This paper presents and discusses the results of OnAir, a European project on Media Education funded by the European Commission. This two-year project aimed at collecting, documenting, and developing media education practices across Europe, especially in Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. In particular, the paper focuses on…

Empowering children for a critical and judicious use and consumption of media is a main objective of media literacy. This paper aims to examine the range of television programs available for children in Portugal through a comparative analysis of the programming for children broadcast by the four Portuguese terrestrial channels (RTP1, RTP2, SIC and…

School principals play an important role in managing media and technology integration into school teaching since they can foster the use of information communication technologies (ICT) at a strategic level, even supporting the introduction of media literacy education activities into teaching. Starting from a review on the role of principals'…

The purpose of the article is to describe Finnish media literacy policies and good media education practices in early childhood education and care. This article will focus on describing two central action lines related to the Children and Media Program, initiated by the Division for Cultural Policy of the Ministry of Education and Culture in 2004.…

Use of research-based practices for improving content area literacy of English learners is important both because of their growing numbers and their overall poor academic performance. However, how do we ensure that teachers are implementing proven methods with fidelity? This study shows the direct relationship between teachers' level of…

This commentary explores a central issue for our times, online reading comprehension. It first defines three issues that have largely gone unnoticed as the Internet enters our classrooms: (1) literacy has become deictic; (2) effective online information use requires additional online reading comprehension practices, skills, and dispositions; and…

As elementary and middle school teachers and students face standards, high-stakes testing, accountability, and one-size-fits all curricula, concerns have arisen that these practices limit the relevance and efficacy of teaching and learning. In this paper, we argue that such practices exact personal costs on students and the teachers expected to…

The purpose of the present study was to develop an instrument to measure reading during in-school independent reading (ISIR). Procedures to establish validity and reliability of the instrument included videotaping and observing students during ISIR, gathering feedback from literacy experts, establishing interrater reliability, crosschecking…

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…

This article provides a deeper understanding of how young bilinguals constructed meaning with expository texts in an inquiry-based setting over an academic year. An examination of classroom transcripts and analysis revealed how "Viewing" became the most frequently used literacy practice and a cultural tool in the construction of meaning…

This piece describes how a 5th grade language arts teacher employed technology to create and sustain a metaphorical, virtual, and physical figured world in her class by means of a web site called "The Hive Society." This world positioned students as intellectuals and scholars, and explored how Ms. Smith integrated 21st Century…

In recent decades, researchers have indicated that U.S. schools have underexposed elementary grade students to informational text. The increased exposure to this genre should be a top instructional priority. In the present study, we explored 46 third-grade students' attitudes toward and perceptions of informational text. Using three data…

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 "Voices from the Field" paper presents methods and participant-exemplar data for integrating digital video cameras into the writing process across postsecondary literacy contexts. The methods and participant data are part of an ongoing action-based research project systematically designed to bring research and theory into practice…

Using elements of the ethnography of globalization and teacher research, two Puerto Rican researchers and educators worked collaboratively with a teacher on a study conducted in a third grade classroom in a public school in an urban community in Puerto Rico. They conceptualized children's curricular engagement with the Spanish television genre of…