Creating classroom book clubs with e-readers helps connect adolescent interests, digital literacies, and content area academic goals.

New literacies are affecting the ways that we choose to spend our time in teaching and learning. In this article, Hagood describes the work of nine middle grades teachers' explorations of new literacies, including digital technologies and pop culture, and their implementations in their content area instruction. She also highlights some of the…

The author has been deeply committed to shaping an art curriculum that offers students a more meaningful and authentic experience. In addition, she has been interested in the notion of students as victims of their popular culture. She questioned the ways in which cultural sources might impact their aesthetic choices with regard to personal…

The messages students receive through popular media such as movies, television, the internet, and music videos have a powerful influence and can shape their thinking. A national survey of media use by 8- to 18-year-olds found the average adolescent spends over seven and a half hours daily with entertainment media (KFF 2010). Rather than viewing…

Gainer talks about the importance of connecting students' background knowledge, experiences, and interests to curricular goals. He highlights the voice of DeAndre, an eighth-grade boy in special education classes, whose participation in an after-school club led to the creation of a video. According to Gainer, "[W]hen given the opportunity to…

Literacy education is at a crossroads. While traditional school experiences still prize disembodied experiences of reading print-based texts as the pinnacle of sound education, informal learning experiences provide fruitful examples of the ways that visual texts are read as they are embodied by readers. In this paper I draw from the literacy lives…