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Purpose – This chapter provides the reader with an overview of the process involved in creating a Literacy Center to help students to rise above challenges and flourish academically. It focuses on instructional planning that brings the curriculum to life for P-12 students and emphasizes their strengths and interests.

Methodology/Approach – The authors describe the process of creating a Literacy Center that focuses on students’ strengths and enhances student achievement. They communicate the factors involved in (1) initiating the planning process, (2) designing a policy manual, (3) creating instructional frameworks, and (4) enhancing literacy development through support from home.

Practical implications – This chapter includes a detailed overview of the creation of a Literacy Center, a process that could be replicated by the educators who read the chapter. This description provides educators with insights that could facilitate the planning process and provide ideas for lesson planning and curriculum development in a Literacy Center.

Social implications – The chapter suggests how faculty could work together to create a Literacy Center to enhance student achievement in the community. This could potentially help P-12 students in many locations to acquire the skills and strategies they need in order to turn challenges into strengths. This will help Literacy Centers to provide effective, research-based literacy instruction and promote outstanding literacy leadership in our schools.

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.

The University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville (UTMC) Preston Medical Library (PML) and Health Information Center (HIC) has provided a novel contribution to increasing consumer health literacy and reducing health disparities in a unique variety of ways. UTMC librarians have used qualitative, quantitative, and practice-based methodology and research to demonstrate what a regional medical library working with internal and community partners can accomplish. At UTMC, there has been a focus on the value of health literacy for the patient, the clinician, and the health care system itself. In 1993, the UTMC PML began a consumer and patient health information service, which was the foundation for increasing consumer health literacy. In 2014, UTMC took a leading role in advancing consumer health literacy through the opening of the HIC, a patient- and family-focused library inside of UTMC. This chapter will focus on the PML’s history as a reliable resource in providing patients, family members, and the community with accurate and trustworthy health information, as well as the librarians’ role related to health literacy and health disparities through various initiatives and projects. Additionally, this chapter will highlight specific suggestions for libraries interested in starting similar initiatives, such as obtaining support from leadership, opportunities for funding, and how to address roadblocks.

Purpose – This historical perspective highlights the evolution of reading clinics (also called literacy labs, centers, etc.) from medical-type clinics to instructional powerhouses for struggling readers. Of particular interest, also, is the development of teacher expertise while participating in reading clinics, particularly in the areas of reflection, a critical view of assessments, and using assessment to inform instruction. Furthermore, this chapter traces the history of research that has come out of reading clinics.

Design/Methodology/Approach – A brief history of reading clinics since the 1920s is followed by a deep examination of some of the themes that have shaped more recent reading clinics and research that has emerged from the clinics: assessment, mandates, teacher reflection, and twenty-first Century Literacies.

Practical implications – This chapter offers key information for stakeholders who are designing, establishing, or refining a reading clinic, either university-based or K-12 school-based.

Social implications – Struggling readers and writers deserve and need experiences that help them acquire literacy skills, including reading and writing for twenty-first century purposes. Teachers need support as they navigate mandates from educational policy-makers, enhance their skills as literacy leaders and literacy coaches, and reflect on best practices.

Our purpose in this chapter is to provide researchers and educators with a model of how the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) can be used with inservice and preservice teachers for professional development when teachers engage in reflective processes through the use of video reflection.

In this chapter we provide a brief review of the literature related to video as a learning tool for reflection and a discussion of the Gradual Release of Responsibility and emphasize the role of a teacher educator or more knowledgeable other who scaffolds inservice and preservice teacher reflection across various contexts. Several versions of the GRR model are included. We introduce and explain examples from two class sessions where a combination of inservice and preservice teachers engaged in reflection through video with support from a teacher educator.

We demonstrate that the teacher educator followed the GRR model as she guided preservice and inservice teachers to reflect on video. Through a contrastive analysis of two different class sessions, we show how the instructor released responsibility to the students and how students began to take up this responsibility to reflect more deeply on their own teaching practices.

The examples within this chapter are from a graduate level teacher education course affiliated with a university literacy center. The course was comprised of both preservice and inservice teachers. The model is applicable in a variety of settings and for teachers who are novices as well as those who are experienced teachers.

This is a valuable model for teacher educators and others in professional development to use with teachers. Many teachers are familiar with the use of the GRR model in considering how to guide children’s literacy practices, and the GRR can easily be introduced to teachers to assist them in video reflection on their own teaching.

This chapter provides significant research-based examples of the GRR model and foregrounds the role of a teacher educator in video reflection. The chapter provides a unique framing for research and teaching related to video reflection. The chapter explicitly links the GRR to teacher reflection and video in contexts of professional development or teacher education.

