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Young students must become proficient in the new literacies of 21st‐century technologies to be considered literate. This department explores how literacy educators can integrate information and communication technologies into the curriculum.

Multimodal composing using digital media has long emphasized forms of meaning making that extend beyond printed text to include a wider range of available semiotic resources. However, recent research has complicated this notion by highlighting how this availability does not follow inevitably from digital tools but arises from the interplay of their often invisible infrastructures (e.g., hardware, interfaces, algorithms, code). Using data from a technology‐rich humanities classroom, the authors explore three frictions that surfaced as students worked within and against these infrastructures to create a collaborative digital story. The authors show how attending to such frictions can open opportunities for inquiry and instruction related to the hidden infrastructures that condition multimodal composing in digital environments. Critical understandings of these infrastructures can support educators in creating more equitable conditions for multimodal literacy learning.

Political memes are argumentative visual texts commonly encountered on social media. Through the strategic combination of imagery and captions, a political meme presents information as fact about a topic, an individual, or a specific group. The power of political memes can be attributed to their viral nature and their effects on public discourse and perceptions. To critically read a political meme, students must be equipped with critical media literacy skills. This article describes how action researchers engaged 56 middle school students in the rhetorical analysis of political memes with the goal of supporting critical media literacy skills through practical application. The two-week study took place in the Southeastern United States at a rural school. Students determined that the political memes created false binaries, appealed to group identities, drew on macro and micro sociopolitical contexts, and used strategic visual arrangements to form an argument. Critical media literacy is imperative given the prevalent and viral nature of media and its effects on people and public policy.

Contemporary students, accustomed to the agency and multimodality afforded by digital media in their out‐of‐school lives, require literature pedagogies that provide currency and appeal while furthering their understandings of literary techniques. Literature circles have long promoted student voice and choice but can lack criticality and attention to literary devices and fail to capitalize on the potential of digital technologies. The authors explore literature circle pedagogies designed to develop knowledge of literary theme and mood, highlighting multimodal responses foregrounding students’ identities. Two analytical lenses, curation and multimodality, underpin this investigation into the opportunities presented through pedagogical design. Curation, an expanded concept of text creation, is used to analyze opportunities for student displays of literary knowledge and identity through multimodal resources. Multimodal resources are understood as combinations of modes of meaning. Together, these analytical lenses offer insight into ways in which multimodal curation pedagogies enable students’ development of literary knowledge.

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.

Print‐based literacy is no longer sufficient for the global digital age. However, distribution of the resources needed to learn new literacies is unequal. The authors describe a qualitative case study conducted with teachers in Kenya who participated in a professional development series on new literacies and inquiry. The professional development involved an inquiry‐based literacy approach that is technology‐rich and learner‐centered. Three themes emerged from the data: shifting to learner‐centered pedagogies: “I’m inspired to improve my teaching”; change is slow but coming: “We need to be empowered with more information about new technologies”; and strategies for teaching new literacies: “Creating is better than just talking.” The discussion focuses on the enduring challenges for educational transformation in Kenya coupled with the substantive changes that are being made by pioneering Kenyan educators.

The authors showcase the use of DocuViz, an information visualization tool, as a means to support middle school students’ online synchronous collaborative writing. The purpose of this study was to explore writing outcomes when students write in groups and independently. Providing students with a tool to help them understand their individual contributions to a collaboratively written Google Doc may be one reason why group‐written essays were significantly longer and received significantly higher rubric scores when compared with the independently written essays. Results also indicated that group writing had a positive impact on later independent essay writing. Student survey results reflect positive reactions to online collaborative writing. The authors conclude with a discussion of the theoretical contributions that this study makes to New Literacies Studies and provide guidelines for teachers interested in supporting students’ writing development through technology‐enhanced strategies that position students as partners in the writing process.

The author investigated the relation between young people's new literacies practices and identity development on Twitter and found that participants used three new literacies practices (live‐tweeting, hashtagging, and information sharing) in unique ways to develop feminist identities in this social media space. Participants mobilized popular culture to initiate dialogue about feminist issues, such as the wage gap, to participate in social activism (e.g., advocating for women's reproductive care), and to provide informal counsel to peers. Twitter can be a vital space for young people to become feminists, providing opportunities to learn, develop, and participate.

With young people increasingly learning and communicating through visual and social media, schools are looking for ways to tap into students’ interest in digital media. In a school district in Southern California, a very promising approach to technology use has emerged that integrates digital storytelling into instruction. Findings from a first-year exploratory study suggest that students who engage in digital storytelling develop their academic literacy and important technology and media arts skills. Yet, digital storytelling is being implemented very unevenly in the district, and teachers who wish to implement it face challenges in integrating it into a full curriculum. To achieve more consistent integration and better results, the researchers recommend that the district articulate the role of digital storytelling in district/state curricular goals and develop a framework for implementation consistent with this articulation.

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.