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…

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…

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…

Classroom discussions of multimodal texts, in particular historical fiction picturebooks, offer an interpretive space where readers are positioned to construct meanings in transaction with the written language, visual images, and design elements created by authors, illustrators and publishers (Serafini & Ladd, 2008; Sipe, 1999). This study was…

For their 56th annual meeting, the Association of Educators and Researchers (ALER) met in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the Amway Grand Hotel. This year's conference theme was Literacy Is Transformative, which was also used as the title for this year's Yearbook, Volume 35. Included are double-peer reviewed papers, the presidential address,…

A report of preliminary findings and analysis from student discussion groups held on 7 U.S. campuses in Fall 2008, as part of Project Information Literacy. Qualitative data from discussions with higher education students across the country suggest that conducting research is particularly challenging. Students' greatest challenges are related to…

A report of findings from 2,318 respondents to a survey carried out among college students on six campuses distributed across the U.S. in the spring of 2009, as part of Project Information Literacy. Respondents, while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information,…

Findings from "Learning to Achieve: A Review of the Research Literature on Serving Adults With Learning Disabilities" will inform a new professional development program to be offered to practitioners and others working with adults with learning disabilities (LD). The six topics covered in the review--assessment, English language learners,…

This newsletter, published five times a year, features articles on issues of concern to adult, family, and youth literacy practitioners, as well as recommended resources, announcements, and teaching strategies. This issue includes: (1) Career Pathways for High School Dropouts: A National Survey (Jon Steinberg); (2) Work (Elyse Barbell); (3) Peer…