In today's fast-changing world, it is essential to equip English as a Second Language learners with strong literacy skills, empowering them to critically assess information, adjust to technological shifts, and engage in global discussions. However, what remains questionable is the suitable pedagogical practices and the teachers' and the learners'…

As the number of displaced people increases, providing refugee-background students with critically engaging classrooms is essential. Supporting diverse learners, while focusing on issues of social justice and equity, critical literacy facilitates a perspective where texts are analyzed for underlying messages of power and sociopolitical issues.…

While teachers and schools across the country actively work to impart curricula that is relevant and meaningful to their students, the written standards and reading lists too often represent a Eurocentric perspective and reinforce inequities perpetuated by the status quo. Too frequently, teachers are inadequately supported with or provided…

Recognizing the prevalence of low literacy achievements of secondary students with disabilities despite numerous mainstream reading interventions' attempts to alleviate the issue, this dissertation considers an alternative path to literacy. To begin, this study theorizes knowledge, literacy, and learning as mutually constituted person-world…

When invited to respond to the story of Rosa Parks through describing whether they encountered similar events within their Israeli context, the minority Palestinian-Israeli EFL ninth-grade students in this teacher research narrated stories resonating with Rosa's story. Evident in their narratives were events that left an immense impact on them. A…

Purpose: This paper aims to propose a critical multimodal framework to understanding pedagogical materials that focuses on not only the verbal or the visual components but also the interaction between the two semiotic resources that constructs power relations as a result of intermodal interaction, and it further provides an example of an in-depth…

This study was a yearlong investigation over writing instruction with one class of ninth grade students in an urban, "underperforming" high school. Using qualitative methods with embedded quantitative features, findings revealed students benefited little from the writing instruction they received. In fact, most students showed virtually…

Drawing from the theoretical contributions of Ethnic Studies, activist new media, and critical digital literacies, this article explores the nature of a ninth-grade curricular unit about how one's daily environment impacts one's health and well-being. Using a combination of ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods, the authors highlight an…

The author details how new literacies create spaces for student voices to be heard and how, by valuing video as a medium for expression, students are able to critically engage with their world and the world outside of the classroom.

The study explores how literacy sponsorship (Brandt, 2001) is constructed in a United States rural region by focusing on the discourse of rural teachers and students. Data included interviews with teachers and students, classroom observations, an environmental print literacy scan, and analysis of community and classroom-based texts. A multi-cycle…

This article illustrates how critical multimodal literacy practices engage secondary students to further explore differences and similarities between past and present instances of discrimination within a process drama, where students and teachers explore a topic through unscripted role-play. Data from a classroom-based ethnography are drawn on to…

In this article, I share the ways in which New Literacies theory served as an interpretive lens to understand how the Internet as a cultural tool mediates the literacy actions of adolescents in English Language Arts classrooms. Data were drawn from a larger study in which students who were considered "at-risk" because of previous…

South Africa's communication landscape has changed and is still changing because many previously disadvantaged areas have benefitted from the construction of roads, provision of electricity and installation of satellites. As a result, many previously disadvantaged learners have access to digital media in their homes. In this article, we argue that…

This article intervenes in the long-standing conversations around which youth activism, literacies, and civic engagement take place. In an effort to expand the boundaries of activism to include the work of youth critical literacies within the classroom, this article highlights the work of four female high school students of color as they bring…

Nonfiction texts demand critical literacy, as evidenced by these teachers' experience teaching Phillip Hoose's "Claudette Colvin: Twice toward Justice" with ninth graders. In addition to selecting high-quality nonfiction, the authors are committed to high impact teaching of those texts. For the authors that means supporting students'…