Taking Swedish secondary school students as a point of departure, this article focuses on aspects of teaching and learning critical literacy and specifically on what students identify as argumentative text structure. Challenges connected to teaching critical literacies can be considered quite big, since studies show that students have difficulties…

Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciation for the content, their prior experiences, and the texts. This department column shares ways for educators to help literacy learners unlock their potential with instruction anchored in their skills, knowledge, ways of learning, interests, and…

Background: Today, children play in transmedia franchises that bring together media characters, toys, and everyday consumer goods with games, apps, and websites in complex mergers of childhood cultures, digital literacies, consumer practices, and corporate agendas. Recent research on youth videogames and virtual worlds suggests the productive…

In this paper, we present a collaboration project within one urban Puerto Rican classroom, focused on constructing a critical literacy inquiry curriculum grounded in the students' out-of-school literacy practices in their communities, including their experiences with media and popular culture. We focused on a critical literacy and media inquiry…

Against the backdrop of globalisation, many English language teaching (ELT) curricula emphasise the need to promote awareness of intercultural communication. However, in many settings, the current ELT practices still predominantly focus on Anglophone cultures or interactions with Anglophone speakers, as the teachers and materials may not fully…

This study explores a psychosocial concept coined by the author referred to as "Urban Critical Literacy" (UCL). UCL is an emergent four-step strategy employed by five African American young men as they navigated their cultural worlds of home and school in an urban setting. Critical literacy is the theoretical conceptual framework that…

Research on Black girls' and women's literacies reveals how they utilize literacy practices to resist oppression and define their identities. Yet, these practices are frequently absent from or marginalized in formalized schooling spaces. In addition, Black girlhood is rarely placed at the center of equity interventions in schools. As the history…

In this theoretical paper centered on adolescent literacy and civic engagement, we draw from human rights education and multimodal cosmopolitan critical literacy consider the ways adolescents may take up civic engagment. With a combination of multimodal resources and social networking, adolescents are able to have an impact on a variety of social…

Gender identity is influenced by a variety of characteristics, including race, social class, sexual orientation, language, and gender. This article explores the importance of critical literacy, critical pedagogy, and the influence on identity development. Furthermore, it seeks to provide practitioners and teacher educators with an understanding of…

Given the realities of this increasingly connected, complex, and conflicting age, governments and policymakers around the world are recognizing the importance of global education. The field of literacy has not been immune to the pressure to globalize. Today, the notion of literacy must account not merely for social processes but also for global…

Teachers are obligated to construct an environment inclusive of "all" students. This article argues critical literacy with queer intent can offer strategies to expose normative constructions of gender and sexuality that can exclude some students. I initiate the case with a queer theory analysis of a description of critical literacy…

Literacy is a powerful tool to engage students in learning about the social, cultural, political, and natural worlds around them. This is especially true within the discipline of science where students use reading and writing to engage in scientific inquiry. In the era of accountability reform, however, students spend more time acquiring reading…

This paper explores how two teacher candidates in an equity-focused preparation program negotiated among multiple perspectives about teaching the English Language Arts in linguistically and culturally diverse teaching contexts. We present cases of two preservice teachers (PTs) who experienced tensions in their development as a result of…

In multi- or intercultural educational contexts, folktales from around the world are often approached as representative of diverse cultures and used to transmit knowledge and understanding of the literary, social and cultural heritage of those cultures to children. In this article, I present contemporary critical literary, folklore and cultural…

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…