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Drawn from a larger study on implementing visual-based literacy strategies across the curriculum, this article focuses on the ways multilingual students leveraged multimodal resources to express their perceptions and reflections on their innovative classroom learning experiences. Informed by a critical multiliteracies perspective, we analyzed a data set of 22 drawings, created as exit tickets, to find out how students illustrate their response to the curriculum. Our 4th to 6th grade students, identified as English Language Learners through district evaluations, leveraged multimodal techniques to reflect on their content learning and insert themselves into the classroom learning process as successful and accomplished community members, sometimes challenging the deficit labels assigned to them with their status as English Learners.

Expanding definitions of literacy requires classroom instruction that provides multiple pathways for students to demonstrate their understanding of the content and communicate knowledge. Privileging the use of visual and multimodal texts as valued school communication may create equitable practices for students who are new to English or struggle with literacy for a variety of reasons. The authors explore the roles that the Talking Drawings strategy played in supporting students' content and literacy learning and in their ability to reflect on their new understandings. In seven upper elementary classrooms, students drew pictures before and after focused instruction about a topic and added written reflections about the differences between the two drawings. The results of this study demonstrate how Talking Drawings provided a multimodal pathway for students to access the curriculum, communicate new content knowledge, redirect their content misconceptions, and reflect on their learning.

Purpose: 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. Design/methodology/approach: 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. Findings: 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. Originality/value: 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.

This article presents an illustrative case study to explore the classroom potentials of critical multimodal literacy. We feature Marcela's multimodal response to demonstrate how she engaged with visual and textual tools for learning. Illustrative cases are especially useful to explore a particular issue and often involve in-depth analysis of qualitative data that represents theoretical constructs or significant findings. Critical multimodal literacy is a framework that we developed from a synthesis of the research literature to describe the ways that children use tools (e.g., sketches, videos) for personal meaning-making, critique, and agentive learning in classrooms. Findings from the critical analysis of a young Latina fourth-grader's multimodal production illuminate our framework, which consists of the following four components: "communicate" and "learn" with "multimodal tools; restory, represent", and "redesign; acknowledge" and "shift power relationships"; and "leverage multimodal resources" to "critique" and "transform sociopolitical realities" all seen through an equity lens. We conclude with implications for how this critical multimodal literacy framework can promote equitable classroom practices that expand the literacy learning of all students.

The authors offer a new perspective on close reading that uses a range of multimodal texts to capitalize on the visual nature of contemporary society and to support literacy within the academic disciplines. Specifically, a qualitative study explored teachers' perspectives on the use of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a practice borrowed from museum educators that replicates close reading processes, to support literacy learning within subject areas. The analysis revealed teachers' beliefs that VTS supported students' academic vocabulary development and accountable talk. In addition, the teachers felt that VTS created a safe environment for all students to participate, thus providing access to the curriculum. The authors argue that teachers can adapt VTS to help students meet the needs of 21st century communication modes as they analyze and create print and nonprint texts in different forms of media.

Teachers can capitalize on the overwhelmingly visual nature of contemporary society for learning and teaching through integrating photography in their classroom instruction. In offering an alternative pathway for acquiring and expressing knowledge, photography has the potential to strengthen instruction across disciplines by drawing on multiple literacies. Indeed, photography can magnify and transform how students learn. This article explores the roles photography played in one fourth grade science classroom where teachers used Visual Thinking Strategies to promote close reading of visual texts and students created photo-booklets to demonstrate disciplinary literacy in geology as well as reflect on their acquisition of content knowledge through photo-interviews. In describing an instructional sequence of visual-based activities and multi-modal projects, this article illustrates photography's potential to improve disciplinary literacy teaching and learning by facilitating metacognition, academic vocabulary, and risk taking.

This paper explores the potential of photography for teaching, learning, and studying literacy in elementary school classrooms. We examine the ways shifting between communication systems (photography, oral language and writing) impacts students' ability to problem solve and create rich texts. Specifically, we explore the roles photography plays in mediating and representing meaning. We found that photography can be used as an effective tool for inquiry in education--and for the pedagogy of writing instruction. (Contains 4 figures.)

This article explores the ways three young students expressed their perceptions about literacy and investigates how their classroom identity shapes and is shaped by those perceptions. The ways in which positioning within a writing event and the classroom culture contributed to the development of writing voice and identity are examined. In addition, the article focuses on the influence of the classroom environment on voice through students' opportunities for personal and intentional expressions. (Contains 3 figures.)