For literacy educators, there is a need to understand students' pathways into composition and mediate contemporary, multimodal compositional pathways with more academic ones. In an effort to mediate between middle and high school students' schooling and curricular demands and their everyday interests and investments in media and communicational…

After-school programs serve as a way to enhance student learning with more flexibility regarding the curriculum and classroom structure. In this article, we reflect on our work with youth from diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds in an after-school program. Applying Youth Participatory Action Research as our guiding…

Multimodal learning clubs link principles of motivation and engagement with 21st century technological tools and texts to support content area learning. The author describes how a sixth grade health teacher and his class incorporated multimodal learning clubs into a unit of study on human body systems. The students worked collaboratively online…

Using an article about labor leader Cesar Chavez's grape boycott and hunger strike, students at Stuart-Hobson Middle School in Washington, D.C., are doing a "close read," a skill prized by the new Common Core State Standards being put into practice in the District of Columbia. As an English/language arts teacher in the common-core era,…

In light of emerging technologies prompting new avenues for teaching and learning, students are positioned to "create" to learn, with video production being an important process for literacy development. There is a growing need for innovative instructional practices in reading and writing that are aligned with student interests and the activities…

Good learning experiences ask students to investigate and make sense of the world. While there are many ways to do this, K-12 curriculum has traditionally skewed toward reading and writing to interpret and express students' sense-making. But there is another way. Infographics represent data and ideas visually, in pictures, engaging more parts of…