This research conducted with third graders examined a teacher and her students as they transformed their traditional writing workshop to a designing workshop. Using the New London Group's (1996) pedagogy of multiliteracies and Katie Wood Ray's (2006) units of study as frameworks, students participated in a unit of study on informational texts.…

Using the Learning by Design multiliteracies framework, writing workshop was transformed into composing workshop. The researcher worked with a team of four second grade teachers in an urban public elementary school to redesign their Kevin Henkes author study to equally value art and design, guiding their students in creating their own narrative…

As writers are increasingly required to leave their ways of knowing, doing and being at the doors of their classrooms, this article explores what happens when teachers of writers open those doors and mobilize the "Writing Realities" framework's interrelated principles of "writer-identity," "critical literacies,"…

A team of four general education second grade teachers, who work in a neighbourhood state elementary school in a large urban area in the northeast United States, and their staff developer, redesigned their Kevin Henkes Author Study to equally value pictures and design, along with writing. They asked, what narrative understandings do children…

Purpose: This study took place in an elementary English language arts classroom during a comics writers workshop unit and focused on one fourth-grade author. This paper aims to explain how a fourth-grade student receiving special education services positions himself and is positioned by others as an expert during a unit on comics. When students'…

This paper draws on Bakhtins notion of heteroglossia to expand theorizations of community translanguaging. Ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods are used to explore the multiple voices that multilingual elementary students adopted and adapted in their digital, translingual texts. Findings illustrate how children drew from multiple voices,…

Children are experiencing life at a time of rapid technological development. They increasingly utilize new technologies, navigate, and create multimodal forms of communication. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) evolve, reshaping the nature of literacy. Meanwhile, state, federal, and professional organizations are rewriting the…

The contribution of this article is to highlight how exploring various writing genres in the beginning of higher education can contribute to academic literacy. While many studies have addressed the transition into academia by focusing on academic writing, the use of various writing genres has scarcely been researched. Based on the thematic…

This article examines students' identities in teacher-student interactions during an eight-week comic unit within a fourth-grade literacy classroom. Though researchers have increasingly studied how teachers incorporated graphic novels and comics into the school literacy curriculum, few have documented the social interactions that students'…

Increased emphasis on standardization in primary grades can stifle spontaneous literacy play. The authors argue that allowing playful, collaborative, multimodal literacies into primary classrooms and specifically in writers' workshop can expand and enliven the way we see students' literacy strengths. The authors look closely at the unique…

This article proposes ways to authentically amplify writer's workshop for emergent bilinguals. Through the study of one bilingual teacher's mediation in teaching, we examined the affordances that translanguaging and transmodal practices have for emergent bilingual students' writing processes. In this case study, we focused on a writing sequence…

The purposes of this qualitative study, viewed through the New Literacy Studies (NLS) theoretical lens, were to explore third grade students' literacy practices as they composed multimodal informational texts in a digital writing workshop; and examine how these students composed multimodally in a digital format and what their perspectives were on…

The lack of strong literacy skills and practices among students is perhaps the clearest indicator that the education system continues to leave millions of children behind. To advance the reading, writing, and speaking skills of middle and high school students, this study examines a professional development model that brought trained…