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Culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy is an asset‐based approach to teaching and learning. In this way, students’ identities, languages, and cultures are centered in the learning experience, creating a sense of belonging. The authors observed culturally relevant and sustaining approaches to teaching and learning while visiting schools in New Zealand as part of a three‐week study abroad program. Specifically, the authors observed how teachers in New Zealand centered Maori and Pasifika cultures into daily instruction and learning. Together as teacher educators, an inservice teacher, and a preservice teacher, the authors examine the importance of culturally relevant and sustaining teaching and share their observations of how students’ cultures are honored through writing and arts integration in the classrooms visited in New Zealand. The authors describe how a fifth‐grade teacher applied lessons learned from her visit to New Zealand in her own classroom context in the United States.

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.

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.

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.

Previous research has revealed that U.S. schools are hostile and unsafe for queer youth, yet school-based supports, such as LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum, are associated with more welcoming schools. Studies focusing on inclusive curriculum have implicitly characterized this curriculum didactically, in other words, as a direct intervention into the homophobia, transphobia, and ignorance of straight, cisgender students. Drawing on a yearlong literacy ethnography at a public high school in a Midwestern U.S. city, I explored the complex layers of queer-inclusive curriculum’s significance. Focusing on two illustrative Socratic seminar assignments from a sophomore humanities course, I argue that the queer-inclusive curriculum was consequential less because it functioned didactically and more because it fostered a classroom context where youth’s already existing queer activism could flourish. These classroom examples suggest the importance of literacy educators collaborating with youth to offer choice alongside curriculum that represents religiously and racially diverse queer communities, queer joy, and possibilities beyond binaries.

This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

Over the course of a year, student authors in the Juntos NC Writing Project participated in the Literary and Community Initiative to write, publish, and share their lived experiences and identities as Latinx immigrants and first-generation high school students in North Carolina. Throughout the publication process of their collaborative bilingual book titled The Voices of Our People: Nuestras Verdades, student authors actively engaged in pursuing advocacy and activism in three ways: (1) community space as an intentional space for advocacy, (2) writing as a vehicle for collective advocacy, and (3) publishing and sharing as an opportunity for youth activism. The participants’ words and actions demonstrated how youth in community organizations can use literacy practices to collectively advocate for their community and become activists who write about and vocalize immigrant youth’s strengths and needs.

The authors examined how youth from the Northern Virginia region communicated their thoughts on significant social issues, school‐level policies, and individual stresses through collaboratively authored spoken word poetry. This poetry was written during a day of out‐of‐school arts‐based inquiry workshops planned by an intergenerational youth participatory action research collective that works to foster connections and conversations about topics important to youth today. The findings highlight youth coresearchers’ words and analysis to enact youth participatory action research methodology as critical pedagogy and critical literacy. Analysis points to specific ways that school adults can help students’ voices be heard. The authors encourage other collectives and educators to consider using spoken word poetry as a tool to honor, amplify, and theorize youth knowledges so their calls for change can be heard.

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.

This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.