In 2016, "Last Stop on Market Street," an American picturebook by Matt de la Pena, won the Newberry Medal, a Caldecott Honor, and a Coretta Scott King illustrator honor. In March 2021, Dr Seuss Enterprises, after working "with a panel of experts, including educators," decided to cease publishing "And to Think I Saw in on…

This article brings out ethical aspects arising in Plato's classical critique of narrative and imitative art in "The Republic," especially when it comes to reading stories about the past. Socrates's and Glaucon's most important suggestion, I argue, is to cultivate an ethical consciousness where one ought to see the distinctions between…

Acknowledging that students are civic actors and that teaching and learning is always relevant to civic lives, this article addresses how imaginative spaces can be political and if the ways that educators dream and speculate with youth have civic implications. The author first considers how communities and nations are shaped by sociopolitical…

In this article, I consider expanding meaningfulness in literacy research by exploring the possibilities offered by a relational perspective on literacy and its study. An interdisciplinary relational perspective is outlined and used to rethink what happens when we engage in reading and writing. Questions guiding this exploration include: What…

At a time when some high school English classrooms erase and distort experiences and identities, it is vital for educators to explore pedagogies that provide radically reimagined forms of liberatory thought. This article explores ways the work of Coates can serve as "blueprint liberation" in the English classroom. The line of broken,…

This article analyzes the genre of the sourced comic as an important pedagogical tool in the development of both alphabetic and multimodal literacies. We argue that sourced comics provide multiple design elements with which students can explore their complex relationships with scholarly sources, make visible various power relations informing…

This article examines the relationship between literacy and play in six- and seven-year-olds' engagement with non-fiction writing. I draw from a year-long ethnographic study (Erickson, 1986) of a US classroom's "writing time", intentionally structured on children's own interests and enquiries. Rather than strict adherence to monolithic…