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This paper aims to analyze how a group of middle-school debaters integrated their identities and epistemologies into the traditional literacy practice of debate to advocate for more expansive and inclusive forms of academic and civic discussion. The adult and youth co-researchers of the Debate Liberation League (DLL) detail their creation of a critical debate praxis through the use of spoken word and translanguaging and illustrate how they sought to redesign a foundational activity of English Language Arts on their own terms.

Drawing upon critical race and borderlands theories, the authors use critical ethnographic and participatory action research methods to explore how the DLL deconstructed the boundaries of what counts as public dialogue and offered an alternative model of what intergenerational and multi-voiced democratic discourse could look like in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms and beyond.

The findings demonstrate how DLL students broke down normative binaries of affirmative/negative and objective/subjective in their debate performances and introduced testimonios as evidence for civic claims to make space for their voices and reimagine deliberation.

This study foregrounds dialogic data generation through a collaborative, intergenerational research approach. It highlights the constructed nature of literacy “rules,” demonstrates youth expertise in reimagining ELA, and offers a pathway toward a more compassionate public sphere.

Keeping Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine the itinerant curriculum theory (ICT) as a subaltern momentum unveiling how ICT informs subaltern ways of being and thus, potentially, the research lens for qualitative approaches. In this context, the paper examines how curriculum as an ideological devise produces an epistemicide – the killing of knowledge – an epistemological havoc cooked up daily in the process of qualitative studies promoting and legitimizing a specific modern western Eurocentric episteme.

The paper dissects modernity as a colonial zone, creating “abyssal thinking,” a eugenic system of visible and invisible distinctions that legitimizes the visible, i.e. “this side of the line” and produces “the other side of the line” as “non-existent.”

The paper urges the need to decolonize leading modern western Eurocentric counter-hegemonic traditions such as Marxism.

The paper analyzes ICT’s contribution to subaltern struggles, asserts ICT’s commitment against any form of canon, grabs the educational matrix of qualitative research as an eugenic beast from its very own ideological horns, alerting the need to examine any study of education and society within the ideological eugenic political economy and modes of production of systems pillared by poverty, exploitation, segregation, and intellectual rape.

This paper aims to describe the critical literacies of high school students engaged in a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project focused on a roleplaying game, Dungeons and Dragons, in a queer-led afterschool space. The paper illustrates how youth critique and resist unjust societal norms while simultaneously envisioning queer utopian futures. Using a queer theory framework, the authors consider how youth performed disidentifications and queer futurity.

This study is a discourse analysis of approximately 85 hours of audio collected over one year.

Youth engaged in deconstructive critique, disidentifications and queer futurity in powerful enactments of critical literacies that involved simultaneous resistance, subversion, imagination and hope as youth envisioned queer utopian world-building through their fantasy storytelling. Youth acknowledged the injustice of the present while radically envisioning a utopian future.

This study offers an empirical grounding for critical literacies centered in queer theory and explores how youth engage with critical literacies in collaboratively co-authored texts. The authors argue that queering critical literacies potentially moves beyond deconstructive critique while simultaneously opening spaces for resistance, imagination and utopian world-making through linguistic and narrative-based tools.

Current legislative, policy and cultural efforts to censor and illegalize classroom discussions and curricular representations of LGBTQ+ people reflect longstanding challenges in English education. In an effort to explore what curricular inclusion can (not) accomplish – especially what and how current struggles over inclusion, censorship, illegalization and ultimately representation in English education might (not) contribute to queer and trans liberation – the purpose of this article is to feature the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers in classroom lessons with LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum.

Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography at a Midwestern high school in which the author explored youth and adults reading, writing and talking about sexual and gender diversity, in this article the author focuses on one literacy learning context at the high school, a co-taught sophomore humanities that combined English language arts and social studies.

Engaging theories of epistemic (in) justice, the findings of this article highlight the experiences of queer and trans youth – especially two queer youth of Color, Camden and Imani – as knowers in the context of an LGBTQ+-inclusive classroom curriculum. The author describes epistemic harms with respect to distortions of credibility and homonormative assimilationist requirements and reflects on alternative possibilities that youth gestured toward through their small resistances.

By centering the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth, this article contributes to research about LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum in English teaching. Previous research, when empirical rather than conceptual, has tended to focus on the perspectives of teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Somos Escritoras, a creative space and writing workshop, for Latina adolescent girls (grades 6–8), as a program that supports not only writing and literacy development of girls, but also their college going identities.

This is a case study focused on the experiences of five Latina girls who participated in Somos Escritoras and what they define as the important aspects of the program that supported their personal and academic development.

Through girls writing, interview transcripts, and ethnographic conversations, their words illustrate how Somos Escritoras provided a safe space to examine their lives and find comunidad. Girls described the value they found in examining their lives through art and writing in ways that school did not invite them to do. Also, girls discussed the power they found in writing alongside Latinas their age and Latina mentors.

