This collaborative autoethnography explores the shifting power dynamics in a youth-adult research partnership within a participatory design research project focused on a youth-led online writing community. The authors, a former high school teacher/now doctoral student researcher and former high school students/current co-researchers, analyze their evolving relationship within the larger research project, highlighting the complexities of navigating shifting roles. The research, grounded in theories of intergenerational inquiry and participatory methodologies, investigates how power circulates and is negotiated within such partnerships, including the fluid interplay of institutional power and shared agency. The study examines how their relationship transitioned from teacher-student to co-researchers and friends over two and a half years, where findings reveal the role of intergenerational spaces and shared fandom interests for restructuring boundaries, foregrounding student expertise both in the online community and in the research, and building true reciprocal co-researcher relationships by shifting leadership of project facets to youth. The paper concludes by highlighting the study's implications for educators and intergenerational research teams seeking to create more equitable and collaborative learning environments, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and valuing youth expertise, promoting youth leadership in the knowledge construction process, and openly discussing and navigating power dynamics.
This narrative autoethnography examines the complexity of experience in teaching Yoritha online as a grassroots Heritage Language (HL) with keen attention to families' efforts in maintaining and revitalizing Yoruba not only as a HL but also as a Less Commonly Taught Language (LCTL) in the national, international and transnational contexts. Inspired by 9mpluwabi beliefs and the bimlingualism-language as a gift-framework, experiences are recounted to examine the vital role that such programs play in preserving linguistic diversity beyond seeing Yoruba as a LCTL but its importance in connecting people to their ancestrality and promoting belongingness. The role of parents and children as the custodians of their culture highlights the importance of agency, recognition of bi/multiliteracy skills, and transnational funds of knowledge. The implication is to challenge the notion that parents' desire to impart multilingualism exceeds elite multilingualism (Barakos & Selleck, 2019) but is also considered more of a connection to ancestrality. The paper also highlights parents and children as custodians of their HL traditions.
In the 21st-century digital age, meaningful literacy practices demand opportunities for open-ended and embodied multimodal response. Purposeful general education classes in the humanities can be leveraged to combat the feelings of isolation and disconnection that increasingly emerge across college campuses in response to our rapidly evolving sociopolitical landscape. Two asynchronous undergraduate humanities classes taught during the 2021 COVID lockdown, a course on young adult Latine literature capped at 6o and a course on canonical British monster fiction capped at 75, leveraged multimodal composing to encourage critical reading and multiliteracies, humanize curricula, and establish an embodied classroom community solely through technologically mediated communication. Multimodal assignments emboldened students to bring embodied ways of knowing into their respective courses and encouraged them to support each other during the disembodied experience of pandemic isolation. By positioning students as sensory composers among authors and artists we studied, we cultivated an embodied, connected community of healing in our remote, asynchronous classrooms.
This paper explores the urgent need for fat-positive and body-neutral representation in nonfiction literature, particularly within Literacy classrooms. The author examines how anti-fatness manifests through social norms and literary absence. Nonfiction texts are often perceived as objective or factual, yet many reinforce harmful stereotypes about fat bodies, contributing to systemic marginalization and internalized shame among students. The paper analyzes current nonfiction offerings and reveals a lack of affirming texts that reflect fatness as a natural part of human diversity. Through a Google-based inquiry into text availability and an interview with justice-centered educator, the research demonstrates both the scarcity of inclusive resources and the power of intentional pedagogical practice. The paper concludes by advocating for the critical role of educators-especially Literacy leaders -in curating nonfiction texts that foster body acceptance and challenge dominant narratives.
Generative AI (GenAI) is playing an increasingly significant role in higher education, with the potential to both support and, if misused, hinder learning and teaching. The dual nature of the new technology has prompted education specialists to explore ways to leverage its educational potential. This paper examines teaching technique that integrates GenAI into an undergraduate history methods course to enhance students' understanding of a historical literacy concept -specifically, presentism. As part of the assignment, students formulated ideas reflecting presentist thinking and visualized them using Al image-generation tools. Student feedback suggests a generally positive experience with the assignment involving AI-assisted image generation. Additionally, this approach deepened their understanding of presentism through three key activities: (1) researching and articulating presentist ideas, (2) prompt writing and critically evaluating Al-generated images, and (3) reflecting on the final visual representations of their original concepts. The process of image generation also appeared to support students' short-term retention of the concept. The ideas in this paper contribute to the broader discussion on the responsible integration of GenAI in education, demonstrating its potential to enhance both subject-specific learning and general Al literacy.
