Building on scholarship that recognizes writing as a rich site of identity negotiation, this study introduces a sociolinguistic analytic frame based on Tannen’s multidimensional power/connection grid and multimodal and visual grammars to explore young writers’ identity work. By integrating Tannen’s framework with an identity and positioning lens, we show how children’s self-authoring reflects ongoing negotiations of status and connection, either affirming how they see themselves or challenging how others position them as writers. Using an interpretive case study of two first graders, we argue that writing identity work involves continuously maneuvering and negotiating levels of connection (closeness and distance) and status (hierarchy and equality) through literacy practices. Our findings reveal how these micro-level linguistic and multimodal negotiations unfold multidimensionally and shape identity and positioning, offering insights for educators to better support students’ writing identity development.
This article draws from a yearlong practitioner inquiry to explore solidarity and inspiration among Black and Latinx youth songwriters in a community-based music program. The inquiry builds upon scholarship and practice around solidarity across Black and Latinx youth through songwriting, performance, and multi-sensory practices. Theoretically, the study brings together a language of solidarity framework and the emergent, future-facing standpoint of the not-yet. Findings address the uneven access to racial knowledge between Black and Latinx creative enclosures and how inspiration travels within and across these enclosures. Leveraging the not-yet, we discuss implications for embracing unevenness, non-linearity, and enclosures while theorizing a language of solidarity among Black and Latinx youth. Its' a slow spring Tuesday at City Rhythms. Tryouts for spring sports have many of the middle schoolers away from programming after school today, all except for five. But with the community music showcase only two weeks away, the slower day is useful for giving extra attention and rehearsal time for the musical pieces that youth will soon perform for friends, family, and community members: original and standard pieces composed on bucket drums, brass, and woodwind instruments, and songs students wrote in English and Spanish. Sitting around a table in the middle school cafeteria, the three of us teaching artists-Emery, Tia, and Rolando-talk informally with the young musicians about which pieces they want to sharpen today. In this downtime, Ana, a 12-year-old musician and songwriter, starts telling us about a new song she wants to write and perform. She wants to partner up with Maria, a fellow Latina student, and write a song about "being Mexican and being proud of her culture." Tia tells Ana that she loves the idea but adds that Maria, who isn't present at the moment, is actually from Venezuela and not Mexico. Ana quickly expands her idea to focus on being Latina, not just Mexican, and now the potential songwriting group has expanded to include Consuela and Yessica, too, who are also Latina. But it's not only the idea for the songshe shares with us. She also shares where the inspiration for the song came from. The inspiration came from Olivia and Keisha, another songwriting duo in City Rhythms, and a song they wrote and performed earlier in the year, with three verses that each began with the following refrain: "We are young, we are Black." Ana explains the connection: "Olivia and Keisha wrote about how they are proud to be Black and how they felt about it. And that inspired me, how I'm proud to be Mexican and how much Ilove my culture. Olivia and Keisha pretty much inspired me."
This study examined preservice teachers’ (PTs’) multimodal and multigenre writing portfolios advocating for change in the teaching profession. Using theories of humanizing education and Janks’s framework of Big P and little p politics, this study analyzed how PTs used writing as professional resistance and a means to heal their own schooling harms and to envision a more inclusive future for students. The findings elevated how PTs engaged as writers to see teaching as a political engagement and transformative act within the educational climate of control, compliance, and conformity. Implications for the field included possibilities to expand professional agency and supporting future teachers in confronting the political and relational complexities of their work through authorship and sharing their voices and advocacy broadly.
