A very successful preschool project the author did at Ohio State University's Schoenbaum Family Center combined students' interest in storytelling, drama, and multiple literacies. For this particular project, a classic children's fairy tale was used, though the project is easily adaptable for other stories, texts, content, and age levels. In this…

Donna E. Alvermann, Distinguished Research Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia in Athens, received recognitions and honors as a scholar/leader in adolescent literacy. Her thoughts about contexts for literacy learning challenge that the divide between in- and out-of-school literacy learning is real and needs…

As a way to respond to the contemporary challenges for promoting multiliteracies and multimodality in education, the current study proposes a theoretical framework--the multiliteracies model--in identifying, developing and evaluating multimodal material. The article examines, first theoretically and then empirically, the promotion of…

Youths' learner-generated designs, instantiated in digital practices, spaces and artifacts, are underutilized in schools. Additionally, digital media tools are often taken up in reductive ways that serve to perpetuate deficit discourses for youth from nondominant communities, rather than reflect the creativity and innovation that youth practice…

This paper presents a study of teachers' perceptions of '21st century literacy' practices and the dilemmas teacher face when these perceptions clash with the policies and the practices they feel are expected of them. Using narrative inquiry as its methodology, the paper presents 3 themes identified within the study, namely: 'Teachers' insights…

A new generation of students should learn from e-materials on tablets, notebooks and smart phones. This consequently means that teachers must be competent to teach new literacies, needed for reading/learning from PDF texts, hypertexts and/or World Wide Web. The presented research investigated future teachers' metacognitive awareness in the process…

In November 2008, the National Council of Teachers of English published "The NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies" (21CL); its objectives include using technology, producing and analyzing multimedia texts, accessing and evaluating complex research sources, building relationships to enable collaboration, considering the diversity of a global…

The study explored how the use of digital news stories promoted the development of content knowledge and oral language skills. The study involved 15 advanced Spanish students who used VoiceThread, an interactive multimedia tool, to create and exchange digital news regarding current events over the course of one semester. Both quantitative and…

"English Teaching and New Literacies Pedagogy: Interpreting and Authoring Digital Multimedia Narratives" is about the fusion of media and narrative, and explores theoretical and practical dimensions of young people's engagement with contemporary forms of text. It showcases a range of critical interpretative approaches for integrating…

The authors present a new young adult novel as a focal point for preparing prospective secondary teachers to employ a rich variety of literacies to enhance literature instruction. The hope is to encourage literature teachers to consider a wide range of useful methodologies available across generations of educational research. By demonstrating how…

This paper examines emerging forms of multilingualism and multiliteracy in rural India (where the term "literacy" is used broadly here to include digital media literacy and marketing literacy as well as literacy in the traditional sense of the knowledge of a writing system). Here forces of globalization and digital communication have…

A subcommittee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Executive Committee wrote the "NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing" in 2004. In over a decade since, the everyday experience of writing in people's lives has expanded dramatically. Increasingly, handheld devices are important instruments for people's writing,…

Thanks to technology, the last 15 years have witnessed change on a scale unknown since the Industrial Revolution. Instant access to unlimited information--and the ability to share it with anyone, anywhere, anytime--has altered the world forever. On that, most educators agree. It's also where the consensus stops. Even as their students step into…

For students who sense no fluidity between their academic context and their personal contexts, what's at stake is more than just their scholastic achievement--rather, their development as individual agents who exist in larger social and historical contexts is jeopardized. When teachers and schools neglect to recognize the legitimacy of…

Research on service-learning offers compelling evidence of the advances student learners make in moral development, orientation to prosocial behavior, and curricular content retention. But who are those student learners? Most studies focus on native, dominant-culture, dominant-language students serving marginalized populations. Studies of the…