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This article explores the intersections of drama and reading, specifically focusing on approaches that are situated within "drama in education." Supported with a retrospective analysis, this article portrays the research, related practice and possible futures in drama education in relation to literacy and in particular to reading fiction as meaning making practice. This study is situated in a reassertion of the value of relational literacies through imaginative practices that dramatic modes generate and support. The article disrupts common misconceptions about the purposes and effects of drama in reading and establishes prominent research discourses and definitions across the history of drama and reading practices. By locating paradigmatic and practical opportunities in our analysis of contemporary research, we bring visibility to the intricacies of drama in education as a generative pedagogy in reading as relational meaning making work.

Although the notion of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) has been well studied and affirmed as important in recognizing the strengths of children and developing inclusive pedagogical models (Albright & Luke, 2008), this article presents a study of transcultural spiritual literacy--an element of cultural capital that is often overlooked, seldom studied in an organized fashion (Smith & Osborn, 2007, p. 23), and rarely validated in pedagogical inquiry as a vital indicator of children's meaning-making. However, this important form of cultural capital threads through the lives of children who participated in this study, which provided a "multi-modal ethnographic gaze" (Rowsell, 2011, p. 335) of spiritual literacies of 14 children from first-generation immigrant Latino families at a U.S. church-affiliated community center. This article, which discusses part of that study, will focus on the artifactual mediations of one of those children: Paulina. Spirituality, although not synonymous with religion in our study, overlaps with religion in both space and ideology, and surround issues including identity, transcultural navigations, and sociocritical perspectives and understandings.

This piece shares preservice teachers and instructors reflections on their perceptions of a course on Spanish language arts methods in Puerto Rico. The course was redesigned to focus on interrelated curricular and pedagogical aspects such as literacies as situated social practice, funds of knowledge, popular culture and critical literacy. In redesigning the course the instructor and colleague/co-researcher explored perspectives related to "inquiry as stance" (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) and engaged with the students on inquiry approaches and practices to examine the collective experience within the course and the political nature of the work we do in literacy education. (Contains 2 tables.)

Grounded in 10 years of critical literacy work in Puerto Rico, the authors engage readers creatively, to share key events in both our experiences as local teachers and as theatre activists in Puerto Rico. Our long-term purpose has been to explore new creative approaches to doing educational research and pedagogies that rupture traditional colonial structures of doing literacy work in local classrooms. After we share these creative stories we explore the idea of improvisation as Anticolonial literacy (un)doings to disrupt colonial imposed ways of inhabiting classroom spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designed as a research story (Patel, 2019) using a (re)membering research approach (Dillard, 2012), this manuscript focuses on sharing the work of the youth activist troupe Jóvenes del 98, who are part of the tapestry of Puerto Rican youth artist-activist initiatives--both on the island and in the diaspora--committed to creatively pushing against and foregrounding complex dynamics of oppression and coloniality through playful and improvisational literacies. Interpreted through the lens of anticolonial actionings--the creative acts of breaking through colonialities--this research story establishes relationships to past trajectories and future actions for all those committed to anticolonial critical literacy education. Mediating through entanglements of multiple literacy practices as anticolonial embodied actions, the analysis of youth creative work may provide a reflective space and opportunity to map the landscape of youth activists' creative production in local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on the topics including ethical responsibility that literacy researchers and educators have to teach truths of history; and analysis of the ethical and political complexities of responding to student writing across.

Drawing from rememory and decolonial theory, this collaborative piece illustrates how three Puerto Rican educators and researchers partnered with a Puerto Rican scholar, activist and children's book author to engage in inquiry cycles. These inquiry cycles centred our general experiences with children's literature and the author's work. After engaging in dialogue and sharing/responding to written reflections, we play with content and form as we unpack our creative‐research journey to ReconoceR—to acknowledge and re‐learn—through storying. By doing so, we engage in transformational actionings to resist the conditions of invisibility, silence and impossibility that sustain coloniality. Through this work, we recognise the centrality of affective spaces and attempt to name those intensities with language. We pivot towards notions of responses to literature as complex understandings of the networks of feelings, experiences and intensities that help us navigate texts and ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intersections of drama and reading, specifically focusing on approaches that are situated within "drama in education." Supported with a retrospective analysis, this article portrays the research, related practice and possible futures in drama education in relation to literacy and in particular to reading fiction as meaning making practice. This study is situated in a reassertion of the value of relational literacies through imaginative practices that dramatic modes generate and support. The article disrupts common misconceptions about the purposes and effects of drama in reading and establishes prominent research discourses and definitions across the history of drama and reading practices. By locating paradigmatic and practical opportunities in our analysis of contemporary research, we bring visibility to the intricacies of drama in education as a generative pedagogy in reading as relational meaning making work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the connection between critical literacies and critical performative pedagogies. It shares the experience of a course facilitator of devising the drama from a reflective practitioner's perspective. It mentions the documentation of the course to observe the performances and social positionings that the participants embodied. It cites that an approach to drama practices provide spaces where intense personal reflection is mediated through complex social interactions.