The growing and pervasive presence of technology and media in the lives of children reveals the need for incorporating critical media literacy instruction into the official curriculum of schools. The purpose of this qualitative, narrative study was to examine how American middle school girls experience the documentary film "Girl Rising."…

Background: In South Africa, developing criticality among learners is essential for their careers in school and outside school. However, knowledge and understanding of critical literacy within the schooling context is unclear, with only patchy guidance available for teachers. Objectives: An intervention project was set up to discover how community…

Health education is largely informed by psychological theories and practices that pursue reductionist views of people learning. However, critical attention is moving to understand health in ways that reconsider relationships to context and the forms of life within which everyday living takes place. This shift is apparent in theoretical…

The study aimed to examine the effect of using a program based on the Connectivism theory on developing EFL prep stage students' critical literacy. A one- group pre-post test design along with a mixed research approach incorporating both quantitative and qualitative assessments were utilized in the study. A group of twenty-five second prep stage…

This article advocates a holistic approach to education concerning literacy and ecological literacy development and builds on data from two different case studies in compulsory school classes in Sweden. The study is built on action-based research and the data material was analysed through directed qualitative content analysis. We argue that place…

This paper focuses on critical pedagogy and EFL teacher education and it argues that it would be unrealistic to expect students who have been educated through traditional university curricula (aiming to deliver content through a 'banking model') to become critical foreign language teachers and educators. The education of future teachers requires…

This article presents the critical digital literacy practices of Latinx bilingual youth in the United States enrolled in a secondary ethnic studies course. Despite the expansion of digital tools in classrooms, empirical studies on the pedagogical affordances of such tools, and how they enhance youth's critical digital literacies and understandings…

This study explored the use of critical literacy practices employed by five third-grade teachers during their shared reading instruction. These individuals worked within a community of elementary classrooms. The purpose of the research study was to understand what critical literacy practices looked like as teachers learned about and then refined…

In the 21st century, our students increasingly communicate, connect, collaborate, and interact with diverse cultures and traditions around the world, so they need to develop global literacy. This department column highlights research and research-to-practice at the international level to bring global best teaching practices to the forefront.…

This article illustrates how critical multimodal literacy practices engage secondary students to further explore differences and similarities between past and present instances of discrimination within a process drama, where students and teachers explore a topic through unscripted role-play. Data from a classroom-based ethnography are drawn on to…

This essay explores the need to prepare educators to teach their students to think critically about the media and information they use and encounter daily so they can become empowered citizens with a sense of agency to use these tools to participate in shaping democracy. After reviewing the dearth of teacher training in media education, the author…

In this article, I share the ways in which New Literacies theory served as an interpretive lens to understand how the Internet as a cultural tool mediates the literacy actions of adolescents in English Language Arts classrooms. Data were drawn from a larger study in which students who were considered "at-risk" because of previous…

Drawing on theories of "radical pragmatism," this article situates the experiences and reflections of four teacher leaders at a K-12 public school to develop aspects of teacher leadership acts that are rooted in a social justice disposition. This article marries frequently established ideas and acts of teacher leadership with social…

Twenty-first-century competencies have been identified as vital thinking and working skills for the 21st century. Students could contribute to social change by using information and communication technology (ICT) while developing 21st-century competencies, but this type of experience is not frequent at schools. The purpose of this qualitative case…

While important work has been done on assessing classroom texts and investigating classroom discourse, there is little research on teachers doing systemic functional linguistics (SFL) with students for critical ends, especially in the high school arena. This article discusses how instructional use of SFL analytic resources in subject English…