Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy最新文献

This manuscript examines multimodal storytelling as community inquiry for an urban high school class of 30 first- and second-generation bi/multilingual immigrant students, most of whom maintained transnational connections. We share how these students, in an A.P. Research class, engaged in community-based inquiry and utilized various multimodal artifacts from a university cultural heritage collection, including a field trip to the cultural heritage archives, to analyze signs and symbols. We asked: How did students engage with semiotic resources and approaches to support inquiry about their school and neighborhood communities? Findings showed that students drew upon their linguistic and cultural experiences to analyze signs and symbols, yet in their digital storytelling presentations some student groups chose signs and symbols that reified stereotypical views of their neighborhood despite their insider status in the local community. We offer recommendations for using cultural heritage artifacts to advance multimodal meaning-making in teaching and research.

In the summer of 2020, amidst state-mandated social distancing and protests for racial justice, youth participating in an ongoing YPAR initiative sought to design and facilitate a book club for the residents of their subsidized housing community to increase community awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement. Through interviews, youth shared their plans to design and facilitate a book club differently than they had experienced in English classroom settings. Through the lenses of critical literacy and civic praxis, the youths' imaginings reveal a desire to talk about books that were relevant to their lives, involve discussions that were participant-led and democratic, and lead to meaningful, tangible outcomes. Implications encourage teachers to re-examine their classroom book club practices and consider ways to center student desires.

This study explored eight middle school teachers' language about literacy implementation in their disciplinary classrooms. Interview data and supplemental artifact data were gathered from two previous studies focused on disciplinary literacy in middle school settings. This critical discourse analysis examined how teachers' language elucidated their perspectives toward literacy and for whom literacy instruction is intended. Findings suggest that teachers considered literacy instruction as remediation, as access to content, and as an opportunity for student agency. Teachers' language around literacy as remediation and as access demonstrated potential dysconscious racism and ableism. This may reify systems of power which position White, able-bodied/minded students' literacies as a more desirable foundation for disciplinary learning.

This research study explores the role of social annotation in supporting dialogic teaching in secondary English language arts. Grounded in Bakhtin's dialogism and building upon research into online discussion, this study describes how a high school English teacher and her students used a digital annotation tool to read and talk about texts. Analyzing student annotations based on discourse features associated with comprehension and high-level thinking, the study examines the extent to which social annotation supports quality dialogue. Findings highlight the need for open-ended prompts and teacher scaffolding of online discussions, and authors suggest that dialogue enhances comprehension of texts when students go beyond reporting on others' thoughts and instead share their own ideas, connections, and questions about the text.

In secondary English classrooms, poetry is often a text that is least liked because it is viewed as being “inaccessible,” reserved for the elite, and/or too abstract. Part of the reason for this also lies in the traditional, colonial structures of introducing poetry such as relying on canonical texts and close reading analysis. Yet, outside of the classroom poetry is used in more accessible and engaging manners. With the advancements of technology, there also includes multimodal ways in which to read and write poetry that could be much more interesting for both educators and youth. This paper opens a discussion to consider multimodal and aesthetic responses to including poetry such as using digital apps like PhoneMe, a free accessible platform that allows users to post their written poems, record themselves reciting poems, and pin their poems directly on to an interactive digital map. The uniqueness of PhoneMe—a layered multimodal approach—can provide a more engaging way to teach and learn poetry.

Teachers have a critical opportunity to decide how to position transnational funds of knowledge of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Positioning theory investigates how views of self and others are applied in social interactions. This scoping literature review identified nine studies that used positioning theory to trace the participation of adolescent CLD students in classroom discussions. The review was limited to peer-reviewed studies set in school and afterschool classes in the United States. The findings provide a variety of real-world examples of students and teachers negotiating their identities and navigating participatory opportunities. In response to how the findings revealed the far-reaching influence of the teacher, this article introduces a model illustrating the intersection of two key components of teaching style: teacher beliefs and positioning of transnational funds of knowledge. Four teacher profiles represent four stances: The Culturally Responsive Teacher, The Wide Net, The Silencer, and The Idealist.

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.