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This study examined the impact of remix journaling as a new media literacy practice on undergraduate students' engagement and ownership of learning. Using arts-based pedagogy combined with new media literacies, this study chronicles students' perspectives on knowledge-building, expression, and social agency through remix journaling. Findings suggest remix as a contemporary literacy practice that expands and enhances students' critical thinking while cultivating authentic classroom cultures that bridge digital worlds by supporting reader engagement and the development of media literacies. Findings have implications for educational professionals, administrators, librarians, and media specialists seeking low-tech, high impact strategies for cultivating new media literacy practices in their classrooms and school communities.

Classrooms play a large part in shaping youths' identities as readers and writers. Due to the pressures of high-stakes exams, for example, reading and writing identities are often defined by a set of academic skills that students can or cannot perform. Such rigid concepts of readers and writers often cause secondary students to believe that their literacy abilities are fixed (i.e., as struggling readers). This study explores how reflective conversations through a daybook defense (an oral reflective assessment for a writer's notebook) opened opportunities for students to redefine what it meant to read and write in two English language arts classrooms. Findings suggest that reflections opened opportunities for students to articulate behaviors of reader/writer identities and express beliefs about reader/writer identities. Implications suggest that such reflective opportunities can provide spaces for students to rewrite reader/writer identities in the classroom.

We examined middle years adolescents' (ages 12-13) responses to reading and viewing advertisements as part of integrated language arts and health education lessons. We report here on the qualitative results from student and teacher focus groups, and from student journals. Three regular classroom teachers co-developed (with university researchers) and then delivered ten media literacy lessons to three classes of grade seven students. Findings include how students learned to analyze advertisements and think more critically by designed ads which satirized original ads. We saw also that students' informed decision making resulted in both acceptance and resistance of media messages. We conclude that transactional reading models and positioning theory may provide teachers with a valuable foundation upon which to base pedagogy designed to help adolescents' understanding and evaluation of advertisements.

The idea of offering students choice in their reading materials is not new yet this is not occurring in many high school classrooms. Researchers have identified many academic and personal benefits when students are allowed to choose their own reading materials, including more engagement with reading. This article describes one high school teacher's experiences implementing a three-week reading choice unit to his sophomore English classes. We highlight how he structured this experience and the instructional decisions he made while teaching students all of whom were reading a different book. In addition, we examine the students' responses to this three week experience. (Contains 1 figure.)

How much time do college students spend reading for recreational and academic purposes? Do Internet and television use displace or interfere with reading time? In this study, we used an innovative time-diary survey method to explore whether the time students spend on the Internet or watching television displaces time that would be spent reading for academic or recreational purposes. (Contains 9 tables.)

The Talkback Project used blog software to involve eighth-grade language arts students, preservice teachers, and parents in online discussion of young adult novels and their personal connections with them. The author shares the challenges associated with the project--including the implications of Internet safety and legal concerns associated with technology integration--but argues that classroom blogging provides positive opportunities for students to develop their digital fluency, strengthen traditional literacy skills, and apply real-life 21st-century skills in a safe and monitored environment.

This practitioner-research study investigated the reading behaviors of preservice teachers from diverse content disciplines as they engaged in reading multiple texts pertaining to a historical topic. Through participant-observer field notes, reader response journals, reflective essays, and participant debriefing, the authors examined the metacognitive awareness of students enrolled in a content area literacy course for preservice, secondary-level teachers. Results indicated that prospective teachers relied predominantly on a limited number of metacognitive strategies and engaged in reading behavior ranging from skimming and incomplete reading practices to not reading at all. This trend of engaging in less proficient or "pseudo-reading" strategies points to similarities in the reading behaviors and identities of these preservice teachers and of struggling readers described in many pedagogical theories surrounding content area literacy instruction. This study offers an explanation for the resistance secondary preservice teachers often exhibit toward content area literacy methods. (Contains 2 figures.)

