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Educational policies seek to integrate engineering instruction within elementary school settings. This becomes challenging for elementary school leaders and teachers, as few have previous teacher preparation or professional development experience with engineering content or processes. Although studies have considered teacher identity in relation to new teachers' experiences teaching unfamiliar STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) content, few consider the experiences of veteran teachers, especially regarding teaching of engineering. Utilizing the lenses of brokering and boundary crossing, this 2-year interpretive case study explores the ways in which 3 veteran teachers reflected on teaching engineering and the engineering design process in a newly formed after-school elementary engineering club. Teachers' reflections elucidate how they mediated their experiences in becoming familiar with new engineering content by navigating boundary crossing and drawing from and expanding on their teacher identities while enacting real-world practices of teaching and working with children.

Situated in an elementary afterschool Engineering Literacies Club framed around multiliteracies and the engineering design process, this article explores engineering habits of mind and disciplinary literacies. Disciplinary literacies encourage students to read, write, think, and act like historians, mathematicians, scientists, or engineers by engaging in habits of mind. Drawing from the Royal Academy of Engineering's framework for engineering habits of mind (EHoM), this exploratory case study considers: What emergent EHoM do students demonstrate within the engineering design process (EDP)? What does this reveal about how EHoM can be used by teachers as a lens for teaching disciplinary literacies? Study findings demonstrated emergent EHoM are enacted synergistically and through multiple modes of communication (i.e. multimodality). EHoM were demonstrated by students in varying degrees reflecting the engineering design process and students' own proficiencies (or lack of proficiencies) regarding engineering. Enactment of EHoM was also influenced by teachers who scaffold learners' development of engineering literacies through problem scoping, problem-solving, collaboration, improving, and testing. The authors propose EHoM as a lens could provide an accessible way for teachers to integrate disciplinary literacies when teaching engineering with particular emphasis on how students can think and act like engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual article addresses the question: What are the disciplinary literacy practices surrounding the Engineering Design Process (EDP) at the elementary level? Recent attention has focused on developing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills for U.S. students. In the United States, the Next Generation Science Standards and reforms such as Common Core State Standards have drawn increased attention to relationships between language, literacy, and subject matter content often referred to as disciplinary literacy. In this conceptual article, we argue that literacy educators can make a substantial contribution to the study of engineering education, particularly for underrepresented minorities and girls. We first provide a brief overview of disciplinary literacies. Then, using examples from a research-based after-school club, we explore how disciplinary literacies might contribute to the study of engineering and EDP in elementary settings particularly in relation to: (a) productive communication, (b) vocabulary development, and (c) identity.

The authors argue for a broader view of what it means to be literate to include meaning making with both linguistic and visual representations.

This collective case study explored what nine elementary teachers' video study group discussions revealed about their understanding of pedagogical content knowledge for an explicit reading strategy instruction framework, Critical Elements of Strategy Instruction (CESI). Qualitative methods were used to inductively and deductively analyze transcripts of the video study groups' discussions and artifacts. Findings indicated that engaging in video study groups afforded teachers opportunities to investigate their pedagogical content knowledge of CESI. Through their discussions the teachers explicitly articulated and questioned their tacit knowledge. In addition, while conversing, teachers provided reasons for their pedagogical moves based on students' needs. These finding are important because limited research is centered on elementary literacy teachers' development of pedagogical content knowledge for explicit strategy instruction using video analysis.

Research and pedagogical information provided to teachers on implementing explicit strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' speech, with limited attention to other modes of communication, such as gesture and artefacts. This interpretive case study investigates two teachers' use of different semiotic resources when introducing second-grade readers to specific reading strategies. We analysed two teachers' use of speech, gesture and artefacts in their introductory explanation of the declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge necessary to be strategic readers. The importance of this article lies in reconciling the narrow focus on what teachers say during explicit strategy instruction with the repertoire of semiotic resources that the teachers actually use to enact multimodal communication during their explanation of the strategy.

Research on implementing reading strategy instruction has primarily focused on teachers' verbal communication with limited attention to other semiotic resources such as gesture and artefacts. In this paper, we construct a "telling case" on the basis of how one primary teacher from the United States used speech, gesture and artefacts as a means of communication while instructing her students in reasons to predict when reading. Data sources for this case study consisted of field notes, artefacts and digital video. We analysed the teacher's use of gesture, speech and artefacts from a social semiotic multimodal perspective. Findings indicate that the teacher created meaning by interweaving multiple modes in the communicative contexts of strategy instruction using speech, deictic gestures, metaphoric gestures and artefacts. These findings are important to reading strategy instruction because much of the research and discussion of practice to date has centred on the instruction of reading strategies using teacher and student speech and not attending to the use of semiotic resources beyond speech.

