This holistic single-case study aimed to understand the impact of digital story telling (DST) on the identity expressions of Native American youth. The question that guided the study asks, 'How do Native American adolescents in a rural, tribal-run after-school programme for Indigenous youth explore and express who they are through digital story…

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…

Research exploring the literacy practices of diverse participants is integral to developing our understanding of literacy. Diverse groups of participants, for example participants with mental health conditions, bring specific ethical considerations and methodological challenges. This paper presents the use of Skype to research literacy practices…

Boys' attitude to writing is widely perceived as an issue in English primary and secondary schools. Prior research has identified a link between negative attitudes to writing and lower achievement and raised the issue of the stereotyping of boys as underachievers in literacy. The study reported here suggests that if we are to understand the…

This article examines data gathered in a broader study of a school-based reading challenge to children aged from 8 to 14 to read science information books, centred in their school or class library. A survey was conducted before they embarked on the reading challenge to establish the children's reading habits. After the period of time allotted to…

College and career readiness has become a key educational priority in the United States. Framed by neoliberal discourses, current conceptions of college and career readiness narrowly define literacy as discrete sets of cognitive skills and curricular knowledge and reduce literacy learning to scores on high-stakes assessments. To disrupt these…

Educational standards documents worldwide include reading and writing of evidence-based argument as a major focus. In order to help students craft arguments that will be considered seriously by those with the power to make changes that affect them, educators need to cultivate within students their sociological imagination--that is, an…

This paper re-considers the concept of aliteracy by arguing that it is less about not reading than it is about choice, agency and context. By analysing findings from a study that examined undergraduates' reading experiences in a Malaysian university, this paper explores the complexities around how the undergraduates grappled with conflicting…

Creative writing is often thought of as an individual and solitary pursuit. This is partly owing to Romantic (and still popular) notions of "creativity" as residing in highly gifted individuals, but also to the widely held belief that "writing" is a lonely rather than a social activity. The research presented in this paper…

This article explores the use of Bourdieusian analysis for examining how policy and practice interact in the teaching of English and therefore in the development of children's language and literacy, in particular how. Bourdieusian analysis uncovers the ways in which teachers' practice has been influenced unconsciously by centralised shaping of the…