In this article, we consider the notion of entangled stories to account for ways that young people assemble stories in generative ways. We draw on Tim Ingold's theorising of lines, movement, and storied knowledge to account for the visible/material and invisible/immaterial entanglements that happen when young people design multimodal storied…

We argue that students can understand an historical period by building on the foundations of their existing knowledge. Specifically, popular media can be used to develop students' historical literacies -- that is their ability to engage with past societies vastly different from their own. Our methodology takes inspiration from the ancient Romans'…

This article seeks to explore the complexities of Black subjectivities as written and illustrated by comic book creators of color who wrestle with the enigmatic qualities of blackness as they write within and beyond racial imaginaries and social realities. I call these works "critical race comics" to highlight their explicit engagement…

This paper argues that the revival of the Gothic as an expression of contemporary tensions and issues has significance for our views of childhood and, as a consequence, for literacy and literacy education. While the ways in which Gothic literature and other Gothic popular culture forms are used to speak to these tensions have shifted across time…

In the majority of public schools across the nation, Black male youth are undergoing what can be deemed as "educational genocide"--the killing off of any chances for an equitable education. This dramatically decreases opportunities for Black male youth to develop into fully participating citizens in a democratic society. In many ways,…

Ms. Mayer, a recently retired English language arts teacher, frequently used strategies described in John Golden's book "Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom." In this book, Golden suggests that ELA teachers "reverse the order: use a film clip to practice the reading and analytical skills that we want our students to…

In this article, the author explores what happens when a group of African American women came together to engage with popular culture narratives (PCNs) soon after 9/11. The author relies on Endarkened Feminist Epistemology to understand the development of raced and gendered meaning making and knowledge development within the inquiry. She also…

The author recently researched and designed a course titled "Seminar on Diversity and Disability" to understand better the ways that "new" pedagogies are received by a group of mostly White special education teacher candidates being prepared to teach reading and prosocial behavioral skills to diverse students with high incidence disabilities.…

The author examines the rise in popularity of graphic novels, the sales of which have steadily increased as their influence expands into adolescent culture. This article also includes an overview of current research results supporting the use of graphic novels within the classroom and school library; graphic novels support English-language…

A Latino teenager participated in an after school digital movie composing program called the Technology and Literacy Project. As a student of color previously identified as at risk for school failure, Horatio's case speaks to a common discrepancy highlighted in sociocultural literacy scholarship. He was competent and engaged with numerous…

This article focuses on representations of youth identity and culture that circulated in a long-term teacher and researcher study group. These representations are important to examine because the way that teachers of adolescents envision their students' identities and cultures relative to that of other adolescents is fundamental to how they…

Building on scholarship in African American rhetorics and African American language, an analysis of Walter Dean Myers's (2000) "The Blues of Flats Brown" is presented as a methodology for (re)imagining educational issues and research related to voice, agency, reading, and literacy in the face of racial oppression and subjugation. In the…

The arrival of the digital age requires new approaches to understand the literacies used in making meanings from multimodal communications, and a rethinking of the ways in which research into these areas can be used to support learners in the 21st century. This presentation examines the range of literacies children have developed and used to make…

Examines why, despite research and opinion that favors the utilization of popular texts to teach literacy, teachers in a research and development project still have an aversion to embracing children's interest in popular culture. Finds teachers who did not wish to use popular culture in their classrooms shared similar traditional conceptions of…

This paper addresses the television program "Cheers" and demonstrates one way of interpreting the complexity of messages within the program. The interplay of visual messages within the "Cheers" programming is referred to as intertextuality, or the relation of one text to another to express an idea. Two basic types of…