This study offers pedagogical implications for English language arts classrooms and schools to support Latina girls’ college-going identities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the literacy practices of the families and communities of first-generation college students in Latin America, and how community and family literacies can inform the understanding of first-generation college students’ identity and cultural values.

This transnational ethnography was conducted in local communities around three public universities in Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica. Participants included nine fist-generation college students and more than 50 people in their families and communities (i.e. relatives, parents and friends). Data gathering occurred at the university outside the formal space of the classroom, at home, and in the community. Data were interpreted through the lens of the community cultural wealth framework.

The author found that first-generation college students and their families and communities engaged in rich literacy practices that have been overlooked in policy, research, and media. It is argued that the concept literacy capital is necessary to acknowledge the critical literacy practices communities engage in. Literacy capital was manifested in these communities to preserve cultural traditions, to sponsor literacy practices and to question and resist unjust sociopolitical circumstances.

The findings of this study should inform a culturally sustaining pedagogy of academic literacies in higher education. Beyond asset-based approaches to academic literacies in Latin America, critical perspectives to academic literacies teaching and learning are needed that acknowledge the Latin American complexities.

These findings are significant because they unveiled how people in local communities were informed about the sociopolitical dynamics at the national and international scale that affected or even threatened their local culture, and how they used their literacy capital to react critically to those situations.

Replicating colonization at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) must be addressed from the root, structurally. At New Mexico State University (NMSU) the authors are aimed to commit to going beyond counting and enrolling, to center servingness.

HSIs will continue to struggle in fulfilling their mission, especially given the fast-growing Latina/e/o/x populations in the United States (US). A major challenge all HSIs face is the contrasting demographics between the student population, the faculty and staff and the administration – with HSI administrations consistently being predominantly White.

Hence, in this piece the authors shed light on the important work the authors have done these last two years through collaborative efforts to transform the institution and center servingness. Judith as the Interim Director of Chicano Programs, and Linda as the inaugural Vice President for equity, inclusion and diversity.

Herein, the authors now share about the genre of testimonio as a decolonial methodology and about the experiences in our work as we attempt to decolonize the praxis at an HSI.

This article is modeled after Robert Michels' classic study of European social democracy. It attempts to ascertain the possibility of evolving and implementing, independent of government sponsorship, an integrative social economics. The study focuses on the largest American denomination, American Catholicism, which possesses a hierarchical structure and sophisticated techniques of communication and mobilization. It examines a representative sample of Catholic publications dividing them into three ideological categories – Augustinian, Thomist, and Liberationist – and it scrutinizes these in terms of orientation on a variety of social economic issues. The paper concludes pessimistically about the improbability of evolving and implementing an integrative social economics.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how participating in a multicultural education course impacted bilingual preservice teachers' (BPSTs) conceptions of identity and how they were able to use their experiential knowledge to create a virtual library based on a variety of topics related to multicultural education.

This qualitative case study examines the experiences of three BPST candidates within a multicultural education course during the fall 2020 semester. The authors focused on three preservice teachers’ written reflections, interviews and work samples based on a virtual library project.

The authors describe the critical role BPST preparation programs have in developing coursework that provides opportunities for building a positive self-identity that values life experiences. Such opportunities foster BPSTs’ ability to create lessons that are reflective of identity and diversity inclusive of culture, language, immigration and LGBTQ+.

For some time now, researchers have examined how teacher education programs should include opportunities to interrogate preservice teachers' own experiences in K-12. However, few researchers have directly documented how to connect these experiences to preservice teacher coursework and create classroom resources based on these critical reflections.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how three young women of color responded with “outlaw emotions” to the novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz in a literature discussion group. This paper considers how readers respond with outlaw emotions and how responses showed emotions as sites of control and resistance. The aim of this paper is to help English language arts (ELA) teachers construct culturally sustaining literature classrooms through an encouragement of outlaw emotions.

To examine how youth responded with emotion to Aristotle and Dante, the author used humanizing and ethnographic research methodologies and conducted a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, journal entries from youth and researcher memos.

Analyses indicated that youth responded with outlaw emotions to Aristotle and Dante, and these responses showed how youth have both resisted and been controlled by structures of power. Youth responses of supposed “positive” or “negative” emotion were sites of control and resistance, particularly within their educational experiences. Youth engaged as a peer group to encourage and validate outlaw emotions and indirectly critiqued emotion as control.

Although many scholars have demonstrated the positive effects of out-of-school book clubs, there is scant research regarding how youth respond to culturally diverse literature with emotion, both outlaw and otherwise. Analyzing our own and characters’ outlaw emotions may help ELA educators and students deconstruct dominant ideologies about power, language and identity. This study, which demonstrates how youth responded with outlaw emotions and gave evidence of emotions as control and resistance, shows how ELA classrooms might encourage outlaw emotions as literary response. These findings suggest that ELA classrooms attempting culturally sustaining pedagogies might center youth emotion in responding to literature to critique power structures across the self, schools and society.