Drawn from an ethnographic study of spoken word poetry in Australia, this article offers case studies of two youth poets and follows their journeys with spoken word over three years as they performed in community-based slams, engaged with the New South Wales English Extension 2 curriculum, and served as mentor poets in culturally and…

This article shares a case study of a classroom of multicultural and multilingual children in an early childhood center to explore how iPad apps can support young children in learning English as an additional language. Situated in Sydney, Australia, this study found that iPad apps have the potential to promote 4- and 5-year-old children's language…

Adolescents are more connected to the globalised world than ever before, with an increased prevalence of social media use amongst youth. Young people are composing multimodal creative works, including digital poetry, to share with an online audience, using platforms such as Instagram. Drawing on transliteracies theory, this case study found that…

This article explores how Australian English teachers can thoughtfully and critically address the cross-curriculum priority 'Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia' in secondary classrooms. It builds on our prior research, which highlighted factors that shape teacher attitudes towards addressing this cross-curriculum priority, the perceived…

Drawing on sociocultural perspectives, this case study investigated ways that youths write, read, and critique poetry in an online affinity space. Specifically, it used a thematic analysis of interviews, a linguistic analysis of online feedback mechanisms, and poetic analysis to gain insight into how four teens engaged with poetry on the Figment…

Teacher education programs play a significant role in shaping pre-service English teachers' pedagogy. The incorporation of texts with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual/transgender, intersex, and queer/questioning (LGBTIQ+) perspectives in the curriculum is one mechanism for promoting inclusion as well as a means to address and combat homophobia…

This case study examined a Romanticism unit within a Year 9 English class in Sydney, Australia. It considered whether popular culture could build connections between students' lives and Romanticism, and whether the process of remixing "high" Romantic poetry with "low" popular culture could foster student engagement. Thematic…

This article examines adolescent literacy practices related to "The Hunger Games," a young adult novel and the first of a trilogy. By focusing on the interaction of social identities, discourses, and media paratexts within an online affinity space, this ethnographic study offers insight into how young adults engage with contemporary…

Prior scholarship suggests that many boys are disengaged from school-based literacy because they do not see its value or significance in their lives. In response, this study investigates the role of popular culture and new literacies in motivating adolescent boys within secondary English. Drawing on sociocultural approaches to literacy research,…

With the introduction of digital tools and online connectivity in primary schools, the shape of teaching and learning is shifting beyond the physical classroom. Drawing on the architecture of productive learning networks framework, we examine the affordances and limitations of an upper primary learning network and focus on how the digital and…

In order to understand the culture of the physical, virtual, and blended spheres that adolescents inhabit, we build on Gee's concept of affinity spaces. Drawing on our ethnographic research of adolescent literacies related to The Hunger Games novels, the Neopets online game, and The Sims videogames, this article explores the nature of…

This year-long ethnographic case study examined high school teachers' participation in technology-focused professional development. By pairing a dialogical perspective on teacher identity with a micro-level analysis of narratives, findings indicate that teachers use language and other semiotic resources to express their own identity as well as to…

Prompted by calls for research on technology-focused professional development, this ethnographic case study investigates how teachers' participation in learning communities may influence technology integration within the secondary English curriculum. In this article, I draw on educational psychology, cognitive anthropology, and sociolinguistics to…

In this paper, we analyse interactions between secondary students and pre-service teachers in an online environment in order to understand how their meaning-making processes embody distributed cognition. We begin by providing a theoretical review of the ways in which literacy learning is distributed across learners, objects, tools, symbols,…