Guided reading is widespread as a small group reading instructional approach, and yet in some cases the original intent of guided reading as a method for encouraging readers' independent strategic thinking has been lost. This article describes one group of teachers' discoveries as they searched for a way to improve their instruction by…

Over the last two decades, the criminalization and demonization of Chican@/Latin@ youth has produced policies in the United States that have banned bilingual education, Mexican American Studies in Tucson, and undocumented students in Georgia from attending public universities. Furthermore, hundreds and thousands of youth in the U.S. are…

Teacher/practitioner research, with its emphasis on the intimate relationship between knowledge and teaching, can be a methodological basis for developing rich conceptions of literacy and alternative practices. Teacher researchers theorize from the thick of things, from actual educational contexts that they shape daily. This informs new practices…

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…

In the context of an arts-integration course in an elementary education program, preservice teachers used tableaux (i.e. frozen scenes) to portray field experience moments in two ways: (1) as remembered events, and (2) as projected possibilities. Using video and photographs of the tableaux, we traced the students' enactment of activist stances and…

An essential requirement for supporting the activist literacies of adolescents is a critical understanding of the purposes, practices and roles of engaged citizens and of the linguistic and broader semiotic resources they deploy in response to their multi-layered contexts. Drawing on theories from social semiotic and rhetorical traditions as well…

Inspired by her attendance at the inaugural JoLLE Activist Literacies conference, the author ruminates on the ways in which children's literature and activitist literacies are inextricably wed and manifested in myriad ways. References to a sampling of children's literature spanning genres and grade levels, websites, and affiliated articles provide…

Because teaching in the twenty-first century involves use of technology, our paper advocates for the integration of multimedia in a literature-based curriculum. One way teachers can accomplish this integration is through transmediation. In this paper, four pre-service teachers (Eliza Altenderfer, Amanda Doerfler, Erika Poblete, and Marissa…