In this forum, practitioners reflect on their experiences as they respond to the following question: How can we use literacy to advocate for environmental issues? Three educators across elementary, middle school, and college settings describe using multiple literacies to conduct inquiries and create a deeper awareness of sustainability and shared…

The cochairs of the International Literacy Association's 2017 Standards provide a hands-on guide to using the updated standards for middle and high school classroom teachers. The authors discuss four key notions: Disciplinary literacy instruction enhances content area learning, culturally responsive instruction is critical in our diverse society,…

This article describes the inaugural year of a cross-cultural after-school program that used a problem-solving, project-based pedagogy to promote meaningful interactions between immigrant middle school students and their urban, low-income peers. The program relied on the students' local knowledge as they worked together to create social maps of…

This column features essays written by current middle school and high school teachers, media specialists, librarians, literacy coaches, curriculum specialists, administrators, preservice teachers, teacher educators, and adolescent and adult learners. They highlight diverse perspectives on teaching and/or learning with literacies to inspire reader…

In this article, the author argues that critical work in teacher education should begin with teacher educators turning a critical eye on their own practices. The author uses Lesko's conception of contingent, recursive growth and change to analyze a lesson he observed as part of a phenomenological study aimed at understanding more about what it is…

During the past several years, middle schools and high schools have been shifting their attention to disciplinary literacy. The Common Core State Standards are explicit in requiring teachers to teach the literacy of science, literature, and history, and even states that are not part of Common Core (such as Texas) are making this shift as well.…

This article makes the a case for conceptualizing content literacy, especially in social studies, as inquiry-based social practices for understanding and addressing complex, multifaceted problems. Two core practices especially needed for a Web-dominated 21st century are then described--excavation and elevation. Next, these two practices are…

This article looks at how social and participatory media can be used to strengthen interdisciplinary literacy and connects the multimodality of social environments with Middle-Years Mathematics curriculum and delivery. The article reports on part of an eighteen months action research study in an Australian public high school within the author's…

This article reports on a study and subsequent vocabulary instructional framework involving middle school students' knowledge of word walls and the efficacy of this instructional tool for improving vocabulary knowledge at these grade levels. We investigated middle school students' perspectives and understanding of word walls by conducting…

This article describes an after-school program in which immigrant and urban low-income middle school students collaborated to create social maps of their school and to produce a multilingual video against gossip. These literacy-based projects combined critical pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy to promote meaningful interactions between…

A fifth-grade science teacher and university researcher challenged the notion that textbook reading follows the same archaic formula: read the textbook and answer the questions at the end of the section. Together, they adapted literature circle roles to fit textbook structures, resulting in the strategy they call Textmasters. This article…

Through a multimodal media production literacy intervention in an extended-day program, culturally and linguistically diverse youth developed valuable information and communication technology literacies, including: (1) Specific how-to skills useful in future academic, professional, social, and civic contexts; (2) Abilities to critically interpret…

This article describes an urban middle school community that took part in a yearlong literacy engagement--a whole-school read of a young adult novel. The authors, three researchers from a nearby university, documented the yearlong event and the effect it had on the school's academic and social spaces. Relying on the perspective that literacy is…

In a time when adolescents are continually inundated by provocative multimedia campaigns that coax them to buy more, think less, and do so in a passive environment that provides little to no opportunities for them to reflect on who they are in the world, the author of this article offers one way to engage adolescents and their teachers with a…

In many middle and high schools, literacy is seen as secondary to school reform; it is often perceived as being a problem for only a few students-that improving the literacy abilities of students is remedial in nature and should not be part of the "normal" classroom. It is felt that improving literacy levels should be the responsibility of English…