Refutation texts are resurfacing as a suggested antidote to misconceptions and "fake news." In a previous critical review of the refutation text literature, we, the author team, suggested further interrogation of the assumptions these texts imply: that learners share the same common misunderstanding about a topic, and that there is one…

Concerned with disinformation, fake news, and a posttruth era, literacy research on digital learning ecologies has focused on content of the texts that youth encounter but less explicitly on aesthetics--issues of form or the way a text is written. Drawing on critical sociocultural theories, this article examines youth aesthetic meaning-making with…

This is a multiple case study exploring five high school English teachers' perceived supports and challenges to enacting critical literacy pedagogy, and their experiences navigating the challenges. Through a structure/culture/agency framework, I sought to understand how these five teachers' leveraging of supports and sense of agency in the face of…

In the face of persistent racial injustice, critical literacy approaches to instruction frequently involve investigating and altering unjust racialized power structures through critical action. However, what happens when youth have become understandably skeptical of action for change? This analysis uses healing frameworks to explore the critical…

This invited paper highlights the reflections of expert panelists who were spontaneously called upon, graciously accepted, and quickly organized to respond thoughtfully and compellingly to Dr. Arlette Willis' powerful and timely Oscar Causey address at the 2022 Literacy Research Association (LRA) annual conference. In her address, Dr. Willis…

Supportive, respectful teacher-student interactions are essential to a positive learning environment for linguistically and culturally diverse students. In this article, I focus on one case from a larger study that examined the teaching practices and perspectives of four secondary teachers of immigrant-origin students of generation 1.0, 1.5, and…

As faculty at a land-grant university, we wanted to better understand the complexity of and pathways toward critical literacy leadership among educators. Specifically, we asked: What forms of critical literacy leadership become visible when educators participate in a cohort model of literacy professional development? Thirty educators enrolled…

In this theoretical article, posthumanist theories of education and Jain nonviolence are brought into conversation through a diffractive analysis. This co-consideration of texts produces a renewed sense of the relationships among humans, the more-than-human world, and (non)violence: relationships that can produce and be produced by various…

Grounded in the theoretical constructs of "envisionment building" and critical literacies, this article discusses a case study on how the teacher invites the students to make their learning of literary elements (e.g., point of view) more meaningful by incorporating components of critical literacies. The teacher's critical practice and…

This article presents an illustrative case study to explore the classroom potentials of critical multimodal literacy. We feature Marcela's multimodal response to demonstrate how she engaged with visual and textual tools for learning. Illustrative cases are especially useful to explore a particular issue and often involve in-depth analysis of…

Twenty years after the New London Group's publication of "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies," we present an analytical literature review that traces the routes and roots of multiliteracies scholarship in Latin America. We found high research activity in Latin America in the areas of literacy education and critical literacy; indigenous,…

This case study explores how a research-practice partnership worked to cross-pollinate culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) over the course of a 9-week spoken word poetry unit in a seventh-grade classroom. The unit reflected CSP's commitment to linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism (e.g., centering…

This qualitative case study examines how fifth graders and their teachers participated in critical literacy instruction grounded in systems thinking on the topic of slavery. Systems thinking seeks to discover relationships and patterns in diverse underlying systems; critical literacy examines everyday texts, focuses on social justice and change,…

This article draws from an ongoing longitudinal qualitative inquiry into the preparation and development of social justice-oriented urban English teachers. It examines the cases of three graduates of an urban education-focused teacher preparation program who claim different intersectional identities and have completed their fourth year as urban…

This article invites a conversation about how critical participatory research transforms the production of knowledge, enables a complex chronicling of counter stories, and nurtures the contestation of dominant narratives with the very people who have been misrepresented as Others. Through a series of research stories fomented in prison,…