ABSTRACT This qualitative multiple case study examines how middle school Students of Color construct, negotiate, and respond to literacy identities within classroom‐based online learning contexts. Guided by racialized identity development in learning contexts, the study examines how access, participation, and recognition shaped students' experiences of competence and belonging during digital literacy instruction. Data were collected over 9 months at an urban middle school and included more than 300 h of classroom observations, semi‐structured interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and digital artifacts from Google Docs, used for collaborative writing and peer feedback; Epic, a digital reading platform supporting teacher‐assigned and student‐selected texts; and Raz‐Kids, a guided reading platform that supported oral reading, self‐monitoring, and rereading. Findings show that students constructed literacy identities through agentic participation, collaborative interaction, and culturally and linguistically meaningful literacy practices. Recognition was negotiated across peer interactions, digital platform affordances, and institutional assessment systems, although these systems were not consistently aligned. While classroom digital platforms supported iterative participation and visible growth, institutional measures often constrained how students' literacy practices were recognized. These findings extend scholarship on racialized identity development and sociocultural literacy by demonstrating how classroom‐based digital learning environments shape opportunities for competence, belonging, and recognition among middle school Students of Color.
ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how scholars and students conduct research, write papers, and engage with knowledge. This article offers a concise synthesis of this rapidly evolving field, focusing on AI's roles in writing and research, issues surrounding AI use in writing, AI's impacts on human users, and the affordances and limitations of AI‐assisted writing technologies. It also explores the profound implications of AI for writing research, theory, and pedagogy. In light of these developments, the article advocates for a critical human‐machine collaborative model, where AI‐powered tools act as genuine assistants that augment human intelligence, rather than as substitutes that undermine the very practice and ethos of academic writing.
This article emerges from a cross‐racial, cross‐cultural partnership between a Black male teacher educator who specializes in Hip Hop ELA pedagogies and a White female ELA teacher committed to anti‐racist teaching. Our discussion centers on the question: What if we assumed an “inquiry stance” to discover how Hip Hop‐based approaches to the teaching and learning of ELA can advance the academic and the anti‐racist skills of Asian and White students in a suburban middle school? The study advances research at the intersections of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Hip Hop Pedagogy, and anti‐racist teaching by sharing victory narratives and cautionary tales related to the cultural‐political and pedagogical dilemmas associated with a White teacher's engagement of Black pedagogies with non‐Black students. We offer these stories so that dreamers keep dreaming about “good teaching” and avoid the traps that befall the fantasizers and sleepwalkers amidst the current political nightmare.
Find and underline the author's main idea. Such instructional directives have long been a staple of postsecondary literacy instruction, at least as gauged by their prevalence in developmental reading (and integrated reading and writing, IRW) course textbooks. We question whether this discrete skill should continue to be taught, given its misalignment with the rigorous and complex interpretive literacy demands of college‐level reading. Drawing from a critical content analysis of current IRW textbooks, we identify how “main idea” instruction remains rooted in decontextualized, surface‐level assumptions that limit reader agency and meaning‐making. We highlight our theoretical dissonance in relation to contemporary literacy theory and offer shifts away from what we see as a reductive and outdated pedagogical practice. We conclude by calling for theory‐aligned alternatives that foster deeper interpretive engagement and prepare students for authentic academic literacy tasks.
Globalization and technological advances have fundamentally expanded the concept of literacy, moving it beyond traditional unimodal, page‐bound meaning‐making toward the integration of multiple communication modes. Through the combined lens of multiliteracies and culturally relevant pedagogies, this article examines literacy leadership and literacy community design as a means of translating theory into collaborative practices that drive systemic secondary literacy reform. By advocating for the formation of literacy leadership teams that strategically include instructional leaders, literacy coaches, district and building leaders, this article argues that collaborative inquiry and design are an effective approach to support diverse meaning‐making and resolve the misalignment that currently exists between students' in‐school and out‐of‐school literacy practices. Initial practical strategies that support leaders in meeting the culturally mediated literacy needs of all learners within an increasingly multimodal society are proposed in this article. Six literacy leadership actions which include assessing cultural models, investigating student identity, designing critical learning opportunities, honoring adult learners, strategically investing in assets, and reflecting on community vision are suggested. Ultimately collaborative literacy leadership, consisting of self‐reflection, collective efficacy maintenance, and multimodal professional learning design, is suggested as a path toward cultivating a school literacy community that authentically honors the dynamic literacy needs and amplifies the literacy assets of educators, students, caregivers, leaders, and community members.
