Religion remains an aspect of culture often missing from picturebooks, based on the misunderstanding that religion has no place in U.S. public schools. This absence is particularly critical for books reflecting the lives of Muslim children, given the rising Islamophobia in the United States. A critical content analysis to examine representations…

Literacy studies scholarship and pedagogy have not attended comprehensively to Jewish cultural literacies or the discursive operations of anti-Jewish hate. As a result, antisemitic rhetoric may be employed, strategically or accidentally, by people who do not see themselves as antisemitic--and who, regardless of their critical and cultural…

Recent political excursions into classroom text selections by local and national politicians and pundits have made teaching canonical texts more appealing to many school districts and teachers. In this study, we used conceptions of Derridean hospitality alongside monster theory to examine what common canonical texts teach students about who is…

The Black Holiness Pentecostal Christian (BHPC) tradition is a focal point through which I illustrate(ed) multiple excursuses beyond Westerly notions of religion. Just as the word "excursus" is usually defined as an appendix to or digression within a written text, this text is designed to nudge the field of literacy research to extend…

This critical content analysis draws on a dataset of contemporary young adult texts receiving awards between 2012 and 2023 to examine opportunities for religiously informed alterity for readers, which we argue can be a productive experience for building critical religious literacy in young adult readers. We argue that young adult literature can…

This article uses diverse genres in addressing "The Jewish Question(s)," a phrase with multiple meanings ranging from the antisemitic to the deeply philosophical. The focus is on addressing "The Jewish Question" in literacy research and theory. The article is organized in three parts. The first part, Jewish Literacy Practices…

Blending narrative portraiture and feminist methods, this study explored the lives of two rural women who are creative writers. The study asked (1) What are their critical purposes? and (2) How did gender and place intersect in their writing lives? The findings were that the women used creative writing to engage in praxis by creating and…

Since the 1990s, there have been increasing calls to "queer" curricula in order to challenge gender and sexuality norms. In this article, I develop a model of queer literacies that understands queer to encompass anti-normative ways of being and recognizes the agentic potential of queer objects to disorient individuals and spaces. I…

This qualitative study examines how youth participants in an ongoing community-based literacy initiative sought to increase awareness of racial justice among residents of their subsidized housing community in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in summer 2020 and throughout the 2020-2021 academic year. We utilize theories of racial literacy…

Scholars have long recognized that reading in digital spaces requires unique skills, strategies, and competencies in comparison to those needed for reading printed text. In recent years, the ubiquity of social media and algorithmically targeted content has radically changed the nature of online reading and meaning making. Technological changes…

This article explores my teaching experiences that informed my distinction between religious literacy and critical religious literacy, ultimately leading to the creation of the Challenge Islamophobia Project. I highlight the impacts of post-9/11 criminalization and dehumanization of Muslims, which have significantly shaped public perceptions of…

In response to anti-Black policing in 2020 that led to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Black children and teens turned to poetry as a means to channel their self-described terror, rage, pain, horror, tiredness, and need for change. Reminiscent of the poetry of the Black Arts Movement and works published in "The Black…

Civic writing has appeared on walls over centuries, across cultures, and in response to political concerns. This article advances a civic interrogation of how civic writing is publicly authored, read, and discussed as openly accessible and multimodal texts on digital walls. Drawing upon critical literacy perspectives, we examine how a repertoire…

In this academic counternarrative, we examine how Black students and adults get positioned by, and come to resist, discourses that favor dominant linguistic and cultural practices. We ask, How do Black youth and adults resist the gaze of whiteness, or dominant discourses, in schools and communities, and what are pedagogical implications of such…

Drawing on life stories and classroom observations, this qualitative study examined how six bilingual maestras enacted and embodied critical biliteracies through bilanguaging love. These maestras were born, raised, and now teach bilingual education on the Texas-Mexico border. Their stories revealed contradictory and complex beliefs about literacy…