Purpose: Early childhood and early elementary are key times when children develop internal and external antifat attitudes; thus, it is necessary to better understand the available children's literature around fatness. This paper aims to examine children's picture books with fat protagonists to better understand the current landscape of children's…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how youth from varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds came together to collaboratively analyze data they collected across two research projects in a community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative, a less understood aspect of YPAR. Specifically, this study discusses how…

Purpose: Social media offers youth a virtual platform to build community and amplify underrepresented voices. Online spaces are often used to respond to societal issues and adopt various roles. This article aims to focus on Laura's case, spotlighting the intersection of online activism by a youth of Color, and social media literacies used to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to mine Black mothers' stories to highlight the critical literacy work they do for themselves and their daughters, to change stereotypic views of them, and to illuminate how they negotiate intersectional structures such as gender, sexuality, race and class practice, to sustain and uplift them.…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore how currently underserved young adults engaged in a community-based organization (CBO), Bull City YouthBuild, wrote and published a book together, and how this work impacted them and their communities. Through a critical literacy framework, the research asked: How do students in a community-based writing project…

Purpose: This study explores student sensemaking based on the creation and interpretation of sound on a public school bus, operating as a result of a desegregation settlement. To understand these multimodal literacy practices, the authors examined students' journeys, sonically as passengers in mobile and adult-constructed space.…

Purpose: This study aims to refocus the field of Hip Hop based education on youth identities and epistemologies rather than on the tangible artifacts of Hip Hop culture. It argues that centering classroom pedagogy and curriculum on youth self-actualization best supports the critical literacy development of students grappling with social and…

Purpose: This paper aims to trace how Asian American girls engaged with civic learning in a virtual out-of-school literacy community featuring a curriculum of diverse literary texts. Design/methodology/approach: The researcher used practitioner inquiry to construct a virtual literacy education community dedicated to the civic learning of Asian…

Purpose: Literacy research exploring multimodal composition and justice-oriented children's literature each have rich landscapes and histories. This paper aims to add to both of these bodies of scholarship through the emerging assemblage of Studio F, a fifth-grade classroom. The authors share poststructural analytic encounters with attention to…

Purpose: Researchers and teachers have noted the power of students reading text sets or multiple texts on the same topic, and numerous articles have been published with examples of and frameworks for text set construction. This study aims to traces the theoretical assumptions of these frameworks and explores their distinct implications and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how preservice teachers conceive of and implement social actions on their college campuses related to a chosen social problem developed in a young adult novel and to examine how social action projects develop teacher candidates' critical literacies. Design/methodology/approach: This qualitative…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to re-center playfulness as a humanizing approach in teacher education. As teachers navigate the current moment of heightened control, surveillance, and systemic inequity, these proposed moves in teacher education can be transgressive. Rather than play as relegated to childhood or infancy, what does it look…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to better understand the ways in which K-8 teachers from a semirural, predominantly white district perceive their responsibilities to work toward anti-racism, as well as to learn more about how the teachers can be supported as they work to overcome the challenges facing teachers in these fraught times in this…

Purpose: This article aims to share findings from a youth-informed study with interracial anti-racist youth activist groups in two urban high schools. Design/methodology/approach: The study used mostly critical ethnographic methods. Findings: The findings showed that the agency of youth activists amplified their literacies of love and resistance,…

Purpose: By engaging in critical literacy, participants theorized Blackness and antiblackness. The purpose of this study was to have participants theorize Blackness and antiblackness through their engagements with critical literacy. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a youth-centered and informed Black critical-race grounded…