This dissertation is a multi-method study that engaged youth in a digital learning ecology called Literacy Scholars for Justice and focused on critical aesthetic textual interpretation. I employ a queer methodology as the dissertation study's overarching methodological framework. I collected data in a virtual learning ecology during a two-year…

Since its inception in 2003, the IWCA Summer Institute (SI) has been understood within the writing center field to be an important professional development opportunity for new and experienced writing center professionals (WCPs). Publications on the SI to date have focused on anecdotal perceptions of the benefits to leaders and participants or on a…

This paper focuses on a summer writing program we called GANAS with bi/multilingual youth, including English learners and one youth with a learning disability, that sought to facilitate sociocritical literacies (SL) based on youths' lived experiences to imagine new social futures. Envisioned as a social design experiment, we used testimonio as a…

Resettled youth often face many challenges while enrolled in schools, such as expectations to quickly assimilate and acquire English language and literacy skills or being positioned in deficit-oriented ways. In this article, we use qualitative methods to seek to understand how resettled youth positioned themselves as authors and use their writing…

This study examines the use of critical community-building--using dialogue as a collective to support, listen to, ask questions, and assist each other in thinking in critical ways--to support resettled youths' writing during a summer writing camp. Through encouraging the youth to use their home languages, by celebrating their cultures, honoring…

Sociocultural language learning theory and situated learning theory stress the importance of social interactions and context in both science and language learning. In addition, researchers have highlighted the important role that multimodal language plays in meaning-making and communication in science. The purpose of this study was to examine the…

This article reports on a study of how a class of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old gifted high school students "mixed" the media of poetry and comics to unveil and interrogate (what they called) their "nerd identities." Both co-authors constructed and co-taught a class within a literature-based comics course that led students…

In this commentary, a National Writing Project site director and two teachers reflect on the philosophy of ubuntu as it helped them redesign a writing community between teachers and students in Connecticut. With the guidance of writing activity genre research, the authors discuss the creation of Young Adult Literacy Labs, including Ubuntu Academy,…

This study examined an in-service teacher's enactment of code-meshing and code-switching pedagogies in a clinical summer reading clinic, as a requirement for a reading specialist program. Thus, the enactment of code-meshing pedagogies was based upon embracing the students' use of African American English (AAE) in academic writing contexts and…

Offered through the Honors College at the University of New Mexico, Conexiones-Ecuador is an explicitly interdisciplinary study abroad program around the theme of "Food, Sovereignty, and Development." In an immersive language and cultural studies experience, students live with host families, take Spanish language classes at the…

This study aimed to explore the implementation of project-based learning (PBL) principles in informal STEM education, focusing on the experiences of Underrepresented Racially Minoritized (UUREM) girls during a week-long residential STEM summer camp. Utilizing a single case study design, the researchers investigated how PBL facilitates engagement…

An important part of promoting scientific literacy is developing disciplinary literacy practices, such as obtaining information from text and sharing investigation results through talk and writing. To support students to develop disciplinary literacy practices in science, educators must provide opportunities for them to work with multiple…

Purpose: Reading and writing are language-based skills, and effective literacy instruction/intervention practices should include an explicit linguistic focus. A multilinguistic structured literacy approach that integrates morphological awareness is proven beneficial to improve reading and writing for students with language literacy deficits. The…

In this article, the author introduces the notion of the balloon metaphor, an exercise she created for preservice writing teachers, in which they reflect upon their writing mentors and their writing journey. The author also discusses three very important issues facing the field of literacy today: teachers are not taught to write, teachers of…

This article describes the development and iterations of the English 0111 Composition Workshop-the Texas Success Initiative (TSI), at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). The TSI is a program that determines college-readiness standards in reading, writing, and math. The initial structure of English 0111 was similar to the structure used in…