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This is a collaborative ethnographic research project that highlights the artistic, literary contributions of racially diverse young men. It uses Critical Race Theory to question conventional, Eurocentric educational approaches that historically and currently continue to suppress various socially and culturally learned modes of communication. This article presents two research projects in urban and suburban formal and informal educational institutions to highlight multimodal literary approaches. The first project is an amalgamation of two critical, ethnographic case studies that explores how racially diverse young men express their literacy through rap and spoken word poetry. The second project uses ethnographic methods to observe racially diverse young men’s production of films and photographs in high school, community centers, and art gallery spaces. This study uses visual methods coupled with affect and sensory-laden approaches to collect data and conduct an analysis. The article reflects on conversations surrounding young men, particularly racialized young men, their relationship with literacy, and how these conversations are founded on their failure and deficit language about their literacy repertoires. We believe that such research is closely tied with other social justice themes and modes of inquiry. This article steers away from the ways racialized young men do not use literacy, and focuses instead on the ways that they do use literacy. Their literacy practices are predominantly visual in nature, frequently accompanied by other modes such as words and moving images. Fitting within the scope of the special issue on social justice and visual methods, we argue for a greater acknowledgement and analytical gaze on sensory and affective nuances within visual research. This approach adds texture and volume to interpreting racialized young men’s narratives. Interrogating their visuals and talking through their narratives that have agentive qualities gives both researchers an awareness of young men’s emotional worlds, and how the visual allows for sense-laden, agentive meaning-making.

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Our understanding of reading—including reading multimodal texts—is always constrained or opened up by what we consider to be a text, what aspects of a reader’s embodied activity we focus on, and how we draw a boundary around a reading event. This article brings together five literacy researchers who respond to a human-scale graphic novel, comprised of over 300 large-scale paintings, recently exhibited in an art gallery and also published in print form. The researchers' responses reflect a variety of theoretical orientations, including postcolonial theory, critical theory, affect theories, new materialisms, social semiotics, and reading development theories. The author of the novel also reflects on his own creative processes and goals. These various responses, and the multiple modalities of the work itself, are intentionally juxtaposed in order to create productive tensions, contrasts, and open spaces for reconsidering how multimodal texts are read and experienced. Dimensions of reading as a meaning-making, affective, embodied experience are productively put into play with one another.

There is far more to the digital divide than meets the eye. In this article, the authors consolidate existing research on the digital divide to offer some tangible ways for educators to bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots, or the cans and cannots. Drawing on Aldous Huxley's notion of a “brave new world,” some digital divide approaches and frameworks require debunking and are strongly associated with first-world nations that fail to account for the differential access to technologies that people who live in poverty have. Taking a closer look at current realities, the authors send out a call to teachers, administrators, and researchers to think more seriously and consequentially about the effect the widespread adoption of technologies has had on younger generations and the role of the digital on knowledge creation and on imagined futures.

Telling stories through photographs is certainly not a new or novel concept; however, thinking about image-making as a way of unknowing what we currently know is quite different from traditional approaches to photography. Built on an existing conceptual framework, writings on unknowing, we apply unknowing as a guiding method and heuristic to understand what a group of young people are trying to say and reimagine through the act of image-making. Research reported in this article from the Community Arts Zone visual arts project features a series of photograph projects across high school contexts where students created a Cindy Sherman-style conceptual photograph with an artist statement. The researchers engaged in a process of unknowing to interpret the photographs where they read through the visuals and engaged with modes in play and with observational fieldnotes about participants to draw out implications for such work for literacy teaching and learning.

Movement is relatively invisible in literacy theory and pedagogy. There has been more recent scholarship on the body and embodiment, but less on connections between movements, body and literacy. In...

Digital literacies play a foundational role in the rhythm and pattern of our lives, yet debates continue about how to harness them for educational purposes. In an effort to humanize digital literacies, this column provides a venue for research and practical applications that depict technology use as part of the fabric of being human. This particular article, “Emotionally Crafted Experiences: Layering Literacies in Minecraft,” focuses on the ways that emotion transcends the screen and helps students layer their meaning making. As such, the Digital Literacy column will help educators reconceptualize the ways that children learn with technology, media, and new communication systems. It honors educator success stories and burning questions and issues, and it reimagines literacy futures.