This qualitative case study explored how four high school English Language Arts teachers engaged with a Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) pedagogical framework originally developed for mathematics instruction. Teachers participated in a workshop series that introduced them to an empirically-derived CCW pedagogical framework and explored its application to ELA contexts. Through semi-structured interviews, we analyzed teachers' descriptions of their implementation of specific CCW practices and shifts in their reported pedagogical beliefs. Teachers reported leveraging multiple forms of capital, particularly social, linguistic, familial, and navigational, through practices like peer collaboration, heritage projects, and student-generated learning tools. Teachers also reported shifts from deficit-oriented, teacher-centered instruction toward asset-based, student-led pedagogy. Teachers valued the CCW framework for providing concrete practices that legitimized asset-based approaches. These findings suggest that the CCW pedagogical framework may serve as a practical guide for bridging theory to practice in assets-based pedagogy across disciplines.
This discussion piece explores how K-12 teachers enrolled in a graduate-level literacy engagement course engaged in a culture of reading. Through assignments like a literacy autobiography and a "book stack" project with discussion groups, teachers were encouraged to examine their literate identities, read for pleasure, and develop daily reading habits. The teachers' increased reading habits and informal conversations about books fostered a community of readers and inspired teachers to make changes to their teaching of reading. We explain that when teachers experience their own literate development, they become more authentic models for their students and prioritize choice and enjoyment in reading.
In this article, we discuss the seductive detail effect and its potentially harmful presence in learning materials like college textbooks. Our goal is to consider how seductive details can be detrimental to learning from text, particularly for those readers who struggle the most with college-level texts, and how to mitigate those negative effects. Seductive details are interesting, but irrelevant, portions of text that are only tangentially related to the topic of the text and are often of a controversial or sensational nature. When found in learning materials like textbooks, seductive details can have a negative impact on readers' ability to learn from that text. We discuss the seductive detail effect, how it can impact reading and learning from textbooks, and provide suggestions for how college reading instructors can help students mitigate adverse effects of seductive details while supporting their students' ability to independently learn from text.
Despite calls for writing reform over the past two decades, few of the recommendations from this work have made their way into high school classrooms in the United States where concerns about the paucity and quality of writing instruction remain. To gain deeper insights into the reasons for this phenomenon, this study examined a dialogic and iterative approach to embedded professional development focused on writing instruction that included a university partnership. Using the methodology of portraiture to explore empirical data, the study examined the process of revamping writing instruction in ninth and tenth grade English and how teachers with varying backgrounds of knowledge and experience teaching writing navigated writing instruction in a context of changing demands. The findings highlight the daily challenges of implementing writing reform, emphasize the importance of structural stability to sustain such reform, and illustrate the need for co-constructed dialogic learning with teachers and leadership striving to improve writing instruction. Two narrative portraits, assembled as a montage exemplifying persistent issues of contending with teacher turnover and changes in state mandatory testing, capture the struggle and potential of dialogic professional development to reform instructional practices. This study also queries the potential role of university researchers as engaged partners committed to long-term inquiry in support of educational reform.
This article discusses the benefits of adopting disciplinary literacy approaches in Mathematics. We propose disciplinary literacy practices foreground mathematical teachers' expertise and knowledge thereby enabling them to adapt generic literacy approaches to better address the specific literacy demands of the discipline. Specifically, we discuss how students' ability to write explanatory paragraphs (a component of a mathematical report) can be facilitated by the joint construction of writing and the provision of specific feedback on students' writing. Such an approach supports students' undersatnding of both mathematical concepts and the literacy demands of mathematical explanations. We draw on examples from a Year 7 Mathematics classroom teacher in regional South Australia, who participated in a disciplinary literacy 7-9 professional learning program. Analysis of teacher reflections and student work samples revealed improvements in students' writing of mathematical explanations, including increased use of discipline-specific vocabulary and sequencing connectives, emergent use of passive voice and expanded noun groups, and shifts from reflective recount to explanatory writing. We argue that integrating disciplinary literacy approaches into Mathematics instruction, which can include genre-aware modeling and targeted formative feedback on writing, offers a coherent framework to apprentice students into disciplinary ways of knowing and thinking.
