Collaborative meaning‐making across difference is often undertaken in pursuit of equity, but too often socially constructed power differentials between collaborators on the basis of social class, ...race, gender, ability, age or other markers are reified. This article examines the ripples produced by one literacy collaboration that took place across public, private and charter schools, nested within urban, suburban and rural districts, traversing cultural, racial and class boundaries. Specifically, we examine retrospective interview data from youth and teachers reflecting on a collaborative project that asked youth to work together with young people from other schools to compose dramatic performances together. Our findings reveal limitations to equitable outcomes across disparate groups working together, particularly around identity markers like race or neurological difference. After juxtaposing a range of positionalities that youth took up when describing the experience of this field trip after the fact, we suggest a set of equity literacy tools for teachers and researchers interested in facilitating more equitable collaborations.
School inequity is a persistent and ‘wicked’ problem communities have a responsibility to solve. Here, we argue that critical literacy advocacy within community‐based settings provides an ...unprecedented opportunity to examine and disrupt school inequity and promote sustainable actions towards justice‐based solutions. This article connects critical literacy and equity literacy theoretical frameworks to describe a series of invitations and actions that focused on addressing school inequity in one town. Here, authors offer lessons learned from a community‐led school equity literacy campaign where researchers and participants collectively organised and reflected on a public event series entitled ‘Year of Equity’ (YoE). Three key YoE processes are described: facilitating book clubs, facilitating a community conversation event and forming action committees. These processes relied on critical equity literacies through the promotion of new relationships and shared experiences centring on engagement with a variety of texts, through a focus on incremental change over time.
Although isolating, lockdown also created unexpected opportunities for connection and inspiration. This article describes the lockdown literacies of a sibling pair, Marco and Mara, as they wrote ...digital texts/books for Literacy-Cast, a virtual, interactive literacy space offered by Appalachian State University from March 2020-present. Since lockdown began, this virtual space has been enacted 4-5 days weekly with 70-250 participants logging in from “home” to co-construct a multigenerational, multilingual, geographically-dispersed community engaged in reading, writing/composing, making, speaking, and listening. Literacy-Cast was imagined, built, and enacted collaboratively among faculty, laboratory school teachers, graduate-level teacher candidates, and children (and families) in grades K-5. We hear a lot about the limitations of virtual classrooms/learning (e.g., COVID “learning loss,” lack of engagement, unequal access), particularly in relation to historically marginalized communities, but rarely are we offered counter-narratives: examples where young children who live and go to school in these communities shaped the creation of new virtual spaces/places by making visible meaningful “at home” literacy/language practices, cultural artifacts, and people. Through invitations embedded in the multimodal texts/books shared on Literacy-Cast’s digital bookshelf, children brought the community into their homes–bedrooms, kitchens, backyards, back porches, and backseats, reframing “home visits'' as sites/events for new kinds of community knowledge production. Research about home visits, educators visiting students’ homes to learn about children’s lives, has documented the impact of home environment awareness on school interactions, improved relationships between caregivers and teachers, typically focused on intervention supporting school-based achievement and school practices, often with unidirectional flow from school-to-home; however we conceptualize Literacy-Cast’s daily activity as multidirectional “home visits,” where invitations to come over and play, read, and write together brokered relationships and strengthened a gamut of literacy practices for all participants. Through collaborative ethnography, we explore ways “home” (e.g., objects/people/practices/languages/events) became tools/co-authors for children’s digital composing/making and, ultimately, home/community-making.
Increased emphasis on standardization in primary grades can stifle spontaneous literacy play. The authors argue that allowing playful, collaborative, multimodal literacies into primary classrooms and ...specifically in writers’ workshop can expand and enliven the way we see students’ literacy strengths. The authors look closely at the unique storytelling processes and final performance of a grades K–1 collaborative storytelling group, the Zombie Boys. This group worked over several weeks during workshop/playshop to produce an original story line rich in special effects, music, synchronized dance, puppets, backdrop, and props design and delivered a meaningful and entertaining play performance. The authors also demonstrate possibilities in expanded, equitable literacy assessment for primary grades by using a multimodal checklist and story line graph to gauge narrative complexity and story shape, tracking the group’s minilesson uptake, and describing how peers and teachers received the group’s story when performed for feedback.
As teacher education programs shift to more practice‐based methods in the preparation of literacy teachers, the ways in which teacher educators support the learning of their preservice teachers ...(PSTs) becomes paramount. In an effort to support PSTs in developing competency in instructional literacy routines, coaching has been found to support PSTs’ understandings of how to teach for student learning. In this article, three approaches to coaching are explored: rehearsals, a modified behind‐the‐glass approach, and structured video reflection. Drawing from rich examples of practice, attention is paid to the ways each method of coaching supports novice teachers in developing competency and the contexts in which each is used.
