Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy最新文献

Viewing teacher vulnerability as a pedagogical tool, this comparative case study examined two secondary literacy teachers' use of vulnerability in relation to various instructional goals. Through the analysis of eight video-recorded lessons, we found that teachers demonstrated vulnerability through multiple ways within their literacy instruction through modeling ways of connecting personal experiences to texts, and establishing classroom norms that welcome difficult emotions and experiences. However, we also found that teacher vulnerability can sometimes lead to uncertainty, and even constrain student participation. We argue that teacher vulnerability helps establish a humanizing pedagogy, and offer possible strategies for teachers who are vulnerable within literacy instruction. We conclude with a discussion of different levels of appropriating vulnerability as a pedagogical tool.

In this Narrative Inquiry, we share the stories of three Chinese rural students who grew up in a southeastern county in China before moving to the county seat for high school. By inviting our participants to read their own life, we aimed to understand how Chinese rural students make sense of their experience in an exam-centered school system that seemed to offer them opportunities of upward social mobility but at the same time perpetuated the mindset of rural deficiency. Data analysis shows that the visceral feelings of shame and love played an important role in our participants' critical consciousness about school, allowing them to work within and against school norms to transform a strictly stratified school space. We argue that marginalized youth's storytelling can become a practice of critical literacy, enabling them to construct critical meaning makings in embodied ways.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown measures in many countries have increased young people's engagement with digital media. The digital divide goes beyond just having devices and includes differences in how well young people can use digital technology. In this paper, we shift our attention beyond screen time to the nature of the adolescents' digital media use. Our study looks at two adolescents from different backgrounds to understand how their digital media experiences differ in viewing, play, and reading. We add to the literature on the influence SES has on the ways in which adolescents are using digital media during the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. Our study was conducted during the pandemic and participants were selected using convenience stratified sampling and the snowballing method. Our findings show that the adolescents' digital viewing was motivated by the need to be a part of an affinity group and that while the viewing was passive, it served a social function to develop a sense of connectedness with peers. We also found that adolescents from high socioeconomic backgrounds tended to engage in more digital reading compared to their peers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, while the adolescents' digital play was shaped by their socioeconomic realities, they were able to make the most from their circumstances and demonstrated both creativity and savviness. By demonstrating the disparities in digital media experiences between two adolescents from contrastive socioeconomic backgrounds, we shed light on the implications of the digital divide, where both equitable access to digital resources and the development of digital literacies necessary to navigate the digital landscape is currently lacking. We argue for the importance for researchers and policymakers to move beyond acknowledging long-standing concerns and take actionable steps to address these issues.

In this article, we revisit the co-creation of a 45-min film, Gender is Like an Ocean, produced with middle school students in response to Kirstin Cronn-Mills's young adult novel Beautiful Music for Ugly Children. The making of this film brought together collaborative inquiry and arts creation. Drawing on the work of critical literacy educators as well as scholars in queer and trans studies, we trace students' participation in the process of co-creating this film through three critical moments, which map their inquiries into gender identity and representation and our own attempts to learn alongside them.

This case study investigates the reading processes of two bilingual teachers who speak English as a second language and use different first languages—Mandarin Chinese and Korean. The two participants read researcher-selected digital texts in English and in their respective first language, retold the texts, and answered comprehension questions about the texts. Their reading aloud and eye movements were recorded for miscue and eye movement analysis. Using Eye Movement Miscue Analysis, the findings showcase the distinctive characteristics of their first-language and second-language reading processes. The cross-linguistic comparison between bilingual reading processes further shows the bilingual participants' similarities and differences in terms of the use of language systems, eye movements, language variations, and image use. This study supports the understanding of non-Roman alphabetical language speakers' reading process, adds to our understanding of the bilingual reading process, and provides teaching and research implications for bilingual teachers and educators.

Motivational research identifies utility value, or the importance of a learning task to future goals, as central to motivation to learn. This study analyzed survey data (N = 86) collected from adult literacy learners to examine their utility value of writing improvement in grammar and spelling skills, word processing skills, and planning, drafting, and revising skills. Findings revealed that participants had a high utility value of improving writing in all three skill areas and possessed a variety of underlying motivations, including obtaining further education, seeking future employment, and personal reasons. Participants' age, educational attainment, and reading levels showed relationships with utility value of improving grammar and spelling skills, and age showed an additional relationship to utility value of improving word processing skills. This work extends research on motivation in this population and supports the application of expectancy-value theory to both adult motivation and writing motivation.

We present an audience reception study of participant reactions to gender-based violence in Issa López' 2008 film, Casi Divas, chosen for its nuanced depiction of women grappling with several violences. Over three focus groups with 15 adult participants, we used Galtung's conflict theory to explore what participants identified as violence, and how victims should respond to violence in various forms. We find that participants have a narrow definition of violence, seeing it as an individualized act and therefore neglecting to consider its cultural or structural foundations. The participants' responses to violence largely reflected neoliberal values of personal empowerment and choice, resilience, and “leaning in.” We recommend critical visual literacy as a tool in the educational context to identify and address violence, to fight inequity, and to establish emancipatory discourses.

The purpose of this study is to understand how Latinx preservice teachers (LPSTs) engage their multimodal and multilingual literacies to create comic strips about the knowledge and pedagogies found within their homes located within with U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Drawing on pedagogies of the home and Chicanx/Latinx multimodality, the findings illustrate how the LPSTs used comic creation to document teaching and learning practices of biculturalism, cultural preservation, spirituality, remedios, and the importance of education. This study has implications for developing teacher education pedagogies that are reflective of the linguistic and cultural diversity of LPSTs.