After 40-plus years, I retired from my professorship and returned to my first role as a teacher of children (kindergarteners through second graders, now at a neighborhood after-school center). As an academic researcher, an ethnographer, I had spent years with children as a “friend” as they often described me. But at the center, I was a teacher, expected to promote the children’s composing. In this role, I experienced at first a sharp shift in my relationship to children. The question arose: What is the relationship between being a researcher and being a teacher? I compared my responses to and from three selected center children and three research project children; data (field notes, written products) for each center child was compared to that of a research project child with similar composing characteristics. All children were urban and African American. Among my findings were that, first, my observations of center children were not the data-filled field notes of project children, and, second, that the teacher me was more attuned to the writing community in formation. Children expected our routine prac-tices, they were eager to share their work, and, moreover, they were ready responders to each other. By the school year’s end, I knew that all who teach must blend the roles of researcher and teacher: We are curious about those we teach; we work to study them the best we can by observing their responses to our efforts, and what we thereby learn feeds into how we teach and how our students learn.
This article reports the findings of a long-term qualitative study that examines the experiences and perspectives of Native youth re-learning their tribal community’s language. Situated within notions of Indigenous relationality, “identity resources” from the learning sciences, and Indigenous futurisms, findings reveal that, through learning their ancestral language, Native youth: (a) develop a deeper sense of their cultural identity, (b) imagine new linguistic futures and possibilities for their tribal community, and (c) recognize ways they, themselves, can become contributors to the cultural continuance of their tribal community. Set against the backdrop of structural settler colonialism and ongoing apocalypse within what is currently known as the “United States,” this research demonstrates the ways language revitalization operates as an anti-colonial act of rupture to settler colonialism’s ongoing attack on Indigenous Peoples, as well as an Indigenous-centric act of healing and self-determination .
With a view to better preparing teachers to engage in linguistically responsive feedback practices, we examined what 120 preservice secondary English language arts teachers (PSETs) considered to be “useful” and “appropriate” feedback to English learner (EL) writers by analyzing posts to an online database of student writing and teacher feedback. Findings of this qualitative study show that PSETs valued linguistic diversity, shared many core orientations of linguistically responsive teaching, and sought to give ELs holistic writing feedback; however, they ultimately equated useful feedback with error correction. PSETs were highly attuned to EL errors, but they were not able to connect different types of errors to language development and could not determine which errors were appropriate to correct given the student’s proficiency level. Furthermore, PSETs largely ignored ELA content and attributed appropriate EL feedback to teacher bilingualism rather than recognizing the need to learn about ELs’ interests and backgrounds. We suggest equipping PSETs with skills to learn about ELs and leveraging extant PSET attention to grammar with additional knowledge of language development processes. Identifying proficiency-level-appropriate errors could allow PSETs to selectively correct errors and provide space for more substantive feedback on ELA content.
This paper examines the civic and literacy practices that emerged through virtual feminista pl & aacute;ticas between Adri, a first-year college student and graduate of a "newcomers" high school, and her former teacher. Amidst a context in which transnational and immigrant youth often struggle to find a sense of belonging in educational and civic spaces, this article reveals the importance of relationships and spaces built on trust, care, and the co-construction of knowledge in which multilingual recently arrived youth can elevate their voices. I draw from transcripts of over seven hours of translingual virtual feminista pl & aacute;ticas. I draw on the concepts of border thinking (Anzald & uacute;a, 2012, 2015; Mignolo, 2000) and futurity literacies from the margins (Cervantes-Soon, 2024) to deepen our understandings of speculative civic literacies (Mirra & Garcia, 2022). Findings reveal how Adri drew upon her border thinking to critically interrogate a deeply unjust global context and to imagine alternative futures for herself and her communities. This work highlights the epistemic ingenuity of transnational youth like Adri and the civic and literacy practices that can emerge through methodologies and pedagogies that recognize that ingenuity.
In this article, we explore how multilingual paraprofessional teachers and students broadened the construction of personhood through literacy instruction in an English-medium school located in a Mid-Southern, semi-rural US town. Drawing upon a study that blended practitioner inquiry with an ethnographic approach, we closely examine how the construction personhood in translanguaging read-alouds was broadened beyond dominant models of personhood—as monolingual and as having Eurocentric, middle-class, and adult-sanctioned knowledges. Our findings show how students and teachers constructed broader models of personhood by constructing a model of a multilingual speaker and reader as well as Latine, working-class, and childhood popular culture knowledges as highly valued and exciting attributes of being human. We conclude by discussing what kinds of interactions these moments could foreshadow and the implications of this work for researchers and teachers to understand how both discursive and contextual factors can contribute to broadening conceptions of personhood to provide children and youth with a greater sense of dignity and belonging in their literacy learning.
