Drawing from data generated during the 2016-2017 academic year, this study centred on U.S. children's design of two critical literacies compositions--a letter to Congress and a persuasive multimodal text. Situated within an integrated unit focused on (im)migrants, children asked legislators to act on the GOP Administration's proposed border wall…

Black Art in various forms has long been used by people in the African Diaspora to promote Black joy and Pro-Blackness yet it is often not included in language and literacy early childhood pedagogies to uplift Black children in North American schools. Likewise, many anti-racist early childhood research studies focus on the challenges faced by…

The prison abolition movement has brought attention to the American carceral crisis, or better yet, the mass incarceration and disproportionate criminalization of Black people in America. It has also led to and fomented recent calls to defund prison systems, the police, and to remove police from schools. While discussions of prison abolition have…

Against the backdrop of endemic anti-Black racism in Early Childhood literacy, we frame these special issues using "Pro-Blackness" as an antidote in early childhood classrooms. "Pro-Black" does note connote "anti"-White or "anti" any other ethnic group and declares an unapologetic, positive perspective…

Although there is a growing body of literature which focuses on museums' role in supporting children's literacy, there is also a need for studies to show ways in which museums can support refugee families' literacy practices. In light of this gap, this qualitative study explores the role of a children's museum in the literacy practices of a recent…

Within this article, I attend to the slippages among sound, silence, noise, voice and ir/rationality to map out the ways in which white supremacist forces subtly moved with/in a primary classroom (NYC), through a host of bodies and sounds, to reinforce processes of affective assimilation -- or demands for first graders to 'feel white'.…

This paper was written in the midst of enquiry--provoked by the question of what happens when we write posthumanism, qualitative enquiry and early literacy together. Rather than offer a stable methodology that is the product of our experimentation, the paper functions as a map, a situated cartography that has multiple access points and is…

This paper discusses findings from the Danish contribution to the EASE project, a European research project running from 2008 to 2010 on early literacy in relation to the transition from childcare to school. It explores a holistic inclusive approach to early literacy that resists a narrow accountability-oriented Danish policy (mirroring…

Young children are surrounded by environmental print on a daily basis. Through their visual exploration of environmental print, coupled with sociocultural experiences, children gain valuable semantic and symbolic knowledge as they make sense of their world. The aim of this review is to examine the question of whether environmental print has value…

Geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) frames this analysis of play, multimodal collaboration, and peer mediation as players navigate barriers to online connectivity in a children's social network and gaming site. A geosemiotic perspective enables examination of children's web play as "discourses in place": fluidly converging and…

This article uses multiple theoretical perspectives to understand the synergy that occurs between linguistically diverse parents and children during reading interactions. Through the detailed analysis of code-switching during book-sharing activities in a middle-class, bilingual home, we can observe how linguistically diverse parents support the…

This article hones what is meant by "emergent comprehension". The authors define emergent comprehension as the period when young children, prior to conventional reading, engage in meaningful experiences that stimulate the development and use of meaning-making strategies with potential to affect later reading comprehension. The construct "emergent…

Based on Moje et al.'s (2004) conceptions of "third space theory", this article describes how five nursery-aged children created a "third space" between home and school, in order to find continuity between home and school constructions of reading. This article describes how the children used various aspects of their home…

This article uses a historical lens to illuminate literacy teaching as it is constructed in two recent reports, "Teaching Reading" and "In Teachers' Hands". In surveying these texts alongside 19th-century sources, we show that an autonomous view of literacy has always held sway, along with a primary focus on reading. Parents'…

National governments in Britain have consistently promised that, while they would legislate for a curriculum, it would not tell teachers how to teach. Our article suggests, however, that this policy is compromised with the current programme to "remodel the workforce" and augment the role of the classroom or teaching assistant. It does…