Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy最新文献

Sixty percent of Indigenous people in Canada live rurally and on reserve but are largely absent among young adult and middle-grade fiction. This critical content analysis examines representations of the land and rural places and Indigenous identities in Canadian award-winning fiction written by Indigenous authors for young adult and middle-grade readers. By positioning land, place, and rural Indigenous youth identities and experiences at the center of the analysis, the study contradicts dominant colonizing perspectives of “rural” and “Indigenous” that undervalue and/or disregard the lives, knowledge, and perspectives of rural Indigenous community members. Critical content analysis makes visible the books' complex representations of rural land and identities where Indigenous characters are agentic, resilient, and adaptable in the face of settler colonialism.

This study explores the implications of critical affective literacy through digital storytelling projects produced by first-year college writing students. The goal was to examine college students' affective and emotional responses to social justice issues, such as racial profiling, educational inequality, and animal protection, through the lens of digital storytelling. Pairing multimodal pedagogy with critical affective literacy, this study was carried out in two first-year writing courses in the United States. The researcher who conducted this study also taught the class sessions. Employing the methodology of a qualitative case study, the author gathered information through conducting semi-structured interviews with 11 students, observing the students' multimodal composition processes, and reviewing the students' digital storytelling videos. The analysis of the data showed that the participants performed critical emotional action when creating digital stories to draw the public's attention to social justice issues. This paper recommends that educators incorporate digital storytelling into social justice pedagogy and cultivate learners' critical affective literacy.

The book Culturally Responsive Reading: Teaching Literature for Social Justice by Durthy A. Washington provides educators with an incisive approach to analyzing multicultural texts through the “four keys to culture”: Language, Identity, Space, and Time, or the LIST Paradigm. This framework offers students and teachers a guided approach to critically analyze literature and “bridge the gap between the conventional study of literature and the new multi-cultural literature that is being taught”. It also asks students to examine their own cultural backgrounds and perspectives of the world around them and how that influences their interpretation of the text. The LIST Paradigm strives to ensure that teachers and students stay true to the author's intent and cultural perspective when critically approaching their literary works.

This article provides a book review of Creativity in the English Curriculum: Historical Perspectives and Future Directions by Lorna Smith. Smith's work provides a robust chronology of how the concept of creativity has evolved across education policy documents since the inception of subject English in the late 19th century to its current state in England's National Curriculum. It also presents aspirational conceptions of child-centered and humanistic learning that both stem from the origins of subject English and can inform new generations of imaginative English education and research, for which educators and professionals within and adjacent to English education in England and in other national contexts can benefit.

This collaborative, single-case study explores the ways a social studies teacher candidate conceptualizes and applies disciplinary literacy (DL) teaching in practicum and student teaching experiences. Through qualitative inquiry of data collected at multiple points in the teacher education program, DL teaching was represented across six themes: skills-based theory of literacy; deep engagement with content; flow verses disruption; responsiveness; placement impact; pandemic influence. Findings affirm research that teacher candidates can be successful at implementing culturally responsive DL instruction, even in post-pandemic teaching contexts, with structured supervision. Implications for small programs of teacher education, secondary content area teacher preparation, and student teaching supervision are discussed.

Engaging college students in purposeful academic tasks designed to foster both reading and writing competencies requires calculated decision-making regarding the goals and benefits of the literacy tasks used in college courses. Consequently, we explore text reformulation as a literacy strategy that aims to enrich students' reading and writing competencies. Text reformulation, taking one text and recreating it in a new form, can be used to provide opportunities for students to develop reading and writing competencies like analyzing story details and sequencing, using mentor texts, and considering audience awareness. Drawing on recorded small group and whole class conversations, student work samples, and student reflections, this study considers how preservice teachers created meaning of an existing short story and applied it to new modalities. Implications for implementing text reformulation in middle, secondary, and college programs are highlighted, including orienting students to the task, teaching text structures, and guiding students through issues of purpose, audience, and tone.

In this paper, we highlight how restorying with preservice secondary English language arts teachers can encourage them to explore what is possible with mandated texts, like those found in the canon, for diverse world building centered in empathy, self-exploration, and justice. Findings highlight the critical reflective process preservice teachers engaged in as they restoryed canonical texts. These findings highlight and how preservice teachers can use restorying as a way to engage the self and others for more inclusive storytelling. Finally, the authors argue that in oppressive spaces that seek to silence marginalized voices, restorying can act as a subversive tool to engage in work that bends toward justice.

This qualitative case study is a part of a larger university–community partnership that explores adolescents' utilization of critical literacy to write, engage, and lead in their communities. For this specific study, we explore the question: How does an educational community use literacy practices and modalities to grieve through collective loss and develop solidarity with one another? Through the utilization of a critical literacy framework and a sense-based pedagogy lens, we explore how various forms of literacy and multimodalities allowed this community to grieve and foster solidarity in a time of loss. We conducted several rounds of inductive and emotion codings to identify key themes from our data sources which included student work/publications, social media posts, organization communication, videos, focus groups, and staff interviews. Our preliminary findings show that (a) reciprocal vulnerability developed over time can produce solidarity; (b) writing can be a restorative act in collective loss; and (c) writing through grief positions students as leaders of their communities. Through this study, we provide educators and community members with potential tools for developing spaces for restorative education and supporting collective resilience through literacy practices.

Students need support to learn Next Generation Science practices that include use of such texts as investigative records and datasets, analyses and arguments, and works of other scientists. This article describes secondary school science teachers' curation and support of students' multimodal text use during their development of a library of equitable, text-rich, phenomena-based science units of study. Following a description of project background and inquiry methods, findings delineate how teachers collaborated to select texts, delineate roles for the texts, and use scaffolds to support students' equitable access to these texts in investigations and engineering designing. Findings also explain how the pandemic and teachers' ongoing concerns for their students' equitable learning of science and literacy practices caused teachers to amend their plans. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for science educators and others who are interested in science-specific disciplinary literacies.