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Children in a grade two/three classroom co‐designed photographs of each other's important family objects to develop critical empathy and better understand their peers' home cultures. They engaged in visual critical literacy practices. The paper provides a narrative of what happened and a framework for creative collaborative pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is located within a larger study of children's voice and storytelling. The focus is on how children use artifacts, such as special objects and photographs, to tell stories about their lives. We studied the collaborative learning of educators, in two schools in Eastern Canada, as they used sharing circles and multimodal pedagogies, and worked to elevate and listen to children's voices during a period of pandemic teaching. This study examines children's things/artifacts as material culture and relates things/artifacts to artifactual literacies. The action research design included a consideration of children's voice in early years research alongside the collaborative professional development inquiry undertaken by educators in the study. An analysis of key findings as they relate to evolving pedagogies, including how artifacts were used to tell stories, and how voice can be viewed through this artifact sharing is presented. We argue that building voice and collaboration can result from pedagogies of classroom sharing and listening. Educators' challenges in this research and their classroom teaching during a constantly shifting set of teaching conditions are fore fronted. Insights from children's particular artifacts and their stories enhanced educator and peer awareness of difference, and of cultural practices in families. Finally, implications for practice, and future research possibilities are presented, along with an argument for viewing children's voice as emergent alongside classroom multimodal pedagogical practices that augment children's voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's intra-actions with the natural world offer an important lens to revisit notions of literacies. They allow for a decentring of humans--here children--as actors. Also, forest schools and nature-based learning programmes are increasingly erupting across North America, although more commonplace in Europe for a longer period. In this presentation of our research, we feature a storying/(re)storying of data from a yearlong research study of children's entanglements with the forest as a more-than-human world. We ask what we might learn if educators, children and researchers think with sticks, not separate from, but in relation to sticks? Eight preschool children, two educators and two researchers ventured into the forest twice a week over the course of a year, documenting their interactions with a mosaic of data generation tools, such as notebooks, iPads, Go-Pro cameras. The forest offered diverse materials that provoked "thing-matter-energy-child-assemblages" that were significant for the children's play and literacy framing. Through post-humanist theorizing, we have paid particular attention to the stick within the children's forest play and illustrate the ways in which the stick was entangled with children's bodies, relations, identities and discourses. The stick was a catalyst, a friend, a momentary and changing text, an agentic force acting relationally with children's play and stories. The post humanism storying/(re)storying of the children's encounters in the forest with sticks invites infinite possibilities for literacy teaching and learning. How might educators foster such relations, enquiring with and alongside children with an openness toward what the sticks (forests) might teach us?

This article shares teachers' conversations within teacher inquiry groups and considers how this reflective approach has potential for transforming teachers' practices. Conversations took place at the early stages of a longer teacher inquiry project and centred on the critical interrogation of social justice-oriented children's literature. These conversations served as a forum to help teacher professional learning communities and to reconcile understandings about social justice, action and agency within larger political and cultural forums of teaching. The teacher inquiry sessions shared in this paper explore teachers' beginning struggles with conceptualizations of social justice, and the teacher's role in imparting values to students. Teacher participants imparted their experience and practice as they negotiated their own understanding and implementation of social justice education in their schools. The teacher inquiry groups provided a needed supportive space where classroom teachers' struggles were shared alongside their beliefs and pedagogical approaches so that a social justice agenda could be achieved.

At the same time that creativity, play, and inquiry are receiving special focus in academic, professional, and educational settings, mandated assessments have never been more prominent, despite public debates that question the value of such testing. In the context of these apparently contradictory developments in literacy education, as a "telling case," we explore writing as a strand within the multimodal compositional processes of one boy in one classroom during a three-day mandated writing assessment that was also a performance-based and process-oriented assessment. There are two primary areas of interest here: (1) what is made visible when one examines processes more closely, in an ethnographic and observational fashion, and (2) what a multimodal understanding of compositional processes offers, especially in terms of the learning that happens across modes of expression.

Everyday cultural resources that originate outside school offer possibilities for multimodal creativity and identity play, as children consume, transform and produce multimodal texts. In this study, Kyle, a boy in elementary school, fluidly performed social identities and engaged in playful and parodic rescripting of identities and resources from everyday culture, such as professional wrestling and rap music. In this paper, I posit that (1) Kyle and his family understood and experienced professional wrestling in contradictory ways as both taboo and appealing, (2) Kyle's deep knowledge of the genre of professional wrestling as performative text allowed him to use it in playful and parodic ways, (3) this playful approach to wrestling and other masculine identities, made available through Kyle's culture, constitutes a form of improvisation and can be explained as a form of masculine melodrama and (4) the role of audiences is key in the reflexive performance of masculine identities.

Research that 'grows apart' from its original design and proposal is not uncommon, especially when involving participatory and creative methods. However, the disconnect between research intentions and research realization is seldom probed for the insights offered; this paper addresses this gap. Taking up the conceptual lens of research imaginaries, this paper dives into the tensions and discoveries experienced in between the design and the practice of a multi-site participatory research project. The study involved two groups of young people, in two cities in two countries, with a focus on digital lives. In a commitment to collaboration with artists, senior researchers, research assistants, and young people in community spaces, a complex project emerged. This paper describes the tensions and possibilities of an emergent methodology and in doing so argues for increased attention to the movement of research designs; rather than the adherence to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on reflective and critical stance on literacy practices restructuring the social relationships such as significant uncertainty, isolation, and loss. Topics include addressing long-standing problems of intersectional marginalisation and providing examples of anti-racist or decolonizing approaches; and containing sociology, anthropology, psychology, the arts, literacy, and literary studies.