This interpretive case study investigated how a fifth-grade teacher's social practices with visual and linguistic signs positioned her students (10- and 11-year-olds) to take up particular modes as they constructed digital compositions. The context of the study was a suburban public school in the northeastern United States. Analysis was threefold. The discourse surrounding multimodal composition was analyzed via inductive analysis. Students' use of semiotic resources in the HyperStudio composition was analyzed with Unsworth's image-language intermodal framework. Then, teacher-student conversations related to visual and linguistic signs were triangulated with students' compositions. Findings show that a classroom teacher's limited content knowledge as related to metafunctions and metalanguage of visual and linguistic sign systems affected the information taught to the students and, ultimately, their use of visual and linguistic signs. Students demonstrated tacit knowledge of image-language relations beyond what was taught but lacked the explicit knowledge to more strategically use visual and linguistic signs. Implications include the importance of creating opportunities for teachers to develop more substantive content knowledge of the metalanguages and metafunctions of various sign systems. (Contains 3 tables and 7 figures.)

The purpose of this interpretive case study is to explore--through a close analysis of one fifth-grade class project--teacher's scaffolding and students' use of visual and linguistic modes when composing multimodally. Using Kress and van Leeuwen's multimodal theory of communication as a framework, this case study examines why teachers, whose social and cultural lives have been surrounded by a print-based perspective, need to develop depth of content knowledge when teaching students about multimodal representation. Two research questions guided this study: (a) in what ways did one teacher's discourse and pedagogical practices mediate students' communication with visual and linguistic modes within a fifth-grade classroom? and (b) using visual and linguistic modes of communication, in what ways did the students design and produce multimodal texts? Findings revealed the importance of teachers developing content knowledge of the affordances and limitations of different modes of communication, as well as understanding the metafunctions of these various modes.

Teachers and students often express an aversion to poetry based on their experiences with printbased poetry texts that typically dominate school curricula. Given this challenge and the potential affordances of new and multimodal technologies, we investigate how preservice and inservice teachers enrolled in a new literacies master's course began to interpret poetry multimodally, through PowerPoint. Using scholarship in multiliteracies, multimodality, and semiotic design, this paper presents an analysis of one student's interpretation of Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider." Through this case, we explore what happened when digital tools were used to create, express, represent, and interpret poetry. We then discuss one student's poetic representations and learning in relation to several other students in the course to explore implications, considerations, limitations and potential affordances of new literacies for learning. (Contains 5 figures and 3 notes.)

While many teachers and teacher educators agree that it is important to integrate new literacies and technologies into their teaching, educators are often perplexed about how to begin thinking about this task. Research reveals that educators use technologies for personal and communicative purposes, but teachers, for the most part, have not yet applied these technologies in their classroom teaching and learning. Given these challenges, the current study was undertaken as an instance of teacher research carried out in the context of a teacher education course in new literacies and technologies wherein teacher educators attempted to take up new literacies practices. Study participants were pre- and in-service teachers. Findings indicate that teacher educators must foster environments to share problem-solving and distributed learning, to support design and multimodal redesign of texts, and to explore literacy and technology as transactional processes. Whereas both teachers and teacher educators may be tempted to wait until they are technologically adept before attempting to integrate new literacies and new technologies into their teaching, this study suggests that the learning environment, approach to learning, knowledge about multimodal text design, and stance toward literacy and technology may be far more important than the technologies that teachers use to enact their instructional plans. (Contains 1 table.)

This paper presents a conceptual and methodological adaptation of the Positioning Theory diamond as originally proposed by Slocum-Bradley (2009). The authors propose an updated graphic representation that foregrounds the diamond in moral fields within arrays of identities and relationships that are not bound by space and time. The positioning diamond is illustrated as an analytical, research tool by applying it to study the social interactions, including multimodal interactions, of children (ages 7-10 years) in an afterschool engineering club. The paper illustrates how the authors applied the Positioning Theory diamond jointly with Bamberg's three-tiered positioning analysis and multimodal analysis to develop a clearer perspective on one particular learner. The authors argue that scholars of positioning theory should look to studies of multimodality to deepen their analysis of speech and other acts. Multimodal analysis and the Positioning Theory diamond can be used effectively to explore social interactions in addition to speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This department column explores digital and disciplinary literacies across learning contexts and disciplines within and outside of school. Digital enhancements will encourage readers to post questions, comments, and connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]