Fans often express their love of authors or books by creating and sharing "fanfiction," a genre wherein fans write new narratives that add to beloved works or take place in existing story worlds. In this article, we describe a kindergarten teacher's efforts to enhance students' foundational literacy skills by combining author studies…

Black girls and their literacies are genius. Yet, education, as we know it, does not consistently offer spaces for Black girls to be loved and honored. This form of neglect extends to literacy classrooms. As displayed in the news and research, Black girls experience abuse within the confines of educational walls. Educational violence against Black…

Abstract America's traditional public schools are facing challenges that may ultimately lead to their extinction. From their beginnings, some criticized them for being secular schools when much of the country was religious and wary of government. Today, the Internet has amplified conservative voices, swaying public opinion against government-run…

Due to the paucity of research that focuses on the digital and STEAM literacy practices of Black students and youth and their families in home and community spaces, this article acts as a call for awareness to understand the already-existing digital practices that acknowledges and honors their racial, cultural, and social lives. Lewis Ellison…

Family literacy programs can be effective for supporting the literacy learning of both parents and children. Educators and community members can be constructive in establishing family literacy programs in their school and in the community. Having knowledge of successful family literacy programs is important for both initiating and continuing with…

Children from Latinx families bring rich and varied literacy practices and cultural models to their classrooms. When teachers are able to recognize these assets, they have opportunities to make their teaching more responsive and engaging. One way to learn about these assets is through relationship-building, assets-framed home visits. In this…

We suggest that a healthy literacy diet for beginning readers consists of literacy experiences along a number of dimensions, including experiences with decodable text. As such, this article explores the role of decodable texts in a comprehensive early literacy curriculum that recognizes literacy as a complex, culturally mediated, and multifaceted…

Many children bring rich multimodal literacy practices into their classrooms, with experience weaving between paper and digital texts. In order to support children's multimodal meaning making, teachers need first to understand the multimodal practices that children bring into the classroom in order to then develop instruction that builds on, and…

Offering a heuristic to apprentice young children into the disciplines, we examine how one multiage classroom teacher leveraged the resources of personal digital inquiry to forward students' knowledge building.

This academic service learning initiative enabled teacher education candidates to create research-based family literacy activities around a diverse selection of children's books. Each project included a detailed parent or caregiver letter, which provides an overview of the family literacy activity; materials and props; step-by-step procedures;…

Errors are essential for emergent literacy learning because they reveal the gaps in young children's knowledge. The ways in which teachers respond to these errors can have important implications for children's knowledge building; yet, there is limited information for teachers about how to effectively respond to children's errors in emergent…

This article explores the potential of multimodal literacies to support a more equitable, inclusive approach to literacy instruction. Approaching multimodal literacies with an asset-based stance toward students with respect to culture, language, and dis/ability, multimodal literacies can support the enactment of culturally relevant pedagogy as…

Teaching science can provide opportunities for young children to explore and learn about the world around them and, equally important, to support children's language development. Yet, recent research suggests that children's access to science education is limited, especially in early and elementary education. Since language is critical to…

This article describes experiences of a literary coach working with a first-grade teacher to make Pro-Black culturally relevant pedagogy foundational to the coaching relationship. Responding to the failure of mandated programs to support Black students' literacy proficiency and the success of culturally relevant pedagogies, they addressed the…

It has been more than 50 years since Clay (1966) first introduced the concepts about print (CAP). Emergent readers, aged 4-5, must acquire an understanding of basic and hierarchical concepts of letters, words, and sentences; they must also learn basic knowledge about texts and books; they must develop an awareness of book orientation,…