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With the growing number of online students, universities must provide support for students in developmental education to engage, collaborate, and co-construct their learning in socially dynamic ways. Online learning communities provide spaces for students to identify with others, communicate openly and candidly, and develop professional relationships. With social constructivism utilized as a frame to guide this formative experiment, researchers examined social interactions and engagement among students of a PhD cohort across online platforms and apps. Through collective responsibility and the consideration of multiple entry points, the B.E.S.T. (backchannels; engagement; social media; tutoring) framework was established by the researchers and continues to evolve according to students' needs. Discussion includes highlights and future opportunities to extend and enrich online communities of practice to benefit developmental education programs.

As students and teachers embrace more forms of multimodal composing, classroom power structures move from the more linear, hierarchical structures typically seen in education to more open, student-centered forms. However, these transitions are not always seamless. Using a multiliteracies framework, this article focuses on how a classroom teacher framed what counted as writing in a senior English class where students created a digital writing portfolio across three platforms. Findings explore what counted as writing from the perspective of the teacher before, during, and after the portfolio unit as well as the struggles that she faced in understanding how to assess the myriad of possible authoring paths multimodal projects offer. Implications extend to how teachers may be influenced by and continue to push back on established institutional power structures to open spaces for reshaping what counts as writing in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the instructional implications of using podcasts framed by a critical media literacy framework in a high school social justice classroom. This 10‐week, critical media‐framed study examines how eight 16–18‐year‐old students, taught synchronously on Zoom, engaged in weekly podcast‐based lesson activities, selecting podcast episodes as supplemental course texts related to the current classroom topics of study (two episodes per unit topic). Findings indicate that podcasts opened spaces for students to hear various voices, particularly marginalized narratives on controversial topics. Additionally, by engaging in critical media literacy practices, students' own voices were elevated, and students questioned the role of texts in their understanding of the world around them. These findings are of particular value to educators looking to understand the classroom implications of critical media literacy practices and who want to provide counter‐hegemonic narratives in their classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how diverse high school English students designed open-ended, multimodal projects across digital platforms (Weebly, blogs, and Instagram). Framed by metafunctions, emergent and axial coding of each student's website homepage shows a broad range of how they designed in digital spaces and to what rhetorical effects. Additional coding of two focal students' designs across each of the digital platforms highlights how students created complex, multimodal compositions that would have otherwise not been possible with the typical more formal, rigid forms of discourse. By designing multimodally, students showcased interests, humor, emotions, and culture not often seen in this classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship highlights the wealth of varied and interconnected opportunities for learning science that informal environments can provide; yet, participants with different experiences, knowledge, and backgrounds do not all learn in the same ways. Thus, studies are needed that examine how particular participants take up learning opportunities (LOs) in informal contexts. In this ethnographic case study, we focus on the learning experiences of one fifth-grade girl, Nina, who reported that she was not able to learn as much as she had hoped from her participation in an afterschool robotics engineering club. Through analysis of video-recordings, interviews, and field notes, we investigated how instructors and peers shaped LOs for Nina and the environmental tensions that affected how LOs were shaped and how Nina took them up. Comparison of examples in which instructor and peer-afforded LOs were realized and unrealized (i.e., presented in ways that Nina could take them up or not) illuminates multiple tensions. Club members faced tensions related to differing goals and abilities to teach each other, while the instructors faced tensions related to their roles in informal learning environments and their propensity to direct participants to other resources. As a result, many potential LOs for Nina in this rich inquiry learning environment where unrealized because instructors and peers did not shape them in ways that were explicit, elaborated upon, or connected to Nina's prior knowledge, and because Nina was not necessarily attuned to potential LOs in the informal context. We conclude with implications for instructors in informal learning environments.

This article examines multimodal texts created by a cohort of academically marginalized secondary school students in Singapore as part of a language arts unit on persuasive composition. Using an interpretivist qualitative approach, we examine students' multimodal designs to highlight opportunities taken up for expanding literacy practices traditionally not available to lower tracked students. Findings examine the authorial stances and rhetorical force that students enacted in their multimodal designs, despite lack of regular opportunities to author complex texts and a schooling history of low expectations. We extend arguments for the importance of providing all students with opportunities to take positions as designers and creators while acknowledging systematic barriers to such opportunities for academically marginalized students. This study thus counters deficit views of academically marginalized students' literacy practices by demonstrating their authoritative stance taking and enacting of layered positionalities through multimodal designs in which they renegotiated ways of knowing and doing in their classroom.

Researcher reflexivity shapes what and how we know, because the background against which something becomes a site for analysis, and through which we position knowledge about it, result from our researcher gaze. We examine here an adolescent-produced multimodal story according to three different researcher gazes across space and time. By sidestepping a singular attribution of knowing "what counts," our intercontextual analysis constructs different epistemological viewpoints on this multimodal story and contexts of its creation.

Even though the use of social media in education is a now widely-studied topic, there still does not seem to be a consensus for what social media may afford students or how best to use them in the classroom. In this critical review of current literature, I discuss some of the most prominent qualitative studies that explore the use of social media in the classroom. I consider some of the affordances that these scholars assert social media can offer in the classroom, in particular the affordances of authoring to a wider, interactive audience and potentials for improved learning and literacy practices. I then address contemporary scholars' findings for incorporating social media into the classroom as well as the limitations for social media in education. I conclude with a discussion of potential steps for future research.