The concept of neurodiversity has fuelled a social justice movement advocating for the rights of those whose lives diverge from a socially-constructed default. However, deficit understandings of disability persist in educational settings and neurodivergent people continue to face disadvantage and discrimination in organisations constructed on…

Learning Mandarin Chinese as a heritage or additional language at Chinese complementary schools has long been a tradition for many Asian Canadians. However, research that looks at teachers' experiences and perceptions in Canadian settings, especially the power dynamics embedded in biliteracy development at complementary schools, is scant.…

For children to know how to fully participate in and most effectively lead the world they will inherit, they must learn how to critically engage with it and be knowledgeable about foundational rights and instruments that support such engagement. Together, critical literacy, which encourages the examination and interrogation of the underlying…

In the wake of grim events such as Russian invasion on Ukraine, Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the death of George Floyd in America and mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, all occurring amid the pandemic of COVID-19, it became increasingly more important to recognise literacy work that promotes a critically informed and just society.…

Policy-makers and provincial governments have a responsibility to prioritise equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility (EDIA) with approaches that leverage both intersectionality and transdisciplinarity, especially when looking at literacies research. Supported by a federally funded knowledge synthesis grant that surveyed the scope of EDIA in…

While digital multimodal composing, underpinned by a critical literacies approach, provides opportunities for students to make informed semiotic choices and voice concerns about social issues, there is limited research exploring how digital multimodal composing is employed to interrogate and challenge the entanglements of language, immigration…

In this article, we 'think with' the theoretical concepts of flow, rupture, layering, and sampling to affectively attune to 'in-the-red frequencies' flowing across/with-in a New York City primary classroom--that is, alternative sonic frequencies that trouble and refuse hegemonic literacy practices. These hip-hop concepts theorise affect in…

Collaborative meaning-making across difference is often undertaken in pursuit of equity, but too often socially constructed power differentials between collaborators on the basis of social class, race, gender, ability, age or other markers are reified. This article examines the ripples produced by one literacy collaboration that took place across…

This article offers a multimodal analysis of spontaneous, improvisatory interactions between pre-service teachers as they engage with a range of material resources connected to, or generated by, a literary text (in this case, the Old English poem Beowulf). We draw on an understanding of role as a form of frame, offering students a particular…

High quality teaching and learning materials (TLM) are essential for early literacy learning. The purpose of this study was to determine if the TLM used in schools in Kano State, Nigeria, were culturally appropriate, gender balanced and relevant to the Nigeria Universal Basic Education Curriculum, with particular emphasis on primary reading. Using…

In a socially just world, everyone would have an equal chance to become an enthusiastic reader. This article presents a detailed 'asset map' of a successful reading life and investigates three necessary components for creating readers: access, choice and time to read. Access to books, the chance and the requisite knowledge to choose reading…

This article reports on an UKLA funded study which is working with young readers to explore the use of fictional texts to interrogate raciolinguistic ideologies in schools. We draw on data generated from workshops where young students read and responded to "Front Desk," a 2018 novel by the Chinese writer Kelly Yang, which centres around…

This article provides a reflective account of the participatory methodology employed in the Growing up a Reader research study. The aim of the Growing up a Reader study was to explore children's (age 9-11) perceptions of a 'reader' and their reasons for reading different text types. This involved training 12 primary school children as student…

While previous research has documented the challenges international students face during their graduate level study in U.S. universities (Casanave and Li, 2008), less is known about the graduate students at English-medium universities, which are common in non-English dominant (EFL) contexts. To address this gap in the literature, this exploratory…

Re-imagining Home was a collective immersive story response for children ages 7-12 years during COVID curated by artists from The Story Makers Company. This experience focused on connecting children in new ways through the processes of drama and storying. This paper explores the nuanced responses that children and artists negotiated online/offline…