English learners (ELs) represent one of the fastest growing groups among the school-aged population in the United States, yet the level of literacy achievement for ELs has lagged significantly behind that of their native English-speaking peers. Existing practices in schools tend to favor an asocial and decontextualized language learning approach…

Assessment, as defined by policy mandates such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, is a well--established concept within education. However, assessing multiliteracies presents new challenges because multiliteracies is about ways of knowing and being in the world rather than mastery of a particular set of cognitive skills. In this article,…

This qualitative study investigates how 90 teachers explored critical curriculum through their reading, analysis and creation of counter advertisements. Located in visual discourse analysis, we designed a study to investigate the question "To what extent can teachers engaged in a critical literacy curriculum talk back to messages of consumerism,…

This article explores the ways that alternative digital media production by elementary students can support education for critical democracy. The article centers on a collaborative, qualitative study in which students in a 3rd-grade class at a Title One school created and disseminated podcasts about issues of historical injustice rooted in the key…

This paper provides an overview of the recursive process of initiating an action research project on literacy for students-at-risk in a Canadian urban elementary school. As this paper demonstrates, this requires development of a school-wide framework, which frames the action research project and desired outcomes, and a shared ownership of this…

In the last ten years, historical fiction picturebooks have won numerous children's literature awards and have assumed a prominent role in the literacy landscape of elementary and middle school classrooms. Whether read in read-alouds, study groups, as a focus of genre study, or as a supplement to the social studies curriculum, historical fiction…

This article explores the relationship between critical literacy practice, digital media production, and civic agency in the Council of Youth Research, a youth participatory action research program in which Los Angeles high school students conduct research and create dynamic, multimedia presentations as leaders of a growing youth movement for…

Accompanying myriad definitions of critical literacy is an absence of pedagogical models for implementing critical literacy in teacher education contexts. This action research explores critical literacy with pre-service and in-service teachers in teacher education courses offered in the United States. The primary data sources include online weekly…

Educators in Malawi and Zambia have always been concerned with their student's abilities to become analytical, logical and proficient readers of texts. This has been due to the fear that there is an increased overemphasis on knowledge of the fundamental literacy skills and other basics at the expense of critical thinking. This scenario has…

The new Curricula of Cyprus aspire to deliver a new ethos in teaching and learning that promotes the notion of "the humane and democratic school" and emphasises the right of every child to succeed. In this context, the new Modern Greek language curriculum in Cyprus has been moulded upon the notion of Critical Literacy (CL). CL is neither…

Graduate students use existing knowledge and are ultimately expected to add to that knowledge. Students in a Masters of Education entry course were asked to find a Wikipedia page related to the course topics, critique it, and make improvements to it to begin to develop these skills. In this paper, I examine ways in which their perspectives were…

Drawing on theories of multi-modality and critical visual literacy, this article focuses on images that five-and six year-olds painted in a class-made book, Voice on the Bus, about racial segregation. The article discusses how children used illustrations to convey their understandings of Rosa Parks' bus arrest in Alabama. A post-structural view…

In recent years, literacy educators have increasingly recognised the importance of addressing a broader range of texts in the classroom. This article raises some critical concerns about a particular approach to this issue that has been widely promoted in recent years-- the concept of "multimodality". Multimodality theory offers a broadly…

Intertextuality is the relation of each text with the texts surrounding it. Any word or phrase we are writing or saying has relationship with what we have heard or seen before. This shared language makes others understand us. On the other hand, critical thinking is the ability to think reasonably, reflectively and skillfully. Since it is believed…

This paper explores the concept of subjectivity from the perspective of a nonnative-English-speaking teacher educator at a Midwestern university in the USA. It begins with a literature review on the role subjectivity plays in education. It argues that acknowledging the existence of subjectivity allows us to investigate its enabling and disabling…