This article discusses teacher candidates (TCs) introduced to multimodal literacies (MLs) by representing and communicating content coursework through multiple modes such as signs, symbols, images, text, manipulatives, and videos. TCs used MLs to understand multimodal and sociocultural pedagogy in assignments and lesson plans during a semester-long course. Two elementary TCs' stories are included to illustrate ways they navigated coursework with MLs, eventually integrating them into their pedagogy. Excerpts of TCs voices are from post-term interviews conducted during a larger study where multiple assignments from several participants were collected and analyzed. This discussion illuminates TCs' understandings of MLs and pedagogy through a framework involving identity engagement, critical engagement, authentic engagement, and relevant engagement. Their learning and teaching development reveals the interplay of digital and disciplinary literacies, multimodality, and sociocultural pedagogies, ultimately suggesting the need for teacher educators and relevant stakeholders to direct focused attention toward facilitating these meaningful connections for teachers and TCs.
This article examines how teachers can navigate "difficult knowledge" embedded within digital stories, particularly those sourced from openly licensed literacy platforms. These platforms offer a rich tapestry of narratives reflecting diverse cultural contexts and experiences, but may also present challenging themes that require sensitive pedagogical approaches. Drawing on case studies and teacher reflections, the article explores how teachers can leverage their agentive identities to address these challenges creatively within the contexts of constraining institutional structures. Through analysis of several example stories that address issues such as social exclusion and difference, we demonstrate how teachers can use these freely-available materials to facilitate critical discussions about complex sociocultural themes. The study highlights the importance of scaffolding student learning, promoting inclusive classroom environments, and empowering students to engage with diverse perspectives in a meaningful way. Ultimately, this research suggests that open educational resources, when thoughtfully integrated into pedagogical practices using transmediation, translanguaging, and other approaches, can offer valuable opportunities for teachers to foster agency in both themselves and their students as they grapple with "difficult knowledge" together.
This article explores the critical role of phonological awareness (PA) in early reading development, with a focus on young multilingual children. PA, the ability to detect and manipulate sounds in spoken words, is essential for literacy acquisition and is highly responsive to instruction. The article delves into the complexity of PA, its developmental progression, and the challenges of accurate assessment, offering a proposed conceptual model of the supports and demands inherent in PA assessment while emphasizing the significant role of vocabulary knowledge in PA development and the necessity for targeted instruction to prevent reading difficulties. An assessment tool utilizing a database of words with known age-of-acquisition ratings was tested with multilingual Head Start preschoolers, showing better PA performance on tasks with familiar words. The study underscores the need to consider word familiarity in PA assessments to provide accurate instructional needs and prevent misidentification of reading difficulties. Future research should continue to explore the cognitive, linguistic, and design demands of PA assessments to ensure precise identification and support for children's reading needs.
This study explores how English Language Arts (ELA) teachers' experiences with grief shape their approach to teaching tragic texts that explore themes of loss and tragedy. By analyzing teachers' narratives, we examine how their emotional responses to personal losses influence their pedagogical practices when dealing with tragic literature. Specifically, we examine three key questions: how teachers navigate their grief while teaching tragic texts, how their emotions impact classroom activities, and how they align their emotions with professional norms. Building on existing literature and research on the role of emotions in teaching, this study highlights the complexities of teaching texts that address profound themes of death and suffering. It explores how personal grief can challenge teachers' instruction of tragic texts, potentially affecting their interactions with students and their ability to foster meaningful discussions about loss. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the intersection between personal experience and professional practice in the ELA classroom, emphasizing the need for emotional awareness and support for educators dealing with teaching and personal grieving.