As digital portfolios become more prevalent in teacher education, the purposes and processes for creating them have become contested. Originally meant to be critical and reflective spaces for learning about multimedia and conceived as contributing to professional growth, research shows that digital portfolios are now increasingly being used to provide evidence that a set of teacher education standards have been met for a course. In this article, the authors describe how they designed their digital portfolios as part of an inquiry-based teacher research project and represented their own work--as well as that of their students--in these online spaces. They discuss a number of personal and professional concerns that they encountered while engaged in this process, from the ethics of editing students' work to the online personas the teachers themselves chose to adopt. Issues of audience, purpose, format, and content are framed in discussions of teacher research and portfolio design. Finally, the authors argue that keeping design-based decisions about how and why to construct a digital portfolio in teachers' hands can contribute to lasting professional growth and change.

The integration of nature studies within language arts instruction offers multiple possibilities for guiding students toward close readings of literature, their changing selves, natural phenomena, and the world around them. The authors document their own rediscovery of nature study and what happened when environmental observations were incorporated into the lives of 67 seventh-grade students as an alternative mode of literacy instruction.

The study described in this article intended to discover how social processes can influence literary understandings and the development of critical readings of literature in the public space of a classroom. The author draws on Bakhtin's notion of "ideological becoming" to consider how dialogic exchanges focused on works of literature can support or subvert critical understandings. This cross-case analysis illustrates how two women students changed their responses to a short story as they participated in postreading events in their literature class. The data suggest that one student whose initial response was critical of the status quo changed her thinking about the story and adopted a reading that reflected dominant ideologies. The results of this study suggest that literature teachers who introduce multiple perspectives need to have explicit strategies for supporting students' emerging critical perspectives.

Theory has always possessed an elusive, intangible, and almost ethereal quality. Comprising nothing but ideas compressed into words, it is supposed to guide literacy interactions and transactions. Theory provides the "why" that underlies the "how to" of teaching. Yet the author, a teacher, has often struggled with the effort of translating theory into practice. She wonders how it is possible to better use theory to guide instruction in a secondary classroom. A passion for reader response theory, commitment to gender theory, and burgeoning interest in poststructural theory, born and nurtured at local and national reading conferences, led her to question more deeply the relationship between theory and the language arts classroom. This article describes how the journal writing process supported these three seemingly complementary theories. Through this journal writing process, males and females not only can make personal meaning from their experiences with texts but also can be engaged in the questioning of how that meaning is made in a shared classroom context. In this sense, students truly explore what it means to be a gendered person in today's society. As for the author's initial preoccupation with the practice of theory, dual-voiced journals have provoked her to think more profoundly about "the why" underlying what it means to be a literacy teacher committed to reader response, impassioned by gender, and intrigued by poststructuralist ideas. (Contains a list of 27 resources.)

This study explores the importance of competence in boys' literate lives. Participants were 49 middle and high school boys from very different backgrounds, ethnicities, social classes, and levels of academic achievement. They came from an elite, private all boys' school; a large suburban high school; a large urban school; and a small rural school. The schools were located in three states along the eastern seaboard of the United States. This study draws on three kinds of interview data collected: an interview on the boys' favorite activities; an interview on their responses to short profiles emphasizing different ways of embracing or rejecting various kinds of literacy; and an interview every four to six weeks about literacy logs in which the boys recorded all of the reading, writing, listening, and viewing they did in and out of school over a three-month period. In general, the participants embraced activities in which they were competent or through which they felt they could demonstrate improvement toward competence. They rejected activities in which they believed they would be or appear to be incompetent. The data not only establish the importance of competence, but also indicates that the activities favored by the boys tended to be ones in which they could receive clear and immediate feedback on their competence. Recognizing the critical importance of competence in the literate lives of the participants challenges the authors as teachers and teacher educators. Their data have caused them to consider their instruction in a new way.

Describes how a 7th-grade reading class used character journals to explore the sailing and the sinking of the "Titanic." Describes how the students took ownership of their research and enjoyed reading and writing about actual events as they became a passenger or crew member aboard the "Titanic," explored the ship, experienced the sinking, wrote an epilogue, and presented their journals. (SR)