circles as…

Volunteers from the International Reading Association (IRA) participated in the teacher education component of Macedonia's Secondary Education Activity, an initiative to reform vocational/technical education (VET), funded from 2004 to 2008 by USAID. Volunteers offered professional development to VET teachers using a trainer-of-trainers model,…

In previous columns in this department, scholars have taken to task the decontextualized and dehumanizing policies of recent and current federal education policies in the United States. While deconstruction of these policies is crucial, these moves must be followed by reconstruction. In this edition of the Adolescent Literacy Policy column,…

This article explores issues of critical media literacy with middle school students in an urban setting in the United States. The author focuses on data from a qualitative study engaging students in the reading and writing of video texts. The article examines intersections of issues relating to the "crisis of representation" in social science…