This article follows one teacher's quest for integrating technology in the classroom. It also investigates the shift of classroom pedagogy due to personal experiences. (Contains 4 figures.)

Researchers and educators have long argued for the importance of providing time and space for rich conversations around literature. This column draws on research to consider how teachers make room for these discussions inside their classrooms. Particularly, the authors consider different dimensions along which teachers might examine and grow…

This "Conversation Currents" features JoBeth Allen and Valerie Kinloch discussing their thoughts and experiences working with families and communities. Allen bases her comments on the belief that programs have to be adaptable to many different constituencies and demographics, and so must be recreated every year with every teacher and…

This column features two prominent literacy scholars, Catherine Compton-Lilly and Eve Gregory. They discuss their recent research studies in various contexts and describe the reciprocal relationships between school, home, and community literacy practices.

Don Graves died Tuesday, September 28, 2010. In the early 1980s, Don blew open the door to teaching children to write. His qualitative research and subsequent 26 books transformed the teaching of writing in elementary schools. He showed how much could be learned by the simple, powerful strategy of sitting beside children and asking them about…

And so a middle school language arts teacher begins her Saturday. Before coffee, Facebook. In this themed issue on professional development in an era of nick.com, the authors propose that teachers' new literacy learning is as close as their own screens. Teachers, too, live literate lives online in this new age of composition, with impulses to…

In this article, the authors share findings from a study in which immigrant students responded to the wordless text "The Arrival" in small-group, bilingual literature discussions. The interpretive processes of two of the children with different ethnic backgrounds, levels of English proficiency, and styles of response are highlighted as exemplary…

From penmanship, to product, to process...this article recounts 100 years of instructional practice in the US elementary writing classroom through the voices of past teaching manuals and curriculum guides. This particular tale begins at the turn of the 20th century--a time when the elementary school was firmly established in the country, and…

A preservice teacher wants to teach for social justice, but faces challenges effectively engaging in critical pedagogy. Her class of sixth-grade students wants to examine more closely the issues around immigration, and the author is eager to disrupt any one-dimensional stereotypes of immigrants that the students might have picked up from popular…

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…

For four years, Pat Paugh, a university teacher educator, and Mary Moran, a teacher researcher, collaborated on action research by systematically studying literacy development connected to the latter's third-grade community gardening and urban farming curriculum. Their goal was to support an existing classroom culture that valued…

Concerns for the well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth and the children of families who so self-identify suggest that teachers may need additional support in fostering classrooms that welcome all students. The field of children's literature has long-standing interests in multiple cultures and the literature…

In this paper, the author shares three teaching stories that demonstrate the social, cultural, political, and historical factors of all texts in specific interpretive communities. The author shows how the texts that comprised his curriculum constructed particular subject positions that inevitably included some students but marginalized and…

This article offers a way of thinking about literacy instruction that critiques current reasoning, but also provides a space to dynamically think outside of prevalent practices. It presents a framework for both planning and studying literacy pedagogy that combines a practical everyday model of the reading process with Michel Foucault's (1988c)…

Utilizing a New Literacies Studies framework, this article presents critical lessons in film production from a multiple site case study. Examples of children's classroom experiences demonstrate how filmmaking and play come together in a process of storying--a collaborative and multimodal approach to text composition. Students in both preschool and…