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Public library workers (PLW) in the United States can use critical information literacy pedagogy (CILP) as a framework for working with people who are incarcerated to combat oppression. PLW who teach information literacy in any capacity in carceral settings should honor their involvement in pedagogy and follow Paulo Freire’s pedagogical philosophy by rejecting humanitarian postures in favor of humanistic approaches. This can be accomplished by aiming to have both PLW and people who are incarcerated reach an awareness of and critique multiple information literacies, and for PLW to situate themselves alongside, not above, people in jails and prisons in an effort to authentically empower the incarcerated to re-enter society. This practice promotes social justice because it challenges the idea that information literacies associated with dominant groups – and thus, groups who are in power themselves – are intrinsically more valuable than information literacies engaged in by groups that are systematically disempowered. The chapter will end with prospective examples of PLW who participate in CILP in carceral settings.

This chapter theorizes academic libraries and library workers as partners in social justice work in higher education, linking the core concerns of critical librarianship (or Critlib) to library leadership practices that can enable and facilitate widening participation as a political project. ¹ Widening participation, as a policy imperative and higher education practice, attempts to improve access to higher education among underrepresented groups. However, rooted in the logic of marketized, neoliberal higher education, liberal approaches to widening participation are instrumentalist and contribute to a cultural discourse which reproduces inequity and unequal educational outcomes.

Drawing on Nancy Fraser's model of social justice and critical sociology of education, particularly the work of Penny Jane Burke and Diane Reay, this chapter develops a critical theory of library leadership which radically reframes widening participation practice as a project of recognition and inclusion. In connecting the rich scholarship of Critlib movement, particularly critical information literacy and library pedagogies, to shared commitments to social justice between library and other education workers, this chapter deepens our theoretical understanding of libraries' contributions to widening participation.

The radical center is a space of convergence among overlapping circles, a space in which various ecosystems come into contact. In this chapter, we discuss curricular approaches that take their home in this radical center, leveraging documentary mediamaking practices to connect students, disciplinary approaches, community members, and organizing efforts in relationships of transparency, accountability, and mutuality. In such contexts, students can be equipped to create responsible documentaries through engaged pedagogies that focus on critical documentary theory and understanding of individual location (Coles, 1997). This chapter presents two case studies that facilitated documentary-as-praxis in different communities in the Lehigh Valley, in Pennsylvania.

Today’s digitally connected classrooms have the potential to be places for rich and engaged disciplinary learning. This chapter takes two topics that have been identified in the What’s Hot in Literacy 2019 study, digital literacies and disciplinary literacies, and illustrates their intersections and synergies. Both areas have remained hot and very hot as individual topics. In this chapter, the authors explore the powerful opportunities to harness the learning potential of the Internet to engage learners across disciplines. By forging connections between digital literacies for disciplinary learning, the authors examine practices and develop pedagogies that youth deserve.

Purpose – This chapter provides the reader with an overview of a reflective video pedagogy for use within a literacy center or within professional development contexts. The conceptual overview is followed by two-case examples that reveal how literacy centers can serve as rich, productive research sites for the use and study of reflective video pedagogy.

Methodology/approach – The authors describe their ongoing work to develop and integrate a reflective video pedagogy within a literacy center during a 15-week practicum for literacy-specialists-in-training. The reflective video pedagogy is not only used by the clinicians who work with struggling readers twice a week, but it is also used by the researchers at the literacy center who study the reflective video pedagogy through the same video the clinicians use.

Practical implications – Literacy centers are dynamic sites where children, families, pre/in-service teachers, and teacher educators work together around literacy development. Reflective video pedagogies can be used to closely examine learning and teaching for adult students (i.e., clinicians) and for youth (i.e., children in elementary, middle, and high school) and also for parents who want their children to find success with literacy.

Research implications – In recent years “scaling up” and “scientific research” have come to dominate much of the literacy research landscape. While we see the value and necessity of large-scale experimental studies, we also posit that literacy centers have a unique role to play. Given that resources are scarce, literacy scholars must maximize the affordances of literacy centers as rich, productive research sites for the use and study of a reflective video pedagogy.

A major challenge in teacher education in the United States is how to address the academic and linguistic needs of the growing numbers of emergent bilingual students. A second challenge is how to prepare predominantly White monolingual preservice teachers with little exposure to speakers of languages other than English to educate culturally and linguistically diverse students. With these two challenges in mind, this study examines how a course on literacy, language, and culture grounded in pedagogies of discomfort shifts preservice teachers’ deficit orientations toward emergent bilingual students’ language and literacy resources. Using Ofelia García’s (2009) definition for emergent bilingualism, this mixed-method study was conducted from 2011 to 2013 with 73 preservice teacher participants enrolled at an urban mid-Atlantic university. Quantitative data consisted of pre and post surveys while qualitative data comprised written responses to open-ended statements, self-analyses, and participant interviews. Findings evidence preservice teachers’ endorsement of monolingualism before coursework; however, pedagogies of discomfort during coursework provoke critical reflection leading to significant shifts in preservice teachers’ dispositions toward teaching language diversity in the classroom with implications for teaching emergent bilingual students.