Literacy learning holds infinite possibilities for empowering and transforming students of all levels through the power of language. However, there are barriers to these possibilities that limit the agency teachers should possess in their classrooms, such as curricular mandates, high-stakes standardized testing, and even surveillance. These challenges can prevent teachers from embracing students' many ways of being, knowing, and speaking to promote many harmful ideologies and restrict their learning. Critical pedagogy creates a pathway to push back against these barriers. Through narrative inquiry, three literacy educators across different subjects, namely the English language arts, English as a second language, and the Arabic language and culture classroom, come together to interrogate how they incorporate critical pedagogy in their classrooms for the purpose of educational transformation. Findings suggest that student engagement with identity, community, and equity increases when opposing restrictive educational expectations. This article has implications for practicing educators in the K-i6 space to take on critical pedagogies in their own contexts despite increasing barriers to justice-oriented teaching.
In this article, I discuss my multimodal dissertation to examine how four young adults remember a youth poetry slam as a site of healing, growth, and spirituality. I argue for critical spiritual literacies (Johnson, 2022) as an embodied, multimodal set of antiracist teaching practices that center the human spirit in literacy education. Data in this study include audio recordings of original poetry performances, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups. Audio samples combined with musical elements were remixed into Hip Hop-inspired praisesongs (Dillard, 2011) to document the spiritual experiences of participants. These co-produced songs are excerpted and discussed as research texts that reflect spiritual meaning-making processes. Findings reveal that knowledge of self, communal healing, service to others, and transcendence are critical characteristics of spiritual literacies. Lastly, I discuss implications for centering spirituality through Hip Hop and spoken word pedagogy in the secondary English Language Arts classroom.
This qualitative study works to understand how secondary level literacy teachers conceptualize effective teaching practices. Concepts such as success and effectiveness are difficult to define, but they are nonetheless used in concrete ways to make decisions about teachers' performance. In this study, literacy teachers themselves explain what it means to be effective in their work by sharing their "success stories?' Findings focus on the settings, characters, turning points, and conflicts that are central to teachers' understandings of success, providing implications for how teachers might center their values amidst multiple and at times conflicting demands on their practice.
In this study, we examine two teachers' talk about literacy as they describe literacy events and practices throughout multiple contexts. We draw the theoretical framework of discourse and literacy as a social practice to illustrate the potential ways these first-year English teachers talk and have talked about literacy during their time as English methods students to their student teaching experience and, ultimately, their current contexts as first year teachers. Findings illustrate that the teachers assimilated and adapted their ideologies of literacy early but continued to evolve their understanding of literacy across various contexts. Implications for teacher education include the need for preservice teachers to consider multiple literacy events through multiple pedagogical and ideological lenses.
White teachers often use language that continues to position racialized students and their languages as inferior, thus perpetuating racial and linguistic inequality in society. The purpose of this study was an interrogation of racial literacies within my teaching discourse as a white English Language Learner teacher. Using racial literacies as theoretical framework, this study was conducted in a St. Louis central city school district within a secondary United States Government class for English for Speakers of Other Languages students. A qualitative longitudinal self-reflective design was utilized employing two sources of data, classroom narrative data and written reflective memos. Discursive strategies of racial literacies were identified in the narrative data while reflective memos were used to contextualize the findings. These data sources were triangulated. Findings revealed, while I rejected Anti-Black Linguistic Racism with students through the teaching the history of Black English, my classroom discourse still reified linguistic hierarchies. I had positioned myself as someone becoming bilingual to situate multilingualism as an asset; however, I did not acknowledge the difference between my language learning as a white female and how my Black and Latinx students' bilingualism was racialized by others. This empirical method is an effective way teacher-scholars can reflect upon their biases embedded within their discourse and actions. Because teachers can improve their racial literacy practices, this approach provides teachers opportunities for growth as they strive towards actions that support anti-racism and linguistic justice.
Critical approaches to literature in secondary English require greater attention to narrative discourse. In this conceptual article, I provide interpretative tools from contemporary narratology and demonstrate their critical potential for high school English. In particular, I outline critical literacy's vital but overattentive focus on the contents of story (characters, ideas, themes) and argue for more robust instruction as to how a story is told: the techniques and telling functions of narrative. Using the canonical novel The Great Gatsby as an extended example, this article focuses on the power of attention to narrative discourse, the inescapable organization and presentation of narrative events by a teller who organizes a story to affect a reader. I argue that a renewed instructional focus on narrative discourse does not mean abandoning concerns with the storyworld or the characters of literature. Rather, it envisions a critical literacy which helps students see how the mimetic and the synthetic dynamics of narrative work together. Transcending canonical literature, instructional attention to narrative discourse is crucial in an evolving media landscape, where the techniques of disjointed narration and multivalent telling are rapidly extending beyond conventional literature and into television, film, Youtube, and even into the language of business, politics, and marketing. Teaching narrative form, consequently, is vital for the project of critical literacy in our contemporary media environment.
