This article presents research with migrant primary school learners in South Africa using the wordless picturebook "The Arrival" (by Shaun Tan) as a research tool. Bringing together the disciplines of literacies and childhood studies, it considers representation, storytelling, absence and silence as part of children's 'voice' in order to…

This article examines a culturally sustaining approach to learning about and enacting multimodal literacy instruction that was developed during a field-based reading methods course for elementary preservice teachers. Despite a large body of work exploring preservice teachers' learning about multimodal literacies, few studies have explored their…

This essay examines the role of educators in the tangled economic, social, environmental and technological crises of the present time. It argues that a central purpose of education in this period is to support students to imagine and make liveable futures on their own terms. To do this, the paper proposes that the colonizing, optimizing and…

The number of children and young people in England who speak languages other than English at home has grown in the past decade, increasing from 14.6% in 2011 to 19.3% in 2021. This has understandably sparked an interest in research around reading for multilingual pupils or those with English as an additional language (EAL). Given the apparent lack…

This Innovative Practices piece details the design of a scaffolded project in a public health course that paired a narrative inquiry assignment with an empirical health literature review assignment to highlight both the positivist and constructivist epistemologies of critical health research in public health. The authors discuss and reflect on the…

Through an exploration of an afterschool writing club for middle school girls of Color (GOC), this article puts forth the argument that GOC consistently leverage incisive critiques of schooling through multiple literacies, including embodied and experiential ways of knowing and communicating. However, oftentimes, these critiques are ignored…

This article considers high school students' relationship to poetry through a small-scale qualitative study guided by the question: what happens to student perceptions of poetry when class begins each day with a poem? As a former teacher and current teacher educator, I conducted a series of interviews with a small group of my former students…

Developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) add urgency to the claim that democracy requires media literate citizens. The purpose of this paper is to support media engagement by youth in a context characterized by the spread of misinformation through the very technologies that promise to democratize public debate. Rejecting…

In this paper, I use narrative methodology to examine and interpret the experiences of Shaun, a 4th grade student in the United States, navigating his own reluctance and disaffection with writing in school -- in a writing workshop that sought to foster language experimentation, choice, and agency. From the perspective of a participant-observer and…

Young people have the potential to transform public perspectives about pressing social issues--if their audiences listen deeply to what they have to say. This article examines the ways that high school student participants in a community-university writing partnership employ self-disclosure, or emotion sharing, to encourage audiences to listen…

Teacher preparation programs face the continual challenge to provide experiences that foster collaboration between teacher candidates and go beyond the boundaries of particular programs and classrooms. Collaborative learning structures improve learner achievement, attitudes, engagement, satisfaction, and retention rates when interactions between…

This conceptual article addresses theories of ethics in literacy studies. Here, ethics means people's ways of defining, asking about, and living good lives. Although literacy researchers have paid some attention to ethics, they rarely theorize ethics overtly. To demonstrate the need for a clearer concept of the ethical dimension of literacy, this…

In this paper, I argue that the mainstream assumptions that inform current educational policy and practice for young children's in-school literacy development in schools are insufficient to secure a helpful account of young children's classroom literacy practices. A particular problem lies with the reliance of such policy and practice on…

Teachers' enactments of literacy pedagogies are recontextualisations not only of curriculum documents, but of system and school-based policies, approaches, frameworks and the demands of assessments. These external inputs combine with teacher professional experience, beliefs about teaching and the roles of teachers and learners to generate…

The authors examined the research and activism of 10th graders (ages 15-16) involved in a youth participatory action research project in a course in qualitative research at their small public school in New York City, New York. The authors, a classroom researcher and a high school teacher, looked closely at how the youth researchers used…