Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering 'textual thinking', understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon…

Ongoing research-practice conversations between teachers and researchers have identified a practical tension faced by teachers of upper primary/early secondary students whose progress has slowed. Teachers report that a researcher-led push to develop more sophisticated readings of complex texts results in less reading mileage, potentially impacting…

Connecting the constructs of meaning and experience in the fields of English education, teacher education, literacy and narrative inquiry, "Making Meaning with Readers and Texts" materializes new insights for advancing teacher education research, broadening understandings of teachers' use of literacy practices for making meaning from…

The author questions the "just right" leveling of student texts as having put limitations on students and teachers in promoting literacy. The historical background for the leveling of text and readers is described. The author identifies a number of unintended consequences associated with the use of leveling and guided reading.…

In an eighth-grade English language arts class, 100 students used virtual reality headsets, augmented reality--capable smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, online scavenger hunts, and print-based texts as an introduction to William Shakespeare's life and works. The authors highlight the need for educators to offer multimodal instruction that…

Purpose: Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students' schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander and Ehret, 2019). This article, taking up the notion of…

This article explores the potential of using multimodal texts--particularly comics--as a way of engaging teacher education students in critical inquiry around literacy and ELA assessments. We describe a qualitative study into the use of a multimodal comics-form article within an ELA/literacy assessment course in an MEd program. Our findings…

The current study is a contribution to reading research dealing with tuition in reading comprehension and specifically with the issue of arranging tuition to support the development of metacognition. The empirical findings referred to in this study are from textual discussions of works of fiction in grades 6 and 7. The specific focus of the study…

In this column, the author considers critiques of multiliteracies in light of the impact of the seminal article, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. The author argues that the concept of multiliteracies has been reified and the original meaning of multi has been lost over the years. Particular attention is paid to Leander and…

The research is clear: reading proficiently prepares students for lifelong success. Unfortunately, Tennessee students have fallen behind their peers across the nation in reading. Over the past several years, the results in reading have remained stagnant and, in some cases, have declined. In 2015, on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program…

Culturally relevant text selection and pedagogy support students' motivation, engagement, literacy outcomes, and positive identity formation. Nevertheless, there is limited research on teacher preparation that fosters these outcomes. We explore 17 preservice teachers' challenges and successes with culturally relevant text selection and pedagogy…

Countering reactionary attempts to ban social media from schools is a strong research based rationale for bringing social media into the literacy classroom. When used as a medium to explore literature--or more specifically for interactive character journaling--this medium exemplifies how meaning is created by individuals' interactions with…

Picture books are an important and accessible form of visual art for children because they offer, among other things, opportunities for making connections to personal experiences and to the values and beliefs of families and communities. This paper reports on the use of a picture book to promote Year 4 students' making of text-to-self connections,…

Freebody and Luke proffered an expanded conceptualization of the resources readers utilize when reading and the roles readers adopt during the act of reading. The four resources model, and its associated four roles of the reader, expanded the definition of reading from a simple model of decoding printed texts to a model of constructing meaning and…

This paper reports a study that examines the integration of tablet technologies such as iPads into literacy lessons to investigate how reading and meaning-making occur within this digital medium. Specifically in this paper, we discuss the concept of reading paths as applied to physical and cognitive planes of meaning-making. The paper reports on…