Search results

Literacy research exploring multimodal composition and justice-oriented children’s literature each have rich landscapes and histories. This paper aims to add to both of these bodies of scholarship through the emerging assemblage of Studio F, a fifth-grade classroom. The authors share poststructural analytic encounters with attention to the unexpected multimodal relationships and the justice-oriented talk and texts that emerged, as well as the classroom conditions that produce them.

The authors think with assemblage theory to examine the newness that emerged as one small group of students wrestled with the emerging instances of racism present in Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles.

Together, the living arrangement of bodies, materials and discourses created openings for students’ explorations of race and racism.

This paper offers teachers and researchers space to rethink what is possible in the literacy classroom when the authors re-envision classrooms as vibrant assemblages, support emergent multimodal composing processes and follow students’ critical encounters toward justice-oriented literacies.

Our world had always been multimodal, but studying how young children enact and embody literacy practices, especially reading, has often been overlooked. The purpose of this study was to examine how young children respond to nonfiction picturebooks in multimodal ways. This paper aims to answer the question: What multimodal resources do readers use to respond to and construct meaning from nonfiction picturebooks?

Undergirded by Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and social semiotic multimodality, a 9-min video clip of three boys making sense of one nonfiction picturebook during reading workshop was analyzed using Norris’ approach to multimodal data analysis. This research stemmed from a five-month-long case study of one kindergarten class’s multimodal and collective responses to nonfiction picturebooks.

Findings demonstrate how readers use gesture, gaze and proxemics in addition to language to signal agreement with one another, explain new ideas or concepts to one another and incorporate their background knowledge. In addition to reading images, the children learned to read each other.

This research indicates that reading is inherently multimodal, recursive and complex and provides implications for teachers to reconsider what kinds of responses they prioritize in their classrooms. Additionally, this research establishes the need to better understand how readers respond to nonfiction books and a broader examination of multimodality in the literacy curriculum.

In this paper, the author adapts the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy and the pedagogy of hope for Middle Eastern Muslim students' education. This paper aims to develop a new perspective for educating Middle Eastern Muslim students by focusing on Islam by considering being Muslim as a cultural way of being and living.

Pedagogy of hope (Hooks, 2003), particularly the concept of healing in education and culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), guided this study during the research process.

Three themes of culturally relevant pedagogy through a picturebook by Mobin-Uddin (2007) entitled The Best Eid Ever was examined to illustrate how this picturebook can be used as an example of culturally relevant pedagogy.

The limitation is the researcher’s interpretation as a Middle Eastern Muslim who lived in a Western country. The Best Eid Ever (2007) can be used in the classroom for Middle Eastern Muslim students' education to discursively build a positive identity and educate students from different backgrounds. More studies may investigate other texts (e.g. novels) with Middle Eastern Muslim characters. Further research can also explore the use of this book in the classroom.

This study provides qualitative description of a picturebook from culturally relevant pedagogy and pedagogy of hope to guide teachers to bolster Middle Eastern Muslim students’ schooling experiences.

Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students’ schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander and Ehret, 2019). This article, taking up the notion of affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the in-betweenness among people, objects and material and discursive contexts, examines how two US Latinx teachers and their young bilingual students co-constructed affect and play in translanguaging read-alouds with a bilingual text that centered their culturally rooted ways of knowing and being.

Drawing on data from a larger practitioner research study that aimed at developing teacher candidates’ culturally and linguistically sustaining literacy instruction, the authors took a discourse analytic approach to examine how the two teachers created curricular opportunities for affect and play in designing the translanguaging read-alouds and how bilingual children and their teachers playfully engaged with the bilingual text during the read-alouds.

The analysis indicated that the teachers’ intentional selection of the Spanish–English bilingual picturebook Niño Wrestles the World created opportunities for the children to leverage their full linguistic repertoire and funds of knowledge to engage with the text. During the read-alouds, the children and the teachers co-constructed affect and playfulness through embodied performance and translanguaging.

This study contributes to the research and practice of literacy instruction of bilingual children by illustrating how affect figures into the process of literacy instruction and how translanguaging read-alouds can afford bilingual children opportunities to playfully engage with the text that centers their cultural epistemologies.

The purpose of this paper is to present a method to incorporate teaching about religion into K–12 social studies classes. A central tenet of social studies education is preparing students to be engaged citizens, and religious literacy is essential to this. Yet, teachers often feel uncomfortable teaching about religion. One way to approach this is by centering discussion about religion around understanding who our neighbors are.

This paper employs the Inquiry Design Model to outline lessons for early, middle and upper grades, each centered around the compelling question, “Who are my Muslim neighbors?” Beginning with a picturebook depicting a Muslim American child, the lessons explore supporting questions with academically appropriate sources, culminate with an evidence-based response to the compelling question and suggest an opportunity for students to take informed action.

