An incident of bullying, violence in the classroom, or suicide can unsettle teachers' views of their teaching, their role as a teacher, and their relationships with students. Unfortunately, there is a high probability that many educators will teach a young person who has been bullied or considered suicide. This article explores the shifts in…

Using the Internet as a learning tool has great promise, but also poses significant challenges. Theories and research confirm the importance of students' engagement in self-regulated learning processes for effective Internet learning. In this article the Authors describe a structured think-aloud procedure intended to support students'…

This article presents a conversation about the nature of multimodal inquiry and composing between Lalitha Vasudevan and Mary Ann Reilly. The authors draw on their Twitter exchanges, blog posts, art, photography, and reflections as they consider what literacy education is and can be in a world that offers multiple means of expression. The…

In this column, Kenji Hakuta and Mario Santos described the challenges and opportunities the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards present for language development in the context of English language arts/literacy, mathematics, and science. They heightened educators' awareness of the critical role language plays…

The article describes a semester-long project that draws on Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" as a resource and over-arching theme for preservice teachers taking a content area literacy course. We examine how preservice teachers learn to connect written texts to content area (disciplinary) literacy and consider ways to prepare…

Rigid foci on accountability, accreditation, and customer service pose significant challenges for literacy educators today. The most consequential identified as the snuffing out of scholastic innovation and erosion of academic freedom. This article recounts a recent experience that occurred while the author prepared a lesson for an undergraduate…

While doubts surround relations between adolescents and books, Heath argues that today's adolescents seek out reading opportunities that develop and deepen their special interests. Wanting to know and do more than their parents, young people prize learning on their own time to advance skills, ways of knowing, and peer relationships. Doing so, they…

This article describes what happened when 49 preservice teachers participated in an e-book reading experience in order to prepare them to teach with e-books in K-12 classrooms. In addition to examining the preservice teachers' digital reading behaviors and dispositions, this manuscript also examines reader factors and text factors of digital texts…

This paper introduces a new affective instrument for assessing the reader self-perceptions of students in grades seven through ten. The Reader Self-Perception Scale 2 (RSPS2) builds upon its predecessor, the RSPS, a tool that measures the reading efficacy beliefs of children in grades four through six. New items were created for the RSPS2 to…

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is the latest effort to reform education through standards. This article examines how the Standards promise to prepare students for the changing world of the 21st century, yet do not consider the changing nature of literacy--especially the centrality of the Internet as a 21st century text, and online…

Research on youth use of multiliteracies and multimodal texts often imply that youth are inherently motivated by digital technologies. In this column, I consider the nature of research into motivation and multiliteracies. I suggest that the concepts of competence, autonomy, and relatedness should be integrated with a multilayered contextual…

In this column, content area literacy scholars Tom Bean and David O'Brien challenge the older "infusion" model of content area literacy with its emphasis on generic strategies. Rather, they argue for and provide examples of projects that draw on the unique dimensions of various disciplines like history, science, and English, particularly in light…

This article describes the inaugural year of a cross-cultural after-school program that used a problem-solving, project-based pedagogy to promote meaningful interactions between immigrant middle school students and their urban, low-income peers. The program relied on the students' local knowledge as they worked together to create social maps of…

Identifying English Education courses focused on young adult literature as apposite sites for exploring teacher conceptions of youth and the texts aimed for youths' consumptions, this article addresses the multiple sources of tension--and pedagogical potential--of teaching a young adult literature course centrally framed around controversial…

Across many disciplines in the arts and in fields such as geography, where visual phenomena are a taken-for-granted way of knowing the world (Nairn, 2005; Rose, 1996; Scott, 1992), the visual is privileged. By contrast, in the field of literacy education, language is privileged, and it is assumed that whatever can be thought or felt can best be…