What started as a social media based movement, the viral hashtag #blackgirlmagic has transcended into a way of being, and seeing Black girls and women. The essence and prevalence of #blackgirlmagic continues to defy all odds and perceptions in sports, society, and other social spaces where Black girls have been rendered invisible, including in the expanding landscape of dual language education. This study centered and illustrated the narratives of Black girl multilinguals (BGMs) in two-way Spanish/English dual language elementary programs in Southern California. Using Black girlhood (Brown, 2009, 2013) as the theoretical underpinning, this study employed youth-centered, visual-based methods to explore the lived experiences of BGMs at their school sites, their homes, and in their communities. The photographs and phototalks together provided evidence that BGMs practiced freedom in and across their linguistic repertoires that ignored limitations and boundaries of language allocation and fixed language settings, which created a space for self-expression. This study contributes to a significant gap in the research of Black Girl Multilingualism and suggests further research and practice reimagine two-way dual language education as a potential freedom space for BGMs at the full intersection of their identities: Black, girl, young, and multilingual.
The purpose of this qualitative participatory research study was to explore what happens when English language arts (ELA) preservice teachers collaborate to develop multimodal, intersectional, and critical feminist empowerment literacy curricula. This study centered on the following research question: How do ELA preservice teachers make sense of how pop-cultural, multimodal texts such as VSCO stickers frame girlhood and womanhood? Multiple data were collected: audio and video recording transcripts of monthly Saturday workshops, artifacts, such as curriculum writing and workshop photographs, researcher journals, analytic memos, and a shared Google Drive of written student thinking. The constant comparative method was used to analyze and triangulate the data. Analyses of data revealed that preservice teachers were able to critically analyze consumerism relating to VSCO stickers and girlhood and were able to notice how stickers typecast and reify individualism while also navigating authenticity during self-selection and categorizing stickers. Additionally, data analysis demonstrated how critical literacies played a role in the preservice teachers' understanding of how several groups, communities, and individual voices were not recognized in the marketing and consumption of VSCO sticker packaging as well as providing additional gender biases in society.
This article proposes the concept of "sociotextuality" to explain the accumulation of symbolic academic authority, with a specific focus on the evolving discourse of "multiliteracies." Examining how Western academia has asserted dominance in research about multimodal literacy practices despite the rich literacy traditions of non -Western communities, the study scrutinizes the erasure of the Iranian context from multiliteracies scholarship. The article traces the phases of this erasure, from treating the Iranian context as raw data for Western theorization to rebranding borrowed knowledge as a Western product under the name of "multiliteracies"-ultimately leading to its repurposing in new forms, such as the digital turn in literacy. The analysis centers on the role of "textual materiality" as the primary medium of academic communication, exploring how intertextual connections, citations, and genre practices have contributed to the transfiguration of the multiliteracies discourse. The study also discusses symbolic (alphabetic) collaborations that strategically have helped elevate Western scholars' status and authority within the discourse of multisemiotic literacy engagement.
In this article, we-two university faculty members and three classroom teachers-share our experiences exploring issues of educational equity through a collaborative project designed to support multilingual learners' language development and content learning. The conceptual framework guiding the project centered on critical consciousness (Freire, 1970), culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2014), and sense of school belonging. Through coursework and mentorship, general education teachers learned ways with specific focus on valuing home language practices and knowledge as well as evidence-based practices, such as vocabulary lesson cycles (Carlo et al., 2004). We also share our "lessons learned" about what it takes to support students and families experience a sense of belonging in our schools and to adjust researchbased practices in ways that maintain their integrity and are context-informed. Learning about students and families, creating a sense of belonging, and implementing instruction in ways that take into account individual classroom contexts are essential to creating sustainable instructional change and strong socio-emotional and academic outcomes for students.
