This article describes five middle school students' experiences as they moved with mobile devices to produce digital narratives in a twelve-week digital media enrichment course designed and led by the authors. In the course, iPod Touches were often the exclusive tool for media composition. The authors, as teacher-researchers, designed the…

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…

It has been widely recognized for some time that the complexities involved in becoming literate and engaging in the processes of reading require models that go beyond decoding and encoding. Luke and Freebody, for example, offered a model describing four roles for readers, where literacy embraces families of practice; this model was later critiqued…

This study is framed by sociocultural perspectives and presents findings from focus groups conducted with students from an urban middle and high school that has documented success in reading achievement. Students illuminated the kinds of literacy events that the school valued, the texts that enabled them to negotiate their own identities and the…

Despite the emphasis on increasing the frequency with which students engage in analytic writing, we know very little about the "writing diet" of adolescents. Student notebooks, used as a daily record of in-class work, provide one source of evidence about the diversity of writing expectations that students face. Through careful…

This qualitative study investigates how 90 teachers explored critical curriculum through their reading, analysis and creation of counter advertisements. Located in visual discourse analysis, we designed a study to investigate the question "To what extent can teachers engaged in a critical literacy curriculum talk back to messages of consumerism,…

This article shares findings from case studies of two eighteen-year-old songwriters, Bradley and James. The study investigated songwriter motivation, writing methods, and school experiences. Data was collected over the course of one year through two in-depth interviews per songwriter, two teacher interviews, and 101 songwriting artifacts. Grounded…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) require literacy instruction for secondary students across content areas, but they also recommend that this instruction account for the discipline-specific nature of academic texts. Since English language arts (ELA) teachers and literacy specialists are also responsible for teaching students to read across…

This column addresses the importance of acknowledging the knowledge-making practice of Chicana bloggers. The author argues the online practices of Chicanas can be used to determine ways to develop 21st-century literacies of students, especially students of color. The author presents findings from a case study of three Chicana bloggers that reveal…

The author describes a graduate class she teaches called Perspectives on Literacy and Technology, whose first goal is to provide a space for teachers enrolled in a literacy education MS program to reflect on current theory and research related to digital technologies and literacy. A secondary goal is to foster their use of "cutting-edge"…

Although the term "chronotope" may be unfamiliar, the meaning and significance of the construct resonate with many ELA teachers. Chronotope (Bakhtin,) captures how people come to make sense of stories and the characters that inhabit those stories. In this longitudinal case study, chronotope is used to explore what school literacy experiences…

This article examines teacher scaffolding of academic language in an Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH) course throughout a school year for one student who received a perfect score on the end of year APUSH exam. Data includes four months of observation of teacher instructional strategies to scaffold student writing and vignettes of…

Within the past few years literacy scholars have begun voicing serious doubts on theoretical and practical grounds about the efficacy of the longstanding notion that every teacher is a teacher of reading. In this commentary, we add our voices to the conversation around content area literacy as well as offer our perspectives on the recent calls for…

Implementation of Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts across most of the United States has yielded the rapid creation of new, interconnected literacy assessments, curriculum guidelines, instructional materials, teacher preparation programs, teacher evaluation systems, and professional development. This essay explores two…

This study examines the literacy practices of pre-service English teachers engaged in multimodal and digital composing in a writing methods course designed to support both print-based and digital and/or multimodal composition practices. By examining the struggles and resistances of pre-service English teachers as they adapted print-based writing…