An integrated language arts and technology program engaged students in reading and writing activities that funded an experience in moviemaking. With video cameras in hand, students, often working collaboratively, developed expanded views of the writing and revision processes as they created movies that mattered to them and found an audience beyond…

Letras y Arte: Literacy and Art, is a summer course that pairs college students and children from a Latino neighborhood for literacy and art learning. Started five years ago, Letras y Arte provides opportunities in four areas: (1) literacy opportunities that foster distinctive identities and voice; (2) immersion in a broad view of literacy that…

Discusses one fourth-grade student's attempt to write a bilingual script, based upon a story told to her by her father, within the context of a bilingual playwriting project. Concludes that bilingualism needs to be seen as part of quality education for all students, not as compensatory education only for language minority students. (SG)

Notes that two texts were being read simultaneously as a teacher educator read aloud to other teachers in a summer seminar--Cynthia Rylant's "Missing May" and the experience of reading "Missing May." Notes that the teachers made meaning from both texts, working together to shape the teachers into a community because they had…

Suggests that, in order to re-invigorate writing in schools, educators need to remind themselves of the importance of the tools of the writing process to help them explore the distinct and multiple voices and texts. Presents samples of some of the "local literacies" that students in a migrant summer school camp produced in their writing. (SG)

This paper presents two nine-year-old children who used different oral, written, visual, and digital modes as resources to create meaning and to position themselves socially through multimodal stories. Their diverging experiences with technology as a resource for storytelling draw attention to the importance of studying "the ways that old and new…

Suggests that teaching multiculturally must begin with self-inquiry--teachers must first examine the relationships among their fundamental values, attitudes, dispositions, belief systems, their teaching, and their students' diverse literacy learning. Describes a summer course designed to allow such self-reflection, and explores the course's impact…