Although diversity, equity, and inclusion have been a significant focus of research in children's literature, many studies fail to consider the reader's perspective and instead rely on text analyses. In the present study, the author employed focus groups to examine fifth-grade readers' insights as they interpreted, related to, and engaged with the…

Background/Purpose: This study investigates the pedagogical potential of AI-generated images to enhance student engagement and critical analysis in world literature curricula. Grounded in Reader-Response Theory, it explores how algorithmic visuals impact student interpretation, addressing a gap in understanding technology's role in fostering…

What can the affective turn mean for literacy educators who believe their work can lay the foundation for a life filled with meaningful reading pursuits, for students who "become" readers and "do" reading? Because reading occurs across and within an elaborate composite of time, space, relationships, histories, discourses, and…

Little work has been done to investigate the implementation of innovative technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and 3D printing, during English language arts instruction in juvenile detention facilities. This study explored how technology integration in restricted spaces can lead students to develop connections and empathy toward others. The…

This article describes research on the Harbor Us Book Club. Critical analysis of the reading responses from preteen Black youth remains surprisingly rare in literacy studies. Our inquiry asks: How do readers develop literary and lived understandings of selfhood in response to the books? In what follows, we describe the theoretical frameworks and…

Reading engagement is an essential component of children's reading achievement. This three-chapter dissertation considers a new approach to conceptualizing reading engagement through the lens of children's immersion, or absorption, in a text. Chapter 1 examines the theoretical underpinnings of story world absorption, sometimes known as…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates' response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character's body. This paper explores how readers' meaning making was…

This article presents findings from a qualitative content analysis of 531 Little Golden Books that contain early childhood marginalia--any physical alteration of a book, resulting from an exercise of reader agency by a child from birth through eight years old. The primary goals of the present study were to expand the reach of this methodology by…

The protection and regulation of religious expression present complex challenges. Blasphemy laws, which criminalize acts deemed disrespectful to religious beliefs, have been abolished in England, allowing for broader freedom of expression. However, concerns and discussions about blasphemy persist. The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman (2023), has…

Poetry spaces provide a place where young people can express themselves and develop skills like critical thinking, empathy, and creativity. They empower young people, particularly those at the margins of society. I organized an extracurricular poetry club, Yo Misma, with Latina adolescents in which we read the work of ten Latin American women…

In a rapidly changing information landscape, science communicators need to find new ways to engage audiences, make their information memorable and increase attitudes towards scientists. Evidence suggests that stories could be an effective tool for these goals, but few studies tested experimentally whether they are advantageous to non-stories in…

This research memorandum highlights the collaborative efforts of the literacy panel for the ETS Return on Investment (ROI) Study, Phase 1, comprising Jean-François Rouet, M. Anne Britt, and Tobias Richter, in developing their research memorandum, "Literacy Skills at and around Level 2 of the PIAAC Cycle 2 Proficiency Scale." This…

This paper examines literacy as a sociocultural, personal and human practice dependent on and derived through relationships between people, settings and culture. Drawing on a recent empirical research study that combines learner, teacher and author perspectives [Curtin (2023) "Reading and Writing Pathways Through Children's and Young Adult…

Reductive policies for teaching and defining reading largely ignore the assemblage of multiple factors and forces that impact one's engagement with text. In this paper, we attend to the complex layers of reader response among emergent multilingual elementary students while engaging with multiple modalities and genres of social justice texts. We…

When two people read the same story, they might both end up liking it very much. However, this does not necessarily mean that their reasons for liking it were identical. We therefore ask what factors contribute to "liking" a story, and--most importantly--how people vary in this respect. We found that readers like stories because they…