This retrospective is a group effort between my children and me to make sense of their literacies over the past 26 years. Sharing in the authoring of this retrospective, we take a look back at the ways those literacies unfolded across their childhood. Emily, Tristan, and Simon used different literacies to define who they were and to construct a…

Becoming literate is emotional work. From the time we are born, we engage in multiple literacies, constructing new knowledge and powerful ideas that, together, bridge new understandings. With those new understandings, we are constantly being challenged and provoked with new information. The authors, two educators who have taught many students…

A historically responsive literacy (HRL) approach (Muhammad, 2020a, 2020b) fosters literary pursuits in learners, preparing them to transcend skill development and use literacy to shape a more just and compassionate world. Despite its transformative potential, not enough is known about HRL application with multilinguals, especially in secondary…

In this forum, practitioners reflect on their experiences as they respond to the following question: How can we use literacy to advocate for environmental issues? Three educators across elementary, middle school, and college settings describe using multiple literacies to conduct inquiries and create a deeper awareness of sustainability and shared…

In this article, the authors, two teacher educators and three high school teachers, examine the impact of a professional development seminar held in spring 2017. In that seminar, participants read and composed brief autobiographical sketches in a variety of media and learned a new lexicon for multimodal close reading, composition, and design.…

Global networks of information and interactions have created new conditions for access to myriad literacies, languages, and communities. Engagements with transnational texts and communities can support the imagination of lives different from one's local context. This article presents data from two qualitative studies of adolescent literacy…

As new technology has changed adolescents' literate life pathways outside of school in remarkable ways, new uses of terminology, such as "mutiliteracies", are necessary to capture the multidimensional nature of literacy. However, there have been few studies on the multiliteracies experiences of Korean adolescent English learners (ELs).…

This practitioner research study investigates the power of multimodal texts within a real-world context and argues that a participatory culture focused on literary arts offers marginalized high school students opportunities for collaborative design and authoring. Additionally, this article invites educators to rethink the at-risk label. This…

This column revisits the concept of multiliteracies as originally proposed by the New London Group. Particular attention is given to the saliency of multiliteracies in light of the technological and educational policy changes and pressures that have occurred since the mid 1990s. The relationship of multiliteracies to participatory culture and the…

Donna E. Alvermann, Distinguished Research Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia in Athens, received recognitions and honors as a scholar/leader in adolescent literacy. Her thoughts about contexts for literacy learning challenge that the divide between in- and out-of-school literacy learning is real and needs…