In a climate where our pedagogical practices are increasingly digitized across all levels of schooling and public pedagogies, this chapter draws on a study on the nature and scope of young people’s engagement with the ‘screen.’ Across two cities in Scotland and Canada, 30 youth took part in a participatory arts-based project guided by the question, to what extent do the digital practices of these young people reflect common assumptions about access and engagement to digital and global literacies? This chapter presents the findings of this study, shedding light on the complexity and diversity of digital engagement and the misconceptions of ‘screen-obsessed’ youth. The authors argue that by focusing on the ‘digital’ in education, we are working with an outdated perspective and, as a consequence, very often missing more urgent, relevant, and productive questions of educational space, ethics, safety, curriculum content, and engagement in an era where ‘offline’ is an historical and redundant concept.

Situated in the context of the role digital technology plays in the lives of young children in today's society, this chapter is comprised of four sections examining children's thinking involving digital spaces. First, a succinct overview of current research will be presented, focusing on emergent themes regarding young children navigating digital spaces and their im/material thinking. Following this is an examination of the issues raised from this research. This section highlights disparate access to technology and children's construction of identity in digital spaces. The next section presents the gaps in current research and the final section of this chapter focuses on implications for literacy practice, policy, and research.

Building on existing research applying app maps (Israelson, 2015), the authors take an ideological orientation to broaden app evaluations and consider participatory literacies, social and communicational practices relevant to children's everyday digitally mediated lives. Drawing from their North American elementary classroom studies on children's technology play with iPads, the authors compare four typical literacy practices with apps: practicing a skill, reading an e-book, animating a film, and designing an interactive world. A rubric and radar charts are introduced to help teachers assess and visualize educational apps’ potential to develop six dimensions of participatory literacies: multiplayer, productive, multimodal, multilinear, pleasurable, and connected. The authors conclude with a push for broadened definitions and looser frameworks.

s and invite a select number to write full manuscripts for the deadline below. Submit abstract, title, and bios in one PDF file to kubyc@missouri.edu 15 May 2016 Decision notification from guest editors. 31 October 2016 Manuscripts due to guest editors 1 February 2017 Feedback to authors from editors and reviewers 15 April 2017 Revisions due September 2017 Publication of special issue 6 Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 16(1)

This chapter aims to illustrate two complementary approaches: new literacy studies (NLS) and a social semiotic approach to multimodality (SSMM). It presents the term reading both as a fairly neutral description of an activity and as a topic for theoretical attention. The chapter provides a view of reading through the lens of NLS and SSMM and show how these two approaches may be integrated. It presents an overview of ages and stages of reading, from early childhood literacies to youth literacies to adult academic literacies, and tries to account for reading in different social settings. The chapter offers an integrated model of reading and of the reading process rooted in an epistemology that draws on both NLS and SSMM as a viable frame for thinking about reading in new times. It concludes with a discussion of ways forward with literacy, pedagogy, and policy.

This paper engages some of the philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of silence, and its implications for teaching and learning both within and beyond educational settings. In this exploration, the authors draw on self-reflexive observations, woven throughout the paper as a series of vignettes, to explore questions of silence and its impacts on their respective teaching, research, and professional practice. Similarly, the authors apply this approach while taking into consideration different expressions and meanings of silence and how this can offer new understanding of culture and identity, including social and political issues, through arts, performance, and arts-based research.

This article profiles the use of the iPad (a tablet) in classroom literacy activities in three different instructional environments in different parts of the world: Toronto, Canada; San Diego, United States; and Sydney, Australia. This two-year, qualitative study included observational fieldwork filming students' interactions with tablets in the midst of literacy events. Students in each context used the iPads to make meaning, with the participating classroom teachers affording their students some degree of self-determination with respect to technology use. We describe these three instructional environments and illustrate how these diverse landscapes reflected a variety of ecologies or models that contributed inherently to the nature of learning on the iPads. We describe our findings that show how context and environment allow for different kinds of learning and that may elucidate the array of learning potential afforded with this device.

After 10 years of interviews with professionals who work across creative and business sectors, the author has drawn together findings in this article to encourage a collapsing of silos between schools and workplaces so that educators can build on untapped expertise from professionals who work and think multimodally. This call for change involves adopting alternative, age-old models of learning such as studio pedagogy where learning is modeled and framed by professionals and then practiced and honed by learners with access to materials and resources in a designated creative, thinking, experimentation space. In this article, historical models, and existing literature on creativity, innovation and play are examined; and telling case studies are presented from interviews with 61 professionals to encourage researchers and policy-makers to adopt a studio-atelier approach to teaching and learning.

iPads are increasingly being put in the hands of children in schools and educational contexts, yet there continues to be larger questions about how they fit into the fabric of daily classroom life and what new stories will emerge (de Certeau, 1984, 1984/2000). In this article, we feature vignettes of data from a 2-year government-funded research project on how children make meaning with iPads across 5 early years' classrooms. Understanding the complexities of literacy learning requires an ‘in situ’ examination. Through our ethnographic approach, we have been able to get closer to an ‘insider account’ of the sociocultural knowledge of early learners and their teachers, as well as a holistic description and interpretation of the phenomenon of being and becoming literate (Le Compte & Preissle, 1993).

