This study addressed how picture books featuring international characters could potentially support international students in their transitions to a new Western cultural and social context. Drawing on culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012), community of practices (Lave, 1996), and reader-response theory (Rosenblatt, 1982), this article…

Based on a 1-year interview-based case study of a preservice English teacher, this article considers the limitations of both intersectional literacies and reader-based responses to texts. In an effort to address students' problematic discussions of female sexuality, the participant implemented a queer pedagogy that emphasized alterity, or the…

Like a printed text, an architectural blueprint, a mathematical equation, or a musical score, a visual image is its own language. Visual literacy has three components: (1) learning; (2) thinking; and (3) communicating. A "literate" person is able to decipher the basic code and syntax, interpret the signs and symbols, correctly apply terms from an…

Amongst academics working with postgraduate students, there has recently been increasing interest in ways of supporting advanced academic literacy (AAL). This is a concern for us at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where we teach a diverse group of postgraduate students, most of whom are subject practitioners in…

In this article, the author describes her multimodal teaching practices in her "Adolescent Literacy Methods" course at a graduate university in the United States. By doing so, she highlights content teacher's understanding and use of various multimodal texts to effectively teach adolescents inside the classroom. In lieu of this, she raises…

In the past five years, at least a half dozen major reports have focused on adolescent literacy and providing adolescents with age-appropriate instruction. What is age-appropriate instruction for middle school students? As recent reports on adolescent literacy, such as those of the Carnegie Corporation and the ACT make clear, age-appropriate…

As new technologies promise to be an enduring feature of the landscape of teachers' work, we consider how teachers implicitly bring stories forward into their classroom explorations with new media as a part of their "informal learning". By "stories" is meant specific classroom texts as well as preferred teacher practices with those texts. The…

This practitioner-research study investigated the reading behaviors of preservice teachers from diverse content disciplines as they engaged in reading multiple texts pertaining to a historical topic. Through participant-observer field notes, reader response journals, reflective essays, and participant debriefing, the authors examined the…

Describes how literature is used in elementary classrooms, and is a problem in pedagogical practice. Argues for the need to place a greater emphasis on the study of literature as a subject in the reading program and to help students develop "literary literacy." Suggests a holistic approach to teaching literature that combines transactional and…

The study described in this article intended to discover how social processes can influence literary understandings and the development of critical readings of literature in the public space of a classroom. The author draws on Bakhtin's notion of "ideological becoming" to consider how dialogic exchanges focused on works of literature can support…

This article explores young readers' fascination with particular authors. It begins with a brief analysis of the contents of fifth graders' letters to their favorite authors. It then juxtaposes their range of responses with the varying perspectives that teachers typically adopt when designing an author study, advocating a model of author study…

This article presents an account of how one teacher and one student work through James Joyce's short story, "Eveline," illustrating an important reconceptualization of literacy--the teacher struggles to make public those aspects of reading which are often only assumed or left covert, namely, entering the world of the text, groping for…

This booklet offers 10 ideas to transform instruction in reading and heighten literacy for all students. The booklet states that these principles and ideas, interrelated and built one upon the other, are based on solid research findings and practical experience and that they are already being used in classrooms across the country. The 10 ideas…

The integration of digital tools and multimodal representations in the English classroom has the greatest potential when we define literacy as multiple socially constructed practices. If digital literacies are defined as autonomous tools and isolated symbolic systems, reduced to a set of skills and forms for students to reproduce, then school…

The three books reviewed in this article represent the continuous effort to make visible the significant bridge between theory and practice in the fields of literacy and children's literature. While the authors maintain distinct purposes for their creations, the texts each speak to a strong theoretical support for the practices they describe. The…