This case study report uses the conceptual framework of Bakhtinian notions of dialogism to explore how a highly motivated 10th grade English student, Aaliyah, developed strategies for combating her disengagement in academic writing. Aaliyah?s anxiety and boredom stemmed from multiple factors relating to the distance between her home and school…

This study draws on in-depth interviews in which Jared, a queer trans man and high school arts teacher, grappled with what it means to him to be an activist to explore how his conceptualizations of queer activism have been supported and limited by LGBT-inclusive and queering discourses and to consider other discourses that might better represent…

Students need more opportunities to learn how to respond to and counter forms of everyday racism. This qualitative study addresses that need by investigating how one peer-led group engaged in dialogue about issues of race in regards to an eleventh-grade Language Arts assignment. A racial literacy perspective framed our analysis of three small…

In this paper we tell a story about how we partnered with a Chicago high school in order to turn the school inside out by displaying larger-than-life teacher portraits and statements at street level throughout the community. This paper explores how public art and activism can help teachers and students develop notions of civic literacy and…

This article analyzes the potential of a series of Youth Action Coalition's (YAC) Arts-for-Change (AfC) youth programs for literacy and identity development, as well as for engaging youth in addressing issues of social justice. Drawing primarily on transcripts of interviews, surveys, and participant-observation fieldnotes inventorying changes in…

This paper presents the use of the arts and aesthetic education in a graduate literacy course for in-service and pre-service teachers followed by a description of how one graduate student implemented her learned theory in the high school classroom in which she taught. The core theory of the paper follows the assumption that aesthetic education…

Framed at the intersection of activist and Indigenous research methodologies, this article explores the way two First Nations senior high school students made sense of their visual and literary identity texts (Cummins & Early, 2011). An Ojibwe artist-in-residence at an urban secondary school in southwestern Ontario and a university-based…