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…

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…

To support digital literacies in schools, fundamental reorientation and rethinking is required to develop 'appropriate' pedagogical practices which are aligned with (and extend) the current curriculum. To achieve this, new flexible frameworks and tools are needed to support educators to work creatively and productively within the current…

In this study, we investigate how digital storying creates opportunities for children to attend to their emotional experiences in and about nature. Following relational ontology and socio-cultural theorising, we focus our analysis on the temporal-spatial entanglements of children's emotional experiences. Our inquiry draws on a case study of two…

In this paper, we present a descriptive case study of the Mobeybou materials, a kit of tangible and digital tools aimed at offering young children opportunities to read, create and share intercultural stories. The tools comprise a set of story apps that present interactive, multimodal and intercultural stories for children to make meanings with, a…

In 2021, more than 80 million people worldwide will have been forced to flee their homes. Upon arrival in their new country, families may endure numerous hardships, yet succumbing to these challenges is not their single story. To understand how migrant-background and refugee-background children imagine more liveable futures beyond social and…

Spoken word poetry encourages youth to engage in identity construction, resist oppression and construct counternarratives. Through participating in community-based slams, school workshops and online events, young people can take part in visible activism through exploring their own identity, power and agency and seeing themselves as change agents.…

This paper draws on 3 years of ethnographic research with young children and their families in a northern English town, employing a more-than-human lens to pay attention to what, beyond humans, might be involved in the emergence of children's literacies. The paper focuses on the role of the body and place in the emergence of young children's…

This paper imagines oracy education as a reaching-out for connection with the irreducible socialities of black study. In the wake of imperialist functions of literacy, classroom talk has been left to defend its value against traditionalist views which rebuke, as one UK education minister put it, "idle chatter in class." We argue that…

There is growing evidence that student contributions via classroom talk (oracy) are subject to social judgements premised on cultural evaluation of accent and dialect, with particular varieties often viewed in deficit terms and pathologised, both within and beyond the classroom. We reflect on a university-community project involving researchers…

Adolescents face complex texts rich in academic language. Existing research has documented how teachers can design curriculum to scaffold students' comprehension of complex texts, but little work has documented the moments of adolescents' encounters with complex texts, and how teachers can scaffold these encounters on a moment-to-moment basis to…