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…

The purpose of this study was to better understand the process of engaging in critical literacy practices with kindergarteners. The researcher spent six months in a kindergarten classroom taking extensive field notes on the ways in which the teacher and students explored issues of social justice through literacy activities. Data analysis using a…

Where does the work of de/colonizing preservice teacher education begin? Aboriginal children's literature? Storytelling and theatrical performance? Or, with a paradigm shift? This article takes up some of these questions and challenges, old and new, and begins to problematize these deeper layers. In this article, the authors explore the…

Drawing data from an action-oriented research project for integrating digital video cameras into the reading process in pre-college courses, this study proposes using digital video cameras in reading summaries and responses to promote critical thinking and to teach social justice concepts. The digital video research project is founded on…

In this paper, I use Nielsen's (2005) scholARTistry (as cited in Siegesmund & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2008), interweaving art and written text to interpret and challenge the widespread impact of Borders in school and society. With an artistic and scholarly eye, I argue that the Border needs to be removed, not only the physical wall, but also the…

This article focuses on the intersections among language, literacy, and culture, and what these intersections have meant for the author personally, and what they can mean for students who have been marginalized, neglected, or made invisible by traditional understandings of the role of education. Although not linked conceptually in the past, the…

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…

Using qualitative content analysis, the authors explored depictions of activism in 35 international, translated titles receiving Mildred L. Batchelder Award and Honor commendations. Findings included identification of three social justice issues appearing in the texts: characters were challenged by poor living conditions or homelessness, labor…