This case study examines how digital storytelling (DST) serves as a tool for language and literacy learning, personal expression, and empowerment among Afghan refugee women. The researchers explore the experiences of five Afghan refugee women participating in a 3-month DST project. The participants engaged in iterative literacy practices, creating digital stories that integrated oral, written, aural, and visual elements. The analysis of participant-created artifacts and digital stories, interview transcripts, and observation notes identified three key themes: literacy learning through multimodal engagement, identity expression, and agency enactment. Findings suggest DST addresses linguistic and cultural barriers, fosters emotional well-being, and empowers the participants to reclaim their voices in addition to supporting their literacy learning.
This study explores critical literacy practice as a response to book ban in Indonesia, a nation shaped by colonial and authoritarian legacies of censorship. Through qualitative Classroom Action Research within a university-level Critical Reading course, it examines how students engage with historically contested novels, namely Bumi Manusia and Laut Bercerita, to confront state-controlled narratives. The findings reveal that critical literacy, when grounded in local histories of censorship, enables students to move from passive acceptance to active interrogation of state power. Through engagement with banned novels, students developed three interconnected capacities: recognizing censorship as a spectrum of political control rather than neutral administration; identifying dominant and alternative ideologies; and reclaiming interpretive agency by connecting silenced histories to contemporary politics. This development did not happen automatically; rather, it emerged through classroom discussion and guided research that pushed students to ask questions regarding book banning. The study highlights that critical literacy is not a universal toolkit but a situated praxis that, when calibrated to specific contexts of suppression, equips learners to decode state narratives, interrogate textual control, and confront repression over the narrative of what to read and not to read.
This paper examines the literacies of Lane (pseudonym), a 12-year-old Latino youth, within a semester-long community literacy partnership held while mothers attended GED classes. Lane's multimodal inquiry into graffiti unfolded through a curated text set in an inquiry-based researcher workshop model. His case illuminates how out-of-school partnerships can nurture youth identity and literacy engagement. Three key themes emerge: (1) Lane's increasing ownership of his researcher process, (2) the restorying of his literate identity from reluctant observer to artist and researcher, and (3) the agentive affordances of multimodality in building and sharing knowledge. Findings highlight the instrumental potential of community literacy spaces to disrupt deficit perspectives, affirm culturally and linguistically diverse youth literacies, and foster confidence and joy in literacy learning. This study underscores the value of designing inquiry-based, multimodal spaces that center youth interests and identities in literacy education.
Solving mathematics word problems is a complex task, particularly for emergent bilingual students, who must navigate both mathematical reasoning and substantial linguistic complexity. In this study, we developed a codebook to analyze the linguistic features of 40 math word problems from a 9th-grade Algebra textbook and identified the frequent occurrences of the linguistic components at both the lexical and syntactic levels. The analysis revealed frequent occurrences of dense noun phrases, technical terminology, polysemous words, and embedded clause structures-features that require considerable linguistic processing before students can access the underlying mathematical ideas. Such demands are especially consequential for emergent bilingual learners, whose mathematical competence may be obscured by the complexity of the language rather than the mathematics itself. The codebook developed in this study also offers math and ELA/ESOL teachers a practical tool for identifying and anticipating these comprehension challenges, enabling them to design instruction and scaffolds that support students in unpacking the language demand of math word problems. This study concludes with a discussion of pedagogical and research implications for educators who share the responsibility of supporting students, especially emergent bilingual students, in developing content-area literacy skills essential for success in solving math problems.
This study explored how an Afrocentric literacy workshop can reimagine inclusivity in literacy education for African immigrant adolescents. Drawing on Afrocentricity and Transnational Identity Theory, I facilitated a 10-week virtual literacy workshop with six African immigrant high school students from Nigeria. The study examined the affordances and challenges of implementing an inclusive, Afrocentric approach to literacy and the literacy practices enacted within this collaborative space. Data from recorded sessions, interviews, and student artifacts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings revealed that Afrocentric facilitation fostered cultural affirmation, multimodal expression, and critical dialogue, while also highlighting tensions such as internalized colonial ideologies and technological fatigue. The study offers implications for educators and researchers seeking to decolonize literacy education and center non-Western perspectives in inclusive pedagogies.
This study explores how critical literacy in a 9th-grade high school English Language Arts (ELA) classroom supported youth in challenging justice issues they identified in their local communities. An interdisciplinary theoretical framework informed by literacy as a social practice, critical literacy, and power was used to interpret the data, including student-created infographics and written reflections over 4 years. Findings indicate that integrating critical literacy with a liberatory lens into the school curriculum helped students develop their understanding of justice in ways that supported them in taking action. We recommend that integrating critical literacy into ELA curricula can better support learners to lead, reflect, and advocate for justice within and beyond the classroom.
