This retrospective is a group effort between my children and me to make sense of their literacies over the past 26 years. Sharing in the authoring of this retrospective, we take a look back at the ways those literacies unfolded across their childhood. Emily, Tristan, and Simon used different literacies to define who they were and to construct a…

This essay critically analyzes the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), an online public collection of over 8,000 personal accounts related to literacy and learning. Intentionally designed to be somewhat unruly, the DALN's collaborative collection and participatory curation of self-representations can also be understood as an experiment…

Researchers have studied the shifts in literacy demands across the school years. In this paper we re-examine those shifts, particularly exploring what we see as some potentially disruptive implications of framing literacy transitions in terms of a 'movement' from one fixed 'stage' to the next. Specifically, we discuss some epistemological and…

This narrative inquiry explores an African American read-in entitled Black Girls Read! This read-in was organized by four Black, women scholars who, in celebration of Black History Month, continued the tradition of Black women throughout history who have resisted the dominant narrative perpetuated by mainstream culture. Attended by over 100 Black…

This article analyses literacy narratives of first-year students at a South African university. It uses excerpts from the literacy narratives to explain how this writing genre serves as an outlet for reconstructing experiences of social injustice and agency. The article discusses how students' experiences of social injustice and their sense of…

This paper explores the use of testimonio methodology, born from Chicana/Latina feminist thought and epistemologies as a way of exploring the languaging and knowledge production practices of minoritized communities as a platform to share their/our wisdom/voices in applied linguistics. As such, testimonio is a methodology that allows racialized…

In response to the guest editors' call to attend to literacy and language as bodily practices and to (re)think social inequality in young children's literacies, we read a couple of publications by Rosi Braidotti, Maggie MacLure, Nathan Snaza, Sarah Truman and Karin Murris (and others) in relation to a personal narrative gameboard coming to be in a…

This article centres on the narrative of Thuli, a 62-year-old black South African domestic worker taking English language literacy classes outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. For Thuli, English literacy is of vital importance because, as she claims, "if you don't have English, you're just as good as a dead person". Drawing primarily…

This article revisits questions on the utility of identity in literacy studies. Following a review of the range of conceptions of identity and framings of its uses, we argue that "identity-as-position" is needed as a pragmatic tool in the field of literacy studies, and grounds responsive critical literacy practices. Drawing on a…

As literacy scholars, we continually engage with the ongoing politics of imagination in everyday life across silenced histories and uncertain futures. In this article, I draw on sociocultural theories and philosophies of imagination as well as narrative and global discourse theories to argue that literacy research, in the context of social…

This paper examines the ideological underpinnings of the English as an Additional Language (EAL) curriculum that drive the practice of secondary teachers in Victoria, Australia, and how students' needs and rights are seen and addressed in and through English discourse and hegemony. Bakhtin's (1986) dialogic approach and van Lier's (1996) AAA…

In this article, I review influential contributions made by writing-studies researchers to the research literature on literacy sponsorship. Through this review, I show how subsequent studies have reiterated three basic assumptions of Deborah Brandt's pioneering oral-history project. However, I also demonstrate that later writing-studies research…

Through this piece, we draw upon critical race theory and Collins's Afrocentric feminist epistemology to highlight the importance of storytelling as a knowledge validation system in Black women's language. We illuminate and analyze a dialogic performance of two Black female literacy scholars in a coffee house "sipping tea," sharing…

This article was written as an auto ethnography, which allowed for a complex and personal exploration of professional standards, teachers' professional identities, neoliberal reforms, and approaches to literacy and creativity. This article reflects on a practicum which involved teaching Romeo and Juliet to two year nine classes at an all boys'…

In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze a student's narrative about the arrest, incarceration, and deportation of her mother to Mexico. The student, Gisela, was a fifth grader in my classroom during the 2008/2009 school year, and I encouraged the students to collect family stories from their relatives. Gisela created this…