Book banning and censorship in the U.S. prompts necessary conversations on how critical literacy, dialogue, and inquiry are used in various school and library settings. We share guiding questions alongside three examples of textual analyses centering on gender fluidity with three young adult novels. We believe that English language arts teachers…

This article explores the critical literacies of Black and Latinx high school students who participated in a youth participatory action research project focused on racial injustice in education. The author utilizes poetic analysis of data collected in research about youth's work to viscerally render youth's everyday ways of employing critical…

This article takes an international perspective on adult learning and disinformation, exploring how they have recast the global landscape. In particular, we address former president Trump's naming of certain Caribbean and African nations as "shithole countries," as well as other related experiences, and work to locate these comments…

Grounded in 10 years of critical literacy work in Puerto Rico, the authors engage readers creatively, to share key events in both our experiences as local teachers and as theatre activists in Puerto Rico. Our long-term purpose has been to explore new creative approaches to doing educational research and pedagogies that rupture traditional colonial…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how youth from varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds came together to collaboratively analyze data they collected across two research projects in a community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative, a less understood aspect of YPAR. Specifically, this study discusses how…

Acculturation is the process of psychological and behavioral change that individuals go through during and after intercultural contacts. Social media have become a major space for cross-cultural encounters, and are important venues of socialization for marginalized populations. Intercultural encounters on social media may benefit or detriment the…

This study examines the ways pre-service English language arts teachers (PSTs) conceptualized activism and experimented with visual and multimodal approaches to composing about activism. Drawing on qualitative methods, we examined 22 PSTs' graphic narratives completed as part of their teacher preparation coursework, and center our discussion on…

The emergence of post-truth culture and the spread of dis/misinformation has received a great deal of attention from researchers. Existing approaches to digital information literacy highlight new skills and strategies needed in digital spaces. However, challenges remain, including disconnects between school curricula and out-of-school experiences,…

Courses: Health Communication, Public Communication Campaigns, Public Relations, Introduction to Communication. Objectives: By the end of this workshop, students will be able to: (1) understand how artificial intelligence--based large language learning models work and be able to explain core concepts such as word embeddings, neural networks, and…

Our case study analyzed preservice teachers' (PTs') critical dispositions and alignment or resistance to critical literacies and race-visible discourse. In a virtual reading methods course at a large public university, a diverse cohort of twenty-two PTs recursively discussed self-selected multimodal texts utilizing synchronous and asynchronous…

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…

The study examined the influence of university students' religious literacy on their religiosity, while paying attention to their background characteristics such as field of study and religious affiliation. The urgency of this study lies in the fact that there seem to be numerous bizarre religious beliefs and practices that require people's…

Critical approaches to literature in secondary English require greater attention to narrative discourse. In this conceptual article, I provide interpretative tools from contemporary narratology and demonstrate their critical potential for high school English. In particular, I outline critical literacy's vital but overattentive focus on the…

We present an audience reception study of participant reactions to gender-based violence in Issa López' 2008 film, "Casi Divas," chosen for its nuanced depiction of women grappling with several violences. Over three focus groups with 15 adult participants, we used Galtung's conflict theory to explore what participants identified as…

Purpose: Preparing preservice teachers to become critical literacy educators is integral to creating social justice classrooms. Numerous theoretical frameworks have been used to introduce critical literacy to preservice teachers. The commonality between the frameworks is the focus on analyzing literature. This paper aims to present an alternative…