In a time of increased standardization and top-down reform, teachers with democratic and social justice-oriented perspectives must work to create classroom spaces that value student voice and position them as knowledge holders. This article draws on a critical literacy framework to analyze the case study of one teacher working within a teacher…

In educational research, policies and practices, African American male youth are often portrayed as a monolithic demographic of uneducable, criminalized, deviant students. This column reviews the works of two African American male scholars, Tyrone D. Howard's (2014) "Black Male(d)" and David E. Kirkland's (2013) "A Search…

This commentary offers a critique of literacy pedagogy that focuses solely upon a best practices approach to teaching and learning and argues for a relational pedagogy that relies upon diffractive thinking, reading, and writing.

This article describes a teacher created formative assessment useful for content area teachers in English, mathematics, science, and social studies. The assessment can be administered in one class period and results can be used to guide planning for disciplinary literacy implementation.

Successful Internet reading requires making strategic decisions about what texts to read and a sequence for reading them, all in accordance with readers' goals. In this paper, we describe the process of realizing and constructing potential texts as an important and critical part of successful Internet reading and use verbal report data to…

By examining the ways in which high school students in two different English classes take up virtual self-representation tactics in school-based social networking sites, this article explores how young people carefully juggle the digital identities they adopt for the eyes of both peers and teachers. The data reveals that the students'…

This article explores the digital reading preferences and strategies used by preservice teachers when reading an e-textbook in a literacy methods course. The use of e-textbooks is becoming more prevalent due to an increase in access to mobile devices, acceptance of e-books in general, and the high cost of print textbooks. To ensure comprehension,…

Digital badges are web-enabled tokens of accomplishment that contain specific claims and evidence about learning and achievement along with detailed evidence supporting those claims. Badges traditionally consist of an image and relevant metadata (e.g., badge name, description, criteria, issuer, evidence, date issued, standards, and tags). This…

Among the disciplinary skills necessary for understanding in the social studies classroom is the ability to determine context and build meaning from past events. Historical buildings are an important component of historical study, and they serve as a type of nontraditional text that students can decode and use to construct meaning about multiple…

Research suggests that young adults are motivated in school contexts when they believe in their own self-efficacy, have intrinsic motivation, set goals, experience agency, and demonstrate interest. To highlight how online spaces foster motivation, we focus specifically on two project-based DIY sites, Figment.com and Scratch.mit.edu. From reading…

This article, the first column for this issue's Policy and Advocacy department, features a discussion about a recent experience in a graduate program in Medellín, Colombia introducing students to critical literacy. Graduate students used ideas from critical literacy to engage in an in-depth analysis of textbooks they had used in their…

This empirical study examines the virtual exchanges between an African American mother and son's engagement in a blog. Using literacy as social practices as a framework, this study describes how blogging was developed and used to create affinity spaces, encouraged apprenticeship models, and shaped agentic roles within their family. Attention…

Violent writing is a real, yet rarely understood phenomenon in the secondary and post-secondary classroom. The 2007 Virginia Tech shooting tragedy sensationalized violent writing as a marker of disturbed and violent persons. However, violent writing comes in multiple forms and is composed for multiple reasons. As secondary schools wrestle with…

The research presented in this article examines the English language and print literacy development of adolescent refugee students with limited and interrupted formal education (SLIFE) aged 14 to 21. The aim of this research was to determine if and how teaching early reading strategies to secondary ESL/ELD teachers could improve students'…

As a postcolonial Indian woman now living in the West, I managed to overcome my own circumstances by finding my voice and resisting the oppression of an abusive arranged marriage. Subsequently, as a teacher of at risk marginalized and immigrant youth in the inner cities of 21st century America, who continue to be "colonized" by a public…