Julie Coiro is an assistant professor in the Reading Department at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on adolescents' online reading comprehension development. She has served as co-editor of the "Handbook of Research in New Literacies" (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008), among many publications. In this interview, Coiro…

Social and political tensions heightened after the attacks of 9/11 have created an increase in Islamophobia. Historically, vilified depictions of Muslims have legitimized discriminatory acts against Muslim Americans. In this context, Islamophobia has infiltrated our classrooms, making it urgent for educators to develop a critical pedagogical…

A great deal of attention is being paid to the lack of reading and academic success for adolescent males. In this article, we discuss three structures in a school where boys read (and perform) as well as girls. When instruction is guided by inquiry, when teachers model their thinking while reading, and when book choices are honored, all students…

This manuscript describes 51 preservice teachers' reactions to their engagement with works of art in a community art museum. Participants were individuals in an adolescent literacy course who were future teachers of middle and secondary content subjects. They were initially skeptical about using artwork to support their content and serve as a…

This article describes an after-school program in which immigrant and urban low-income middle school students collaborated to create social maps of their school and to produce a multilingual video against gossip. These literacy-based projects combined critical pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy to promote meaningful interactions between…

Many literacy teachers are creating contexts for students to learn and use a range of reading comprehension strategies. As useful as reading strategy instruction is, relatively little has been documented on the ways in which reading strategies can become tools for critical literacy. In this paper, the author illustrates how a reading strategy can…

This article discusses the viability of reading culturally relevant literature aloud to urban middle school youth. The findings from a research study are shared and guidelines for implementing a culturally sensitive read aloud program in your own middle school or high school classroom are discussed. Anecdotes from students involved in the study…

Students' perceptions about the Internet's usefulness and potential to engage them in academic learning tasks have been found to influence their success in reading for information in online tasks. This article helps to understand the types of dispositions that adolescents may have toward reading on the Internet and how to characterize these…

Inside a ninth-grade classroom, we witness one teacher's very intentional instructional attempts that resulted in her students being able to convey well-crafted reasoning and text-supported evidence to mount persuasive arguments. Through personal examples and Internet resources, the teacher concretized pathos, logos, and ethos. The teacher and…

As new times become hard times, there may be little time for multimodality in school unless educators confront the accountability culture. This commentary reviews the arguments for multimodal transformations of school literacy curricula and explores the potential of reflective talk about multimodal meaning-making as an assessment practice. Talking…

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…

Using a case study design, this study investigated the literacy identity, both collectively and individually, of the members of "Slammin!", a slam poetry team from an urban high school. Participant observation of practices and performances was used to find how the involvement in this group uniquely impacted students' academic and personal lives.…

This article describes the perspectives of bidialectal African American adolescents--adolescents who speak both African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Standard English--on spoken language expectations in their English classes. Previous research has demonstrated that many teachers hold negative views of AAVE, but existing scholarship has…

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…

Academic writing is a mainstay of expression in secondary schools. However, many students think of academic writing in terms of local operations that include spelling, punctuation, use of third person, and so on. Teachers may expect mastery of local operations, but often they want students to navigate the terrain of the content area or discipline…