Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy最新文献

Acculturation is the process of psychological and behavioral change that individuals go through during and after intercultural contacts. Social media have become a major space for cross-cultural encounters, and are important venues of socialization for marginalized populations. Intercultural encounters on social media may benefit or detriment the acculturation process, and how marginalized populations make sense of their social media experience is pivotal in this respect. Nonetheless, there is a scarcity of research that examines non-dominant ethnic groups' meaning-making of and digital literacy practices on social media and how these practices relate to acculturation. To fill this research gap, this study collected data through semi-structured interviews with 44 non-dominant ethnic adolescents in Hong Kong. Through the theoretical lens of critical literacy, this study revealed various facets of literacy practices in which these underrepresented adolescents engaged and found that these practices, and the lack thereof, moderated their acculturation process on and beyond social media platforms. The findings suggest that critical digital literacy on social media interaction is critical to non-dominant ethnic groups' acculturation process.

This design-based study explored the digital and linguistic practices of South Korean adolescents from a rural area within the Write4Change global online community, emphasizing their use of image-driven tools. Framed within the cosmopolitan literacies perspective, these adolescents adeptly merge local and global dimensions, integrating their multilingual identities, and compelling visual narratives into their work. They navigate English, the dominant language of the online community, while incorporating multilingual elements to enrich community dialogues. These practices reflect their linguistic adaptability and digital literacies and underscore the significant role of cosmopolitan literacies in transforming literacy studies. The study highlights the impactful digital practices of South Korean adolescents, contributing to a broader understanding of inclusivity and diversity in global literacies.

In this article, we describe a year-long superhero storytelling project we facilitated with youth in a midwestern middle school. In this project, students read Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spiderman , designed superhero stories set in their community, and presented artistic representations of their stories to their families and peers. We present three episodes of mobile storytelling from this project, focusing on Aidan, one of eighteen youth participants. Using tools from theories of transliteracies and critical imagination, we illustrate how Aidan's embodied movement and play constituted critically literate acts. A transliteracies lens oriented toward critical imagination reveals how Aidan fluidly moved between fictional and real worlds to reimagine his experienced realities. These findings indicate a need to expand what counts as literate activity in schools.

We share digital collages composed by youth in Lit Diaspora, a community-based after-school literacy initiative involving Black African immigrant youth and adult collaborators, as one contemporary example of rendering visible the contours of the educational lives of African immigrant youth, among the fastest growing immigrant communities in the U.S. We do so amid anti-Black, anti-immigrant discourse and policy in schools, workplaces, and society in the U.S. and globally. Thus, in framing our inquiry, we examine how educators and researchers, attending to the varied diaspora digital literacies and educational experiences of African immigrant youth: talk back to deficit narratives of their lived schooling experiences; navigate literacy learning across contexts of families and elders; demonstrate social and civic literacies that extend youth's identities; and affirm cultural and embodied knowledge, language, and practices.

This study explores the integration of multiple sign systems within the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading curriculum for undergraduates in Taiwan, addressing varied learning styles that are often overlooked by conventional curricular methods. The purpose is to investigate how incorporating semiotics can enhance learning engagement and effectiveness by utilizing diverse sign systems such as art, music, and movement. Data were collected through student-created artifacts, self-reflection logs, and evaluations of learning processes from 57 freshmen participating in literature circles and sign-system activities in a university course. Analysis was conducted using Glaser and Strauss's Constant Comparative Method, identifying themes such as interactive teaching methods and diverse engagement strategies. The findings demonstrate that utilizing multiple sign systems enriches students' engagement and comprehension, suggesting the need for broader application of semiotics in education to cater to diverse learning preferences and enhance overall educational effectiveness.

Educators and researchers are interested in ways that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools might move beyond the role of “cheatbot” and become part of the network of resources students use for writing. We studied how high school students used ChatGPT as a writing support while writing arguments about topics like school mascots. We asked: What did students prompt ChatGPT to do? And how did students take up ChatGPT's responses to those prompts? We used Flower and Hayes' writing model to analyze screencasts of students interacting with ChatGPT and one another as they planned, drafted, and reviewed their arguments. Our data show that while planning and drafting, students primarily asked ChatGPT for ideas and then built upon those ideas to develop their own arguments. While reviewing, they generally used ChatGPT as they might use Grammarly or other editing tools. Students also compared their writing with that of ChatGPT, which allowed them to identify their unique writing voices and build meta-level understandings of rhetorical choices and effects. Our study indicates that ChatGPT can become a part of a social, distributed model of writing, and that students can use ChatGPT as a resource for writing without sidestepping the processes of planning, drafting, and reviewing.

Heightened attention to the importance of equitable educational practices in today's schools reveals a growing number of emergent bilingual students who have not received consistent formal education and may be struggling with overall literacy. Labeled as Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE), these learners require novel educational approaches to address their specific academic and social needs. The purpose of this discussion article is to suggest the utility of peer tutoring as a vehicle for increasing literacy and overall sense of belonging for adolescent bilingual SIFE.

School-based supports, such as LGBTQ+-themed curriculum, invite opportunities for challenging oppression with respect to gender and its intersections with other identities such as sexuality and race. However, more understanding is needed regarding how literacy educators might leverage these opportunities. This article describes how intimacy, oppressive actions, and activism functioned in relation to one another in an LGBTQ+-themed literature course at a grassroots public charter high school for the arts in a mid-sized Midwestern city. The larger study, from which this article is derived, is a hybrid of ethnography and practitioner inquiry. Therefore, this study draws on field notes, transcribed video recordings of class, transcribed audio recordings of interviews, and student assignments related to a young adult novel. Our analysis of gendered power relations suggests that oppression can hinder intimacy, intimacy can hinder activism, but intimacy can also foster activism. With the goal of leveraging opportunities to challenge gendered oppression, we argue that students and teachers must navigate intimacy and intersecting structures of oppression to enact activism.

Land-based literacies scholars have worked to expand understandings of literacies to include often marginalized cultures who understand literacy as resulting from human and more-than-human relations. In this article, we contribute to this broadening of literacies with an analysis of how nature influences the meaning-making practices of rural, subaltern communities in the Global South. Our inspiration stems from indigenous scholars who have advanced indigenous and relational epistemologies, seeking to bridge the nature/culture divide that remains prevalent in Western thinking. The central question that guides this article is: How are Land-based literacies produced through the felt and sensed relationships with nature, history and culture in the Callemar community? Drawing on micro-analysis of participant-generated video data from two walks with Colombian youth and adults from the Callemar community, we illustrate ways naturecultures, specifically the assemblages of Land, collective memory and cultural practices, produce Land-based literacies. We describe Land- walking, including forest- and creek-crossing practices, as literacies that require reading and meaning-making with the Land, and that which allow individuals to relate to other beings and thrive in the changing landscape of their rural community. Our description and discussion of Land-based literacies in this rural community poses important implications for informing pluriversal literacies pedagogies that draw on local knowledges and contexts to make literacy learning more relevant and equitable. Furthermore, we describe the relevance of Land-based literacies for sustainable stewardship of the Land during times of drastic environmental change.

This article highlights how mentors in spoken word poetry workshops drew on culturally sustaining pedagogy, modeled their own creativity and vulnerability through their poetry, and amplified the voices of youth poets by encouraging them to explore their identities and grapple with inequities in their own lives. Situated in western Sydney, one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse communities within Australia, the article focuses on the Real Talk program, a 6-week school-based spoken word poetry workshop organized by the Bankstown Poetry Slam, the largest slam in the southern hemisphere. It examines the critical role that mentor poets play in supporting young people's storytelling through spoken word poetry.