Howard, Overstreet, and Ticknor build on the framework they established in their first book "It's Not 'One More Thing'." They extend their practical how-to strategies for enacting culturally responsive and affirming literacy instruction in K-12 classrooms specific to literacy assessment, engaging texts used for literacy instruction, and…

Despite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and…

The coronavirus pandemic significantly disrupted K-12 education in the United States. school closures at the peak of this disruption affected at least 55.1 million students in 124,000 U.S. public and private schools. Teachers continued facilitating the growth of their learners, but from a distance. Depending on a number of factors, some teachers…

Culturally Relevant Pedagogical (CRP; Ladson-Billings, 1995) and textual strategic approaches to reading development are gaining acceptance and broader usage among students of all ages and walks of life. With this shift, quantitative measures of efficacy can confirm, bolster, and source new policies and strategies for implementation in new and…

Culturally responsive teaching is often nebulous and challenging for many to integrate in an effective and intentional way. As novice teachers, we struggled with developing tangible ways to actualize culturally responsive teaching. However, through our combined experiences and research, we have gained a better understanding of culturally…

Since joining The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Indonesia has been actively shaping its education policy following the recommendations derived from the results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In response to the consistently low PISA reading scores, in 2015 the Indonesian Ministry of…

This article exposes the problem of using declarative rather than procedural knowledge to help K--12 students recognize irony in stories. It offers commonplace procedures drawn from students' everyday language experience together with more abstract irony clues to help students recognize irony in stories and increase their story comprehension.…

Purpose: Momentum around the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in US K-12 classrooms is increasing. Opponents have argued that Ethnic Studies does not challenge students academically and prepare them for high stakes testing (Planas, 2012; Sanchez, 2007). Conversely, research continues to show ways Ethnic Studies contribute to students'…

The purpose of this study was to investigate what teachers in a Western Canadian province were doing when engaging their students with literature. Forty two teachers from Kindergarten through to Grade 12 were interviewed, which allowed us to get a broad perspective on the types of reader response activities that are being taught in the classroom…

The Common Core generally eschews mandating texts in favor of promoting critical analysis and rigor. So it's significant that Shakespeare is the only author invoked in imperatives. His explicit inclusion offers a significant opportunity for educators to rethink how we approach Shakespearean instruction. Rather than the traditional learning of…

We are at a transformative moment in education with the almost universal adoption (forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories) of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). As we move from adoption to implementation of these standards across the country, the climate for educational reform has led to expectations of change that…

The activities described in this article, Prediction Path and Quotation Cafe, are adapted from the IRA book "Building Reading Comprehension Habits in Grades 6-12." They highlight the reading comprehension habit of making inferences and predictions, which can be used across content areas and grade levels. In creating this toolkit of activities, the…

Visuals play an important role in the teaching and learning of science and should be embedded within and supportive of authentic science inquiry. Both researchers and teachers believe that visuals have a great deal of potential to help students understand science, but in practice, these visuals do not always live up to their promise. Teachers need…

Over the past few decades, reading assessment has been pushed to the forefront of the national discussion about education. The most recent reauthorizations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1994, 2001) made assessment a priority as administrators and teachers are attempting to meet increasing accountability standards, but measuring…

Background: A current problem in media literacy studies is whether or not to categorize graphic novels as media literacy texts. Thus, this article begins with a review of current media literacy research and its emphasis on defining media literacy texts as texts that rely on both print literacies and image literacies. Because graphic novels rely on…