Building on theories of adolescent learning, including cognitive, personal, social, and moral development, this chapter considers how using media literacy techniques to analyze a children’s television program can create wide-awake, active learners while dissecting media messages. By analyzing children’s television for its portrayal of race and ethnicity, this chapter will explore the role media play in children's understanding of people and cultures outside of their own. A textual analysis of episodes of Maya & Miguel, the chapter describes the depiction of several cultures found represented on the program including White, Asian, African, Dominican, and Mexican and how race, ethnicity, and culture is framed in the television program.

Some theories suggest that television is a primary tool in the socialization of children. Children are attracted to the animation in cartoons, the colors, the movement and the easy-to-follow simplicity of the dialogue. Given the impressionable nature of children, it is possible that they begin to act out the biased nature of the cartoons they watch. Thus, considering their vulnerability, information literacy is relevant to discerning media messages. In this way, information literacy converges with media literacy and visual literacy. Guiding children to interrogate what they view is critically important especially when they are at an age where they can be easily influenced by misinformation or dominant messages. Additionally, the volume of information is steadily increasing in the 21st century as are the modes for accessing, creating and manipulating information. Thus, this work will demonstrate how promoting participatory learning by objectively viewing media and exercising reflective thinking will be important components of children’s education in this millennium.

To deconstruct colonizing ideologies and expand our understanding of global meaning making (Tierney, 2018) in this chapter, we describe a qualitative study that explored how a cohort of teacher candidates (TCs) from a large Southwestern university in the United States made sense of a community mapping project as part of their international service-learning program in rural South Africa. The TCs observed, collected, and reflected on various literacy activities and artifacts. Findings suggest that the TCs grappled with colonizing perspectives and practices specifically related to language, literacy, and cultural hegemony. They identified and struggled with the power and privilege they noticed bolstering Western literacies and the English language in the local community to the extent that it overshadowed local languages and local cultural norms. They questioned the historically situated use of certain spellings in local texts and how such spellings are connected to Apartheid policies still influencing this rural community. By engaging in the community mapping project, the TCs also recognized that literacy is socially informed and is more than just reading and writing but employs a range of semiotic tools such as images, movement, and music. The transformative process of participating in the community mapping project helped TCs develop a deeper understanding of the relationships between community and school literacies and grapple with the broader impact of Western epistemologies in the Global South.

Knowing your why is a powerful thing. As school librarians, an integral part of our mission is to ensure that students leave their K-12 education as information and media literate members of our society. In order for that to happen, students must also exit their K-12 years understanding how implicit and confirmation bias play a role in the way they view the world. That’s part of the basis of our why: (i) School librarians are critical, necessary, and integral to ensuring we graduate students who are not only college and career ready but also have a deep understanding of how bias affects perception when it comes to being information and media literate; and (ii) School libraries are the epicenter of information and media literacy instruction. Because school librarians have the expertise and the background, they are a first line of defense in the broadening landscape of misinformation and a key player in combating fake news. Additionally, school librarians are uniquely poised to assist students in understanding bias – in particular confirmation and implicit biases that may affect the student’s search for information. This chapter will address the power of the school librarian in an ever-evolving information landscape.

Gender inequality in New Zealand, and globally, remains a social justice and human rights issue despite decades of feminist activism and scholarship as well as social and political interventions. This chapter outlines the strides in gender equality in New Zealand, and the continued manifestations of gender inequality within the country. It argues that to address persistent patterns of gender inequality, a primary prevention approach that deals with gender polarity and then sexism is needed before it takes hold. New Zealand considers best practice from other countries in implementing gender equality education and better media literacy in schools. Drawing on existing Scandinavian policies and other empirical work, this chapter explores how such gender equality education policy is outlined.

This writing is performed with and about disappointment in moments of failed research and teaching. The bulk of this chapter was written some years ago and describes, reflects on, and analyzes a self-study inquiry about the phenomenon of pedagogical reading. Having returned to and studied this earlier work, I offer a posthuman postscript that rereads the initial inquiry primarily through the work of Deleuze. Rereading intimate scholarship through a post-human lens decenters the self as knower, writer, and teacher, making possible otherwise ways of imagining reading, writing, and studying together. In my case, posthumanism provides tools for rereading two concepts offered for understanding teaching literature, naked and belated pedagogy. While these concepts were somewhat productive in helping me understand what I was experiencing as a researcher and writer, they reproduce and justify traditional, text-centered teacher identities and practices. They are a product of and themselves reproduce what Deleuze and Guattari (2003) called “arborescent” thinking. Ultimately, naked and belated pedagogies reinforce traditional curriculum practices, sidestep students’ lives, and position the teacher as final authority in matters of curriculum control and interpretation. Disappointment includes those affections and emotions that arise through a posthuman rereading of the research scene – including what I, the researcher and teacher, failed to do, say, think, and teach.