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Amid the COVID‐19 pandemic, students, families, and educators have faced unprecedented challenges. These challenges have disproportionately impacted racially/ethnically diverse, low‐income communities because of long‐standing health system, socioeconomic, and educational inequities. With closures of schools, libraries, and childcare centers, many students were disconnected from their community and did not have access to books. Parents' and educators' concerns centered around students falling behind academically and socially. In this article, we explain the motivation and rationale for a social justice initiative to provide students of color from low‐poverty areas with access to high‐quality multicultural children's literature at home. We describe our literacy partnership with a local after‐school program serving participant students and families, research underpinning the initiative, and our process for selecting high‐quality multicultural literature book sets and offer suggestions about how to facilitate comprehension and motivational support for home‐based reading. We also offer a list of recommended literature and discuss outcomes and implications of this project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parenting while transitioning out of incarceration, homelessness, or drug addiction has received inadequate attention despite the fact that these factors affect more and more of the U.S. population each day. This article is about a family literacy program implemented in a residential treatment facility where the fathers, most of whom were previously incarcerated and now receiving treatment for substance use disorder, have been parenting from afar with limited access to their children. Fathers participated in a family literacy program where they respond to children's literature with the intention of eventually reading with their children. Our research was guided by the following question: How do fathers who are separated from their children while in a residential treatment program, read and respond to children's literature in a small‐group setting? Findings reflect how fathers wanted to share their feelings about parenting and also consider their identities as fathers who were also addicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study introduces parents' roles in the community Korean–English bilingual family literacy program named Family Storytime. It was offered at the Korean church for 30 minutes during lunch time on Sundays over 3 months. The Korean parents played two major roles: facilitators and participants. As facilitators, the parents advertised the literacy program to other Korean families, set up the room, managed children's behaviors, and assisted bookplay activities. The Korean parents were active participants who responded to the book, interacted with children, and gave positive feedback to children. The parents' heritage–language skills and funds of knowledge were valuable resources at the Family Storytime sessions. This study offers an example for how bilingual parents can be involved in family literacy in schools and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authors featured in this department share anthropological perspectives and qualitative insights to redefine community in adolescent and adult literacy practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author encourages educators to ground disciplinary literacy instruction in the study of social issues that matter to the livelihoods of their students. Topics discussed include nature and location of knowledge, a case for civically engaged disciplinary literacy education, and the role of complex connected knowledge in solving social injustice.

Underresourced communities often have limited access to print and materials to promote children's early literacy development. Recognizing that the neighborhood is a unit of social change, organizations that engage families in early reading and learning with their children, therefore, have increasingly become part of the community landscape. Recently, efforts to promote early literacy have found families in a less conventional place: the local laundromat. The authors report on a study of six laundromats in low‐income communities, three of which were transformed to include literacy‐related play centers and three of which remained business as usual. Results indicated dramatic increases in literacy‐related activity among young children as compared with control sites, demonstrating the potential of these sites to enhance children's opportunity to learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this qualitative case study, the authors explored the responses of seven Mexican American mothers during a bilingual (Spanish–English) parent book club with a chapter book from their children's elementary school literacy curriculum. The authors sought to better understand the findings of a previous study in which parents expressed new learning during comprehension‐related activities. Specifically, the authors examined how these women came to better understand their identities as literate individuals capable of assisting peers and their children's literacy learning. Analysis of interviews and book club session transcripts, written and artistic artifacts, and researcher reflective journal entries revealed that during reflective dialogue, participants assumed all of Brooks and Browne's (2012) homeplace reader positions (ethnic group, community, family, and peers) and the additional positions of empowerment and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This department explores how teachers can sustain students' multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Literacy Association is a global advocacy organization, and literacy is viewed as a human right worldwide. This department highlights research and research‐to‐practice at the international level to bring global best teaching practices to the forefront. Topics may include best practices for literacy instruction in Europe or other continents/countries, partnership and collaborative projects between international schools/teachers, and advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors use Bourdieu's conceptualization of capital and data from two longitudinal case studies to explore how financial challenges impacted learning opportunities for two children in a high‐poverty urban community. Interview data collected from two African American families over a 10‐year period were analyzed with attention to the role of economic academic capital (resources and experiences that require financial investment and translate to school success) in children's school trajectories. Findings revealed that the families' homes, schools, and community lacked economic academic capital and that this dearth had dire consequences for the children's academic careers. However, the families could access other forms of capital, namely, embodied academic capital and social academic capital. These findings point to the important role that teachers can play when they act as advocates for students from low‐income backgrounds and their parents when they encounter educational and economic barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A university's literacy festival can promote reading and foster the idea that books make a difference, especially to undersupported students from Title I schools. A literacy festival featuring a variety of diverse authors presenting hands‐on workshops showcasing their literary craft can enable students from Title I schools to engage with the authors and can motivate students from diverse backgrounds to develop an excitement for reading. It can also motivate teachers and librarians to use literature that reflects their population to engage students in reading and can transform teacher candidates' understanding of students from diverse backgrounds. The authors describe how a university College of Education's literacy festival was implemented and explore how it provided an opportunity for children in low‐socioeconomic‐status communities to be exposed to books and authors of quality children's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Framing ethnography as a form of democratic inquiry, this study examines how the author worked with a group of Mexican and Vietnamese American adolescents to learn and apply ethnographic tools to interrogate language and literacy ideologies in their school and community. Examination of the students’ findings reveals circulating ideologies and narratives of English monolingualism in schools, as well as their own complex literacy repertoires that worked against Standard English deficit models. This study demonstrates the democratic potential of welcoming diverse students into their own ethnographic research for literacy learning. The study equally provides insights for teachers and researchers into the mundane ways that literacy and language ideologies are produced schools and how students work to resist these through their own practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]