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For literacy educators, there is a need to understand students’ pathways into composition and mediate contemporary, multimodal compositional pathways with more academic ones. In an effort to mediate between middle and high school students’ schooling and curricular demands and their everyday interests and investments in media and communicational systems, the author offers educators a way to frame composition that attends to the potential and affordances of multiple modes of expression and representation. Combining affect theory with Arendt's writings on thinking and embodiment, the author presents a research study with adolescents who made stances in selfies, self‐portraits, and written artist statements that are indicative of new rhetorical and compositional practices. Stance, as a construct in modern compositions, represents the ways that young people interface with ideas and experiences within the world that materialize in and animate their designs. Stance provides young people with a space to tell the stories they want to tell through media and mediums of their choosing.

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.

This case study examines one African American adolescent male's digital choices and experiences during the creation of a digital story about Minecraft. This study introduces digital participatory choice cultures as a framework to consider how he might recognize and use existing meaning‐making and composition strategies to bridge what young people know, do, and learn both within and outside educational settings. Data include interviews, observations, photo elicitation, digital photos, and digital and nondigital texts. First, the author highlights the student's choices to create a topic and digital story. Second, the author examines how the student's digital choices illustrate the literacies, agency, and identities inherent in digital participatory choice culture, which helped him express himself in both cultural and digital ways. The analysis demonstrates how race mattered in the student's digital composition, which suggests that literacy educators can design instruction to learn about and build from their students’ already existing funds of knowledge.

This study uses photovoice to examine the ways in which Chicanx youths hone their critical and multimodal literacy skills in a secondary ethnic studies course. While the institutionalization of secondary ethnic studies courses swiftly expands in school districts across the United States, more research is necessary to understand the nature of these courses. This inquiry examines student photovoice compositions, participant observations, and in‐depth semistructured interviews to ascertain some of the affordances of an ethnic studies course from the perspectives of participating students. The following question guides this paper: How do students articulate the importance of ethnic studies in their lives? Students’ creations of photovoice compositions allowed them to communicate ideas around ethnic studies in authentic ways that valued their cultural practices and resources. Findings highlight student literacies of social action across three domains: individual, community, and structural.

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.

In this article, I focus on the critical literacies of Black and Latinx youth participating in a youth participatory action research project, as well as the pedagogies that engaged those literacies. Critical ethnographic study of the Youth Equity Agents’ literacy practices revealed that they enacted a practice of reading school, wherein they investigated and acted on racial injustices in their local school worlds. Although youth had clearly been investigating injustice as a part of their daily navigations of urban schooling, this practice was engaged and extended in the youth participatory action research project. A pedagogical approach that positioned youth as knowledge producers and centered their social interests facilitated this, as did specific teaching practices such as engaging social theory and exploring the material environments of school. Youth applied this learning to produce digital photo counternarratives with the potential to transform inequity in schooling.

The author explores how one teacher at a newcomer school (a school for recently arrived immigrants) used dialogue journaling and write-alouds as instructional and community-building tools in her work with multilingual ninth-grade students with limited or interrupted formal education in their home countries. The analysis shows how the focal teacher used dialogue journaling to engage students in meaningful writing opportunities that identified and built background knowledge and facilitated context-rich literacy instruction through accompanying scaffolded write-alouds in which comprehensible input was provided. The author concludes with recommendations for how other teachers of language learners can utilize write-alouds and dialogue journaling in their instruction of culturally and linguistically diverse students.

This article describes a recent teacher researcher's investigation of digitized literature study at a Midwestern U.S. high school during the 2015–2016 school year that explored the use of digital literacies to support student‐centered literary analysis. Digital literacy practices position literature students to connect with texts in authentic ways. In their reading of The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, students used the video game Minecraft to re‐create scenes, respond to literary elements, and analyze deeper meanings. The analyses of one particular student resulted in powerful explorations of identity. Using qualitative research tools, the author analyzed her case through observations, interviews, and student‐created artifacts to understand how this popular technology could facilitate literary analysis at the secondary level.

The authors examined the research and activism of 10th graders (ages 15–16) involved in a youth participatory action research project in a course in qualitative research at their small public school in New York City, New York. The authors, a classroom researcher and a high school teacher, looked closely at how the youth researchers used photography, collage, and videography to transform their school hallways into a space for critical conversations about race and gender. The authors examined how the hallways became a civic space shaped by collective youth resistance, multimodal counterstories, and negotiated civic engagement.

Authors featured in this department share anthropological perspectives and qualitative insights to redefine community in adolescent and adult literacy practice.