The article examines high school students' writing composition practices in multimodal instructional environments. We use Rosenblatt's transactional theory to look across the findings of 2 studies that blend traditional and digital modes of instruction in order to explore how modal switching can support students' reading and writing. We also address the tensions and challenges faced when attempting to create multimodal learning environments that use traditional texts to improve students' composition.

Type in ‘how to become an autodidact’ into Google and the first entry that appears is a blog called Loner Wolf with a list of such famous self-taught masters as Ray Bradbury, Frank Zappa, Stanley Kubrick, Benjamin Franklin, Malcolm X, Albert Einstein and the list goes on, especially with the infinite accessibility to information on the web, autodidactic practices are on the rise and indeed flourishing. Drawing on data collected from an iPad research study, this chapter focuses on one young man, Cole, and his passion for autodidactic practices to think and design texts as a part of his everyday repertoires of practice. Applying Tim Ingold’s environmental, anthropological framings of social practices to theorize iPad thinking and being, we explore how Cole’s hybrid, rhizomatic and web-like navigations point to reframings of literacy practices that are valued by younger people.

On the basis of interview data with a video game designer, this author team explores the nuances of stories and story worlds in video games as complex multimodal, compositional processes that can be harnessed to our understandings about contemporary literacy learning. How we enter, exit, mediate and transmediate stories across media channels has been naturalised into the ways that we view and understand media texts, yet as literacy scholars interested in the role of media and literacy learning and teaching, do we actually understand the mediational practices and logic enacted when a story moves from a film to a video game? This article goes some way in extrapolating the process of story transformation when a ‘canonical’ story moves from a film text to a gaming text. By using X-Men Destiny as our exemplar, the article classifies and attends to three overlapping worlds that are negotiated when approaching adapted video games: a canonical mythic universe, the adapted game world and the story world of a learner, in order to enable the harnessing of video game practices for literacy contexts.

This paper reports a study that examines the integration of tablet technologies such as iPads into literacy lessons to investigate how reading and meaning-making occur within this digital medium. Specifically in this paper, we discuss the concept of reading paths as applied to physical and cognitive planes of meaning-making. The paper reports on data collected as part of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project involving researchers from Canada, the United States and Australia. The study is currently under way in schools in the three different countries where the researchers are observing students in classrooms in primary and secondary schools. The research is designed with a mixed methods approach coding video footage of dyads to enable close study of their interaction during literacy tasks incorporating iPads. Our findings show that the affordances of touch technology allow for multimodal, multidirectional reading paths. By tracking students' interactions with the digital platform through touch, it is possible to see navigation as evidence of the relationship between material and cognitive processes, which fosters metatextual awareness. These aspects of modes and new literacies construct a dynamic materiality for students' reading and writing. As a result, we propose that current awareness of the mode of gesture needs to be expanded to take into account haptic ways of learning.

The article features a graduate literacy teacher education course that compelled students to think in terms of design and multimodality. In an effort to innovate our own literacy teacher education work, we came together to devise a course that encouraged students to adopt a design lens to their thinking, planning, and assessing of literacy learning. We saw this qualitative case study as a way to understand the interrelationships of learning processes, principles of design and multimodal texts, and how these might inform pedagogy. Building on years of work in the areas of multimodality and multiliteracies, we observed how eight teachers with varying degrees of comfort with multimodality moved into a design-oriented approach to literacy education. The article presents our research on design-oriented teacher education work, but the findings illuminate how the adoption and inhabiting of different mindsets and metalanguage can make a difference.

Research methodology using visual narrative techniques opens up conceptual views for interpreting a wide range of visuals. In this article, the authors analyse tattoos on a subject’s body and approach the task from what they term three ‘optics’: social semiotics; sedimented identity in texts; and New Literacy Studies in relation to multimodality, drawing on ethnographic perspectives. Each optic illustrates how a woman constructs her identity through her body art. The article serves to illustrate that, whilst the use of visual methods in a small-scale study does not aim to be generalizable, the contribution to visual methodology has to do more with how varied conceptual views can work in conjunction to excavate deeper, more textured meanings in visual narratives.