While religion does not appear in many social studies standards, teaching about religion has strong connections to civics standards. In an increasingly diverse USA, students need to understand the beliefs and religious behaviors of their neighbors and how those traditions provide a sense of belonging within the faith community. This paper provides the necessary tools for teachers to teach this content. In addition to teaching these as outlined here, teachers can also select resources from across the three units in order to customize an inquiry for a particular group of students.

Teachers are often hesitant to teach about religion. This paper offers a concrete method for doing so. Incorporating religion into social studies classes is necessary for preparing students for civic engagement.

Set in a Mexican-American community of a US Gulf Coast state, the purpose of this paper was to describe how three young siblings and their family members constructed their spiritual, ethnic and communicative identities within the context of a virtual family literacy program during COVID-19.

This project was approached as an illustrative case study that focused on one family’s engagement with a children’s book in which the protagonists retell the legend of the Catholic patroness of the Americas, Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The case study illustrates how the children's spiritual/religious identities were inseparably intertwined with their home literacy practices and their identities as communicators with others. The children’s everyday spiritual/religious practices, routines and activities motivated familial conversations and dialogue that engage and support children’s literacy development.

Although there is a large corpus of scholarship about secular early literacy program for families with preschool children, there are few that describe the recognition and inclusion of families’ spiritual/religious identities.

This paper aims to present three girls’ visual annotations and digital responses that restory a scene in the picturebook I’m New Here. The authors focus on how children use multimodal tools to reflect their critical knowledge of the world by illuminating how this group of girls responded to and incorporated broader social issues.

This study takes place in a third-grade classroom. Using qualitative methods that build on critical multimodal literacy, the authors documented and analyzed children’s visual and digital interpretations. Data were generated from classroom sessions that incorporated interactive readalouds, as well as students’ annotated visual images, sketches, video and digital responses. The collaborative analytic process involved multiple passes to interpret visual, textual and multimodal elements.

The analyses revealed how Aliyah, Tiana and Carissa used multimodal tools to engage in the process of restorying. Through their multimodal composition, they designed images that illuminated their solidarity with the young female character wearing the hijab; their desire to disrupt xenophobic bullying; and their hope for a respectful and inclusive climate in their own classroom.

In this paper, the authors examine how three girls in a third-grade classroom restory using critical multimodal literacy methods. These girls’ multimodal responses reflected how they disrupted dominant storylines of exclusionary practices. Their authentic acts of visual advocacy give us hope for the future.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model as an instructional framework for enacting culturally relevant literacy pedagogy in K-8 classrooms.

Approach – First, the authors frame a discussion on culturally relevant pedagogy via three central tenets and its significance for promoting equity and access in literacy education. Next, culturally relevant pedagogy is linked with the GRR model. Finally, authentic literacy practices that help bridge culturally relevant learning throughout the segments of the GRR model are delineated.

Findings – The authors believe that GRR models infused with culturally relevant pedagogical practices make literacy learning more equitable and accessible to students of Color. Toward that end, the authors provide multiple research-based instructional strategies that illustrate how the GRR model can incorporate culturally relevant pedagogical practices. These practical examples serve as models for the ways in which teachers can connect with students’ cultural backgrounds and understandings while expanding their literacy learning.

Practical implications – By demonstrating how K-8 teachers scaffold and promote literacy learning in ways that leverage diverse students’ cultural experiences, the authors aim to help teachers sustain students’ cultural identities and nurture their socio-critical consciousness.

This paper aims to connect disability studies to multicultural education. This paper advances equity discussions and positions educators as interrupters of deficit dialogues that exclude students with social/emotional/behavioural (SEB) differences, disrupting the ableism that is present in schools.

The authors studied current children’s and young adult literature with representation of SEB differences to develop a three-dimensional model for educators. The authors synthesized interdisciplinary fields to provide educators guidance for planning, teaching and assessing student learning using such books.

The 3-D Model: Disrupting Deficit Dialogues with Literature (3-D model) is a framework that educators can use to evaluate SEB differences representation in books, deliver instruction that supports students’ critical thinking and assess student gains in literacy and social–emotional learning. This tool helps educators develop inclusive, interdisciplinary instruction, embedding social–emotional learning competencies in literacy lessons that disrupt deficit dialogues about SEB differences.

While other frameworks exist for evaluating books portraying characters with differences, they are not solely focussed on the assets of children with social/emotional/ behavioural differences. The 3-D model supports interdisciplinary instruction to meet mandated standards, incorporating concepts from disability studies in education into multicultural education. There is little research or guidance for educators in this field. However, challenging assumptions about disability and societal norms foregrounds possibilities for change as a foundation of multiculturalism.