This article examines a culturally sustaining approach to learning about and enacting multimodal literacy instruction that was developed during a field-based reading methods course for elementary preservice teachers. Despite a large body of work exploring preservice teachers' learning about multimodal literacies, few studies have explored their…

The results of this study revealed students' solution strategies progressed from inefficient strategies e.g., counting on fingers to more efficient strategies with mathematical connections. These findings should enable educators to gain more insight to use Number Talks to help student develop computational fluency with numbers.

There is a burgeoning body of evidence on the average impacts of educational programs. Yet, for many local decision makers, because impacts can vary across sites, the question of whether a certain program will work in their particular district or school remains. This article addresses the question of the generalizability of large-scale average…

Empathy, an unsung, yet critical element of learning, can be strategically interlaced with literacy instruction and engineering design to create a rich and authentic learning experience for students. Integrated STEM education rests on the promise of engaging students and providing deep understandings through the intentional practice of delivering…

The purpose of this article was to offer guidance to educators in evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, and most effective uses of commercial reading assessment suites. We provide three resources to help educators who are responsible for making instructional decisions in reading using formal screening, benchmark, interim, and progress-monitoring…

The language of instruction for Deaf children in the American educational system has long been the subject of debate: Should Deaf children learn language via American Sign Language (ASL), English-based visual communication systems, or spoken English only? It has long been the practice of the standard epistemology to encourage the use of verbal…

In this article, the authors describe some recent research on Readers Theater in the elementary classroom that examined gender differences and achievement. In one particular study, boys who participated in Readers Theater significantly outperformed their peers in reading comprehension. Elementary school boys reported enjoying Readers Theater…

Teaching spelling is controversial because teaching approaches vary considerably in the contemporary classroom. Teachers may privilege visual over linguistic strategies, select words based around themes or let students choose spelling words, rather than focus on the explicit teaching of phono-morphological structures of words. A nine-week…

The focus of this special edition is students' literacy development over the school years. Drawing on data that includes classroom interactions, analyses of texts, and interviews with students, this edition builds on the seminal treatment of the question of literacy transitions provided in Christie and Derewianka (2008). This paper aims to…

This paper explores the intra-actions between and assemblages among classroom materials, a teacher's chair and a seven-year-old boy during a second grade literacy workshop. I consider the ways in which the relationships between the human and more-than-human produced multiple ways of being and, in particular, new modes of competence for a child…

Emergent bilingual students in the U.S. often attend English-medium schools where their bi- and multi-lingual language resources are ignored and dismissed. This article draws on a social literacies perspective to explore how a second-grade teacher and her multilingual students re-framed one English-medium classroom to welcome and include…

In response to the guest editors' call to attend to literacy and language as bodily practices and to (re)think social inequality in young children's literacies, we read a couple of publications by Rosi Braidotti, Maggie MacLure, Nathan Snaza, Sarah Truman and Karin Murris (and others) in relation to a personal narrative gameboard coming to be in a…

We conducted a skills analysis on written expression curriculum-based measurement (WE-CBM) tasks completed by 117 second-grade students. As part of the skills analysis, we scored two WE-CBM tasks (i.e., narrative and expository) for correct and incorrect writing sequences, common writing errors, and sentence structures. Although a majority of…

In Norway, children are encouraged to pose a problem that they can solve using an arithmetical calculation. This is known as 'regnefortelling'. During a larger project, we became interested in a small group of "regnefortelling" which used unusual contexts, contexts that made us uneasy and invoked a feeling of uncertainty about how we…

How people see the world, even how they research it, is influenced by beliefs. Some beliefs are conscious and the result of research, or at least amenable to research. Others are largely invisible. They may feel like "common knowledge" (though myth, not knowledge), unrecognized premises that are part of the surrounding culture. As we…