Many teachers tirelessly grapple with topics of text selection, evaluation, and comprehension--examining elements of diversity, quality, and kid appeal to empower teachers to select titles for classrooms through a critical lens--under a mandated scripted curriculum. The purpose of this column is to explore and draw upon teachers' knowledge around…

An academic volume is a literary text, and the knowledge within is a subject to its interpretation. In the spirit of work by last century's great literary scholars Auerbach (Time History and Literature. Princeton University Press, 253-265, 2014) and De Man (The Resistance to Theory. University of Minnesota Press. 21-26, 1987) I have applied a film…

Using the framework of Rita Felski in her 2015 book "The Limits of Critique," this essay offers a postcritical analysis of William Carlos Williams' 1915 poem "The Young Housewife." Its intention is to show how Williams' poem or any poem can be approached through a variety of critical lenses, but that these may get in the way of…

The goal of the present investigation is to determine how undergraduate students think about critical reading. We asked 249 students to rate the usefulness of several critical reading skills, how often those skills are taught, and whether they practice those skills when working on their assignments. We found that students consider more complex…

Through juxtaposing images and text, picturebooks have the unique power to facilitate critical reading and critical literacy. This article presents three analytical approaches to develop critical reading and critical literacy skills through picturebooks: (1) critically analyzing broad representation, (2) critical visual analysis, and (3) analyzing…

The article describes practices of "intensive reading" for post-qualitative inquiry, drawing on the work of Deleuze, with some examples from the author's own research. To read intensively is to experience the forward propulsion toward something not-yet-present. That forward momentum, and the fragmented path that it carves through the…

This study sought to understand how well students (n = 274; M[subscript age] = 12.45) were able to identify the author, the main claim, and the supporting evidence (identification performance) and to justify the author's expertise, the author's benevolence, and the quality of the evidence (justification performance) while reading multiple online…

Purpose: Many PhD students have strong reading comprehension, but some struggle with how to read critically. The purpose of this study is to understand what reading looks like for PhD students, what they are doing when they read scholarly texts and how they bring these texts to life in meaningful ways. Design/methodology/approach: The authors…

The Stonewall Riots are pivotal in queer liberatory history, often heralded as the start of the modern queer rights movement. This analysis looks at two versions of the riots, and asks readers to consider not only the stories of Stonewall, but who is telling those stories, and why it matters.

This qualitative study investigated how teaching an historical unit through a critical lens might empower students to evaluate sources, challenge fake news, and make informed decisions. The reading intervention teacher in this study engaged secondary students in reading, discussing, and critiquing a series of multimodal historical texts. Grounded…

This article describes a comprehensive framework (iDISC) for the close reading of informational texts for elementary students that may need additional language, social, memory, or behavioral supports. The article introduces concrete tools that are used before, during, and after close reading, including cue-cards, language stems, discussion…

Reading is an integral part of scholarly practice, though we do not often discuss how our approaches to reading differ, and how these approaches may ultimately make interpretive impact on our research. This essay considers approaches to reading in light of the concepts of proximity and orientation. Though formal "close reading" is a…

Teachers in any discipline where reading matters should practice a robust scaffolding pedagogy to teach critical reading, in contrast to the more common but less direct approaches that often leave students to learn or not learn these skills themselves. In this essay, I describe how to adapt established methods for teaching writing (including…

In recent years, a number of states in the United States have enacted educational policies, often referred to as "critical race theory" bans, that aim to restrict teaching about race and racism in schools. This study examines how current and future elementary literacy educators interpreted and intended to respond to one such law in…

Educating students to apply probability literacy and reasoning in out-of-school contexts requires the previous preparation of teachers, which should include the assessment of their mathematical and didactic knowledge. Consequently, we investigated three research questions concerning the probabilistic reasoning and literacy of 66 prospective…