Drawing from theories of youth speculative civic literacies and freedom dreaming, this article explores how youth imagine the future of education and what roles schools and teachers play in fostering students’ dreaming. In this research study, the three co-authors—a literacy professor, an undergraduate English major, and a graduating high school student/future teacher—engage in intergenerational qualitative data analysis to discover how youth cultivate the capacities and imagination to engage in speculative educational dreaming. Through analysis of student interviews and youth counternarratives, we found that the types of interactions students have with their teachers as well as the availability of authentic opportunities for youth to engage in civic thought and action in schools are instrumental in the shaping of youth imagination and agency. For many students, school is something that is happening to them rather than for them. However, when their ideas and voices are heard within schools, it compels students to think about the world outside of school and their place in it. Conceptualizing student dreaming as acts of discovering and moving toward one’s purpose, we posit that engagement in critical civic praxis and relational encounters in learning environments are instrumental factors in the cultivation of youth agency and capacities for freedom dreaming.
Based on the notion that one’s critical consciousness development is rooted in understanding how the moments and narratives of our collective past construct our realities, this article brings together theories of critical literacy, critical memory, and critical sociohistorical consciousness to offer a literacy framework that can foster students’ radical imagination. By examining data from an ethnographic study of students’ critical consciousness development in a social justice-oriented urban high school, the author examines how a critical sociohistorical literacy approach to teaching classroom literature presents a site for interrogating and disrupting structures of inequity as well as a pathway for young people to cultivate innovative, literary perspectives in pursuit of social change. The framework and examples offered in this work highlight practical approaches for English educators seeking to support critical consciousness development in classrooms as well as the need for youth to develop critical sociohistorical literacies as a component of social activism and future building.
As recent history has shown, an information ecology polluted with fake news, mis/disinformation, and conspiracy theories can breed division, anxiety, and hatred—forces that pose profound challenges to nurturing a civically engaged, democratic citizenry. But is that always the case? The satirical conspiracy movement Birds Aren’t Real offers a curious example of how a faux conspiracy theory—that birds were replaced by avian drones to spy on Americans starting in the 1960s—can counterintuitively create counterpublics that engage in democratic civic action across digital platforms and real life but do so by actively increasing the noise in the system. Guided by Moncada’s theoretical work on vigilantism, this critical content analysis of Birds Aren’t Real describes how Bird Truthers enact vigilante civic literacies, authentic forms of youth-led activism in which literacy practices are deployed outside of and/or against institutional constraints in the service of collective, democratic good. Through this study, the authors suggest that beyond merely integrating Birds Aren’t Real into classroom media literacy lessons, ELA classrooms can become civic-minded counterpublics in their own right—spaces where students’ literacies are mobilized to interrogate institutional power, imagine alternative futures, and engage in novel forms of civic participation.
Research underscores how working-class individuals “disidentify” (Skeggs, 1997) from working-class identities because of the impact of degrading, victim-blaming views of poverty in dominant discourses and in teacher thinking (Gorski, 2016). Contrastingly, a subset of working-class students in this preservice, young adult literature (YAL) course for English language arts (ELA) teachers took up the social class literacy curriculum that featured a sociocultural understanding of social class foregrounding the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of living as classed subjects under capitalism and embraced their working-class identities. Through the vocabulary of the social class literacy curriculum, analysis of social class in two working-class YA texts, and writing and talking about their classed lives, three working-class students utilized the curriculum to mourn working-class identities previously not discussed in public contexts. Findings from the study reinforce the significance of “mirrors” (Bishop, 1990, ix) in textual selections that feature working-class lives in dignified ways, perhaps as opportunities for working-class students to not only see themselves but also to identify their experiences as valid and to mourn losses of cherished identities.
