An understanding of the importance of nonfiction literature in classroom instruction is not new within the field of education. The recent implementation of the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) has brought an increased policy focus. The Common…

Teachers of reading and writing have been getting a lot of criticism recently, mostly derived from studies showing that students and the population at large lack essential literacy skills to be successful. The move to multimodal literacy only complicates the problems already present. While some new skills are needed in order to engage in…

Despite the increasing attention paid to the importance of critical literacy in North American early childhood classrooms, critical literacy has been rarely discussed in East Asian classrooms, particularly in South Korea. The present study delineates ways in which a Korean preschool teacher interacts with her young learners during literacy…

Purpose: Preparing citizens for participation in pluralist democracies also requires a type of citizenship education that fosters critical democratic citizenship (CDC). This study inquires into an educational activity with a long history in many EU-countries: mock elections. It explores the extent to which elements of CDC-literacy, competences and…

Twenty years after the New London Group's publication of "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies," we present an analytical literature review that traces the routes and roots of multiliteracies scholarship in Latin America. We found high research activity in Latin America in the areas of literacy education and critical literacy; indigenous,…

This article intervenes in the long-standing conversations around which youth activism, literacies, and civic engagement take place. In an effort to expand the boundaries of activism to include the work of youth critical literacies within the classroom, this article highlights the work of four female high school students of color as they bring…

Conflicts and violence either inside or outside the classroom can affect the quality of learning within the classroom. Critical literacy is proposed as a strategic instructional practice which aims at teaching a nation's citizens to be literate and raising their critical and social consciousness (Freire, 2007). This paper suggests how teachers, as…

This research investigates the social and socialization practices within an online professional development web seminar. The aim of this study was to identify the kinds of social and community building practices that occur in online professional development webinars by exploring how communication tools such as chat are used for community building…

In New Jersey and nationwide, legislative efforts require that schools refocus on teaching social emotional skills in order to meet the holistic needs of students and prevent bullying. However, with an ever-growing list of school requirements, no additional instructional time, and little guidance on how to teach social emotional skills, schools…

This paper draws on practitioner inquiry and participatory action research methodologies to recount how five K-12 educators, who inhabit a range of positionalities and levels of teaching experience, engage in a collaborative professional development program, called Teaching Out Loud as they draw upon critical literacy theory and practice to…

At present, Australian sex(uality) education curricula aim to equip students with information which facilitates "healthy" sexual choices as they develop. However, this is not neutral information, but rather socially and culturally regulated discourse which encodes a normative binary of sexuality. The largely US-focused sexuality…

This article discusses the potentiality and risks of applying transmedia storytelling strategies in the realm of education. The empirical approach is used to analyze the experiential education project Robot Heart Stories, developed in 2011 in Canada and the United States. The theoretical framework focuses on the conceptualization of transmedia…

"Ten in Bed" was a project led by participatory arts organisation Phakama, in partnership with Queen Mary University of London. Over an eight-week period we ran a series of intermedial arts workshops and staged a performance with under five-year-olds and their families at a community centre in Bethnal Green, London. We attempted to…

What does it mean for a student to be critically literate in the Twenty First Century? How do we teach critical literacy within university humanities programs in the United States? And what are the implications of critical literacy for the conception and praxis of the global good? Using Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams' conceptions of critical…

This case study explores how a research-practice partnership worked to cross-pollinate culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) over the course of a 9-week spoken word poetry unit in a seventh-grade classroom. The unit reflected CSP's commitment to linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism (e.g., centering…