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Literacy educators can guide students to examine the stories we live by, or the larger narratives that guide individual and collective sensemaking about relationships between humans and the environment. Drawing from the field of ecolinguistics, the authors consider two ecologically destructive stories we live by: Humans are the center of existence, and consumerism is a main pathway to happiness and fulfillment. The authors also explore three intersecting beneficial stories we live by that center on indigenous perspectives, feminist foundations of climate justice, and youth activism. This work is rooted in three essential understandings about climate change: It is a complex socioscientific topic and escalating problem, engaging with climate change is mediated primarily by a complicated array of motivated digital texts and motivated readers, and climate change is about climate (in)justice. The authors conclude with ideas about being a climate justice literacy educator.

This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates.

Discussions about literacy assessment can often be polarizing for teachers, school administrators, and other stakeholders. Given the diverse and often charged perspectives on assessment within both the profession and the broader public discourse, it can be difficult to engage in productive dialogue about the role that literacy assessment plays in promoting or inhibiting effective models of literacy education. This department provides perspectives, questions, and research that enables readers to better advocate for themselves and their students as they develop their own assessment programs and respond to assessment programs that are imposed on them.

Recently, many have released calls for the need to help students evaluate online information. Additionally, many have offered strategies, lists, and other heuristics for helping students evaluate. However, educators lack a method for organizing these various practices into a systematic framework that captures the complex (occurring within online inquiry) and multifaceted (having multiple components) nature of evaluation. Such a framework can guide students as they evaluate information online. The author proposes such a framework that positions readers as proactive judges engaging in iterative evaluation of relevancy and credibility within and across three tiers (content, source, and context) and multiple texts while researching a topic of interest during online research and comprehension. The author also offers three instructional practices for engaging students in the framework, as well as an example of one student using the framework with support from his teacher.

This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates.

The author describes a literacy activity that took place in an 11th-grade English language arts classroom: student-created role-play. Through a discussion of two such role-plays, the author explores how these performances illustrate students’ engagement with raciolinguistic ideologies that marginalize certain speakers through the simultaneous processes of being seen and heard through deficit perspectives. Students collaboratively designed role-plays that demonstrated their understandings of how their language practices were (mis)heard by linguistic gatekeepers. In analyzing these performances, the author shows how students creatively represented their grapplings with raciolinguistic ideologies and the white listening subjects who maintain them. The author discusses how educators can take a critical translingual approach to language and literacy classrooms, encouraging students—through multilingual, multimodal texts, writing assignments, and activities such as role-play—to interrogate and disrupt such oppressive ideologies.

Culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) has emerged as an essential way to value the evolution of culture among diverse learners. Discussions around teaching in a culturally sustaining manner in the English language arts classroom, specifically when teaching literary analysis, often address the need to incorporate multicultural literature so that students are exposed to stories told from diverse perspectives. However, the reality in many schools is that teachers do not have ownership over their curriculum in a way that allows them to choose which texts they read and study with students. In this context, culturally sustaining teaching presents a difficult challenge. In this literature review, the author presents classroom strategies that apply a critical literacy lens to analysis of canonical literature as a way to create a place for culturally sustaining teaching within a prescribed curriculum.

In this forum, practitioners reflect on their experiences as they respond to the following question: How do you think about antiracist reading practices and what are some ways that you incorporate them into your pedagogy? Three educators across high school and college settings recount their personal journeys developing antiracist reading practices and share strategies for readers to consider their own entry points into critical reflection and action.

Black women have been and continue to be objectified, mistrusted to voice their own realities, and pushed to the margins even among other people of color, yet expected to lead and contribute their lives and labor. In this piece, we focus on curricular and epistemic violence evidenced through omission and distortions of Black women in English Language Arts and World Languages and advocate for a centering of Black women’s voices and perspectives in ways that affirm their humanity across both contexts. We come together as literacy educators to offer strategies to support the inclusion and integration of Black women’s voices and experiences throughout secondary language and literacy learning spaces.

This forum focuses on the intersections of texts and identities with the aim of selecting and mediating texts that readers and writers find valuable within and outside of formal educational settings.