This paper explores how prospective teachers across five geographic and educational contexts constructed understandings of equity literacy within literacy methods courses. Artifacts of what equity "looks like" in prospective teachers' field placements in early childhood, elementary, and secondary literacy classrooms were analyzed from…

Our current political moment has raised critical questions surrounding the efficacy of public education to deliver on its promise of social uplift. This ethnographic case study utilizes Louis Althusser's conception of ideology--which insists that the way to dismantle systemic injustice is first to recognize its imprint on our everyday actions--to…

This article examines the effects of education system types and characteristics on changes in the distributions of literacy and numeracy skills during the upper secondary phase of education and training. Whereas there is a substantial literature on system effects on skills during the primary and lower secondary phases of education, much less has…

The burgeoning work of translanguaging and bilingualism has much to offer adolescent learning spaces in order to provide bi/multilingual students more equitable opportunities to engage in disciplinary literacy at the high school level, particularly where there are many low-incidence languages. Drawing from critical theories in both literacy and…

A historically responsive literacy (HRL) approach (Muhammad, 2020a, 2020b) fosters literary pursuits in learners, preparing them to transcend skill development and use literacy to shape a more just and compassionate world. Despite its transformative potential, not enough is known about HRL application with multilinguals, especially in secondary…

Access to core subject-area curriculum for students from immigrant backgrounds who are learning the dominant language of instruction has long been a barrier to equitable education around the world, especially in secondary schools. This article explores the promise of Complex Instruction (CI) to address barriers to access for such multilingual…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the reading of a book-length fiction or non-fiction text in one disciplinary literacy (DL) teacher education course. This paper considers how the assignment may help pre- and in-service teachers understand literacy as multifaceted and connected within and beyond their content areas (Moje, 2015). The research…

This study focused on a problem of practice at Mystic River School (MRS), a kindergarten through eighth grade school in an urban district in New England. Schoolwide diagnostic data showed a significant gap between multilingual learners (MLs) and their native English speaking peers in literacy. An analysis of this data, interviews with staff and…

Mateo was like many students, neither fluent in English nor in American Sign Language (ASL) and significantly delayed in literacy skills. At Model Secondary School for the Deaf (MSSD), he was provided with emerging signers services to develop his expressive and receptive ASL skills. He was also provided with speech and language services by a…

Drawing from theories of identity, language, and race, we conceptualize gateway moments to literate identities in high school English language arts classrooms enrolling language-minoritized youth. Gateways were interactions that afforded particular kinds of literate identities for youth. Deficit literate identities often invoked racialized…

Background: By providing high-quality, internationally comparable data on the cognitive skills of working-age adults, the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) offers great potential for illuminating the complex interplay of formal qualifications and skills in shaping labor market attainment as well as social…

This paper claims a central role for school leaders (principals or head-teachers) in the enactment of social justice policy in schools, who act as key agents or 'gate keepers' for what counts as social justice in their contexts of practice. Social justice means different things in different contexts depending on where leaders -- who use policy as…

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…

Although there is now a good deal of research on whether, when, and how to teach Academic Language (AL), we still have a limited understanding of the various ways and reasons we might teach AL to refugee-background students enrolled in U.S. schools--and how to do so without devaluing their existing repertoires, resources, and lived experiences. A…

This critical race ethnography examines a secondary-level dual-language (DL) program, a bilingual-education model thought to provide Latinxs educational equity. Drawing from a three-stage recursive analytic approach, I present evidence that a DL program's policies and practices valued offering Latinx youth biliterate schooling only so long as DL…