Background: With standardization ever squeezing creative curricula in K-1 classrooms, creating time for a play-based multimodal writing curriculum that leverages children's strengths as storytellers ...is revolutionary. Due in part to accountability policy pressures, print-based writing and verbocentric writing feedback are still often privileged in school curricula. And yet, children are natural whole-body storytellers who will be asked to write and present ideas in all sorts of forms. In order to leverage children's storytelling strengths, we need to teach writing through multiple modes: This means expanding both writing instruction and the types of feedback offered to writers in primary classrooms. Research Questions: This study examines two questions--How is feedback being given, and what impact does it have on children's storytelling? How is play/storying being sanctioned? Setting & Participants: The study took place in a K-1 classroom in an inquiry-based, project-based school in the U.S. Midwest during a month-long storytelling workshop unit. Participants included two co-teachers and 46 children aged 5 to 7. Research Design: This qualitative study used ethnographic methods and participant observation. Data Collection & Analysis: Video data were collected during workshop each day for one month, including minilessons, writing time, and share time, which is the focus of this article. Discourse analysis and a multimodality theoretical lens were used to analyze how children gave one another feedback on their stories through embodied demonstration, gesture, acting, out, or copying one another's storytelling devices. Findings: Findings indicate that children's acting/embodiment, humor/parody, and copying all worked as effective forms of multimodal feedback, which ultimately functioned as teaching for developing peers' storytelling strategies and skills. However, teachers inadvertently privileged language alone via narration, or language with demonstration in feedback sessions. Conclusions: Teacher/researcher collaborations should explore ways to reimagine forms of writer's feedback that include and account for demonstration, copying, and impromptu performance and that, ultimately, open up the definition of what counts as writing at school.
Context: The documentary film about U.S. education reform, "Waiting for 'Superman'," was met with acclaim and controversy when released to theaters in 2010, and again when launching its grassroots ..."host a screening" campaign in 2011. The campaign ran concurrent with 2011 state legislative sessions, during which several states (e.g., Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, and Wisconsin) voted on education reform bills regarding teacher merit pay, probationary teacher contracts, school vouchers, changes to the school funding formula, charter school funding, and limiting teachers' (and public workers') collective bargaining rights--all issues touched on in the film. Purpose: To shed light on the relationship between popular media, public opinion, and social action regarding education, I examine responses to "Waiting for 'Superman'" across different viewer demographics and relate responses to educational policy stances. The following research questions are considered: 1. Why did people watch "Waiting for 'Superman'"? 2. How did different education stakeholders (preservice teachers, current teachers, academics, community members, etc.) react to the film? Were some groups more likely to accept, negotiate with, or oppose the film's message? 3. What role, if any, did the film play in viewers' stances on education reform or intention to take social action in the education reform movement? Participants: Participants include 168 self-selected audience members attending free public film screenings at a midwestern university. Research Design: Mixed methods research design compares audiences' descriptive statistics alongside open-ended survey responses and interview data. Results: Viewers were majority young and female. Most attended because they were interested in the topic, wanted to learn more, or came with a friend. Audience responses were complex and nuanced, i.e., 38% volunteered positive reactions to the film and 30% criticized it in some way (not mutually exclusive). Emotional reactions were common (38%). Audience members tended to respond to the film based on their direct prior experience (or lack thereof) with the U.S. public education system. The majority of current teachers in the audience chose not to participate in the study, perhaps because of the contentious political climate. Fifteen percent of audience members were "inspired" to act after viewing, and half of those were preservice teachers, but none were current teachers. Conclusions: In vilifying teachers' unions, thereby marginalizing some great teachers, the film's producers may have missed the chance to effect lasting change in the education system. While potentially polarizing, popular film may be an effective way to engage preservice teachers in complex education topics. Contextualizing discussion with a multiperspective panel afterward is recommended.
We explore how digital tools can support children's creativity in classroom. In response to a growing need for tools to support children's digital literacy, we take a step forward to explore digital ...tools to support children's digital creativity. We draw insights from interviewing twelve K-6 teachers about their experience using digital tools in the classroom. Findings uncover teachers' perceptions of the role digital tools play in the classroom, intersections between accessibility, usability, and developmental appropriateness of digital tools. The article generates insights on the role of digital tools used by teachers, pedagogic methods, school contexts, and access to interactive technology.
This article provides primary teachers with assessment tools and curricular examples to expand writers’ workshop by adding a multimodal storytelling unit on drama and filmmaking, allowing students to ...create engaging off‐the‐page stories through films and play performances that enrich writing. Too often, children's literacy abilities are assessed solely based on what they can write on paper, overlooking the rich ways children convey meaning through multiple communication modes like sound effects, gesture, movement, images, and language in their storytelling. This research recognizes play as an important literacy and argues that a multimodal emphasis in teaching and assessment more closely matches the ways children learn and make meaning in their everyday lives. This study is a part of a larger, ongoing multiyear, multisite study of literacy playshops in early childhood classrooms and teacher education.
The rise of right-wing populism, embodied in the figure of Donald Trump, has been characterized by conspiracy theories, "fake news," and other forms of mis- and disinformation in what has been ...described as a "post-truth" era. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this problem, and national conflicts around appropriate content, methods, and modes of schooling often involved disinformation circulated in school board meetings and other local contexts during the 2021-2022 school year. In this study, we adopt a critical literacy lens and take up the tools of discourse analysis to examine the rhetoric of post-truth, conspiracy oriented groups opposed to public health mandates, critical race theory (CRT), and social emotional learning (SEL) in public schools. Our discourse analysis of Purple for Parents Indiana (P4PI), a local advocacy group, suggests that P4PI and similar groups are engaging in "cosmetic criticality," a project superficially resembling critical literacy that poses a unique challenge to public education-a challenge literacy scholars and teacher educators must confront.
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