An issue devoted to foundational skills and adolescents might center the cognitive skills and practices most needed to accelerate learning. While an understanding of these--whether multisyllabic decoding, fostering comprehension through discussion, or argumentative writing--is important, in this article, we advocate for the importance of attending…

Social media platforms rely on algorithms to filter and select content, thereby personalizing every individual's social media experience. Many use social media without awareness of this personalization and its impact, pointing to a need to both understand and improve literacy among active social media users. This qualitative study addresses…

I discuss the complementary strengths of foundational literacy skills and foundational texts to support the academic and life journeys of Black adolescent males in this commentary. Foundational texts are defined as texts central to life-outcome, personal, intellectual, and professional trajectories accompanied by self-assurance while being…

This discussion introduces a heuristic to guide writing instruction with adolescents and young adults. Our framework, called "Open World Writing," consists of six writing territories (vision, material, design, voice, flow, polish) that provide focus and clarity for writing and educators working across academic and creative writing…

Textual consumption in digital spaces has come under scrutiny by educators who worry about youth's surface-level comprehension of such texts as well as the polarizing nature of online discourse. This paper synthesizes affective concepts of critical witness and glimmers of care to explore two cases in which adolescent writers in digital OST…

Heightened attention to the importance of equitable educational practices in today's schools reveals a growing number of emergent bilingual students who have not received consistent formal education and may be struggling with overall literacy. Labeled as Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE), these learners require novel educational…

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown measures in many countries have increased young people's engagement with digital media. The digital divide goes beyond just having devices and includes differences in how well young people can use digital technology. In this paper, we shift our attention beyond screen time to the nature of the…

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, challenges with adolescent mental health are on the rise, making the need for spaces where teens share their emotions and experiences all the more vital. This single-case study explores the impact of writing on one young woman's (Celia) mental health during Girl Power, a gender empowerment poetry writing…

Book banning and censorship in the U.S. prompts necessary conversations on how critical literacy, dialogue, and inquiry are used in various school and library settings. We share guiding questions alongside three examples of textual analyses centering on gender fluidity with three young adult novels. We believe that English language arts teachers…

Acculturation is the process of psychological and behavioral change that individuals go through during and after intercultural contacts. Social media have become a major space for cross-cultural encounters, and are important venues of socialization for marginalized populations. Intercultural encounters on social media may benefit or detriment the…

"How Young Adult Literature Gets Taught: Perspectives, Ideologies, and Pedagogical Approaches for Instruction and Assessment" (Bickmore et al., 2022) seeks to provide guidelines for teacher educators and secondary English teachers on how to teach young adult literature (YAL). This 15-chapter manual includes chapters written by experts in…

This discussion article presents practices for designing more supportive and individualized writing tasks for adolescent and young adult students. The practices emerged from a synthesis of findings from a prior study in which we asked 79 undergraduates to talk about moments from their writing histories that made them feel proud of their writing.

In this study, we investigated media reports and literacy research in four nations--China, Morocco, the Republic of (South) Korea, and the United States--about the relationship between adolescents' literacy and use of digital media, or digital literacy. We present short "snapshots" of adolescents' digital literacy in each country and…

This article offers a way to leverage young adult literature in guiding students to consider the meanings of continuity and change within their own development. Borrowing theories of change from the evolutionary sciences, we developed a critical lens focusing on the role of technology in young adult literature. Based on a comprehensive review of…

School-based supports, such as LGBTQ+ -themed curriculum, invite opportunities for challenging oppression with respect to gender and its intersections with other identities such as sexuality and race. However, more understanding is needed regarding how literacy educators might leverage these opportunities. This article describes how intimacy,…