This article explores how arts-based pedagogies give insight into the lives and dreams of students who experience detainment and incarceration. This article begins with an overview of imagination as a framework that the authors used to explore student work. They connect the concept of imagination to research on multiliteracies and arts-based…

In this empirical article, the author seeks to understand the question: What "productive tensions" (Wenger, 1998, p. 79) emerged as three humanities teachers worked to queer their teacher-developed literacy curriculum? The author returns to what it means to queer a curriculum in the findings and discussion. But first, it is important to…

Conceptualizing literacy as multidimensional, this study explores the intersection between literacy integration and children's literacy engagement by investigating how a researcher's workshop guided practice in integrating literacy with social studies. A year-long qualitative case study approach was used to examine how children actively engaged…

This article follows one teacher's quest for integrating technology in the classroom. It also investigates the shift of classroom pedagogy due to personal experiences. (Contains 4 figures.)

Researchers and educators have long argued for the importance of providing time and space for rich conversations around literature. This column draws on research to consider how teachers make room for these discussions inside their classrooms. Particularly, the authors consider different dimensions along which teachers might examine and grow…

This ethnographic study documents how a space for critical literacy practices emerged as one teacher attempted to make literacy learning authentic. The school lunch program in an urban elementary district provided the theme for an authentic and focused literacy unit. Throughout this focus unit, the students not only met state standards but also…

The article focuses on the notion of tablet technologies as placed resources (Prinsloo, 2005; Prinsloo & Rowsell, 2012) by exploring how an international research project in Australia, Canada, and the United States forged community through online spaces. There is a tendency in media and in literature to romanticize technologies like iPads as a…

Don Graves died Tuesday, September 28, 2010. In the early 1980s, Don blew open the door to teaching children to write. His qualitative research and subsequent 26 books transformed the teaching of writing in elementary schools. He showed how much could be learned by the simple, powerful strategy of sitting beside children and asking them about…

And so a middle school language arts teacher begins her Saturday. Before coffee, Facebook. In this themed issue on professional development in an era of nick.com, the authors propose that teachers' new literacy learning is as close as their own screens. Teachers, too, live literate lives online in this new age of composition, with impulses to…

In this article, the authors share findings from a study in which immigrant students responded to the wordless text "The Arrival" in small-group, bilingual literature discussions. The interpretive processes of two of the children with different ethnic backgrounds, levels of English proficiency, and styles of response are highlighted as exemplary…

From penmanship, to product, to process...this article recounts 100 years of instructional practice in the US elementary writing classroom through the voices of past teaching manuals and curriculum guides. This particular tale begins at the turn of the 20th century--a time when the elementary school was firmly established in the country, and…

A preservice teacher wants to teach for social justice, but faces challenges effectively engaging in critical pedagogy. Her class of sixth-grade students wants to examine more closely the issues around immigration, and the author is eager to disrupt any one-dimensional stereotypes of immigrants that the students might have picked up from popular…

This piece shares preservice teachers and instructors reflections on their perceptions of a course on Spanish language arts methods in Puerto Rico. The course was redesigned to focus on interrelated curricular and pedagogical aspects such as literacies as situated social practice, funds of knowledge, popular culture and critical literacy. In…

L. S. Vygotsky, the psychologist and teacher from Byelorussia who became a central figure in Soviet psychological and educational circles in the 1920s and 1930s, has become a frequent citation in 21st-century scholarship. He is most-often invoked to support some form of instructional scaffolding, based on his idea of the zone of proximal…

For four years, Pat Paugh, a university teacher educator, and Mary Moran, a teacher researcher, collaborated on action research by systematically studying literacy development connected to the latter's third-grade community gardening and urban farming curriculum. Their goal was to support an existing classroom culture that valued…