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In this commentary, the authors move beyond digital literacy and take up the question of what digital citizenship means and looks like in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. To engage with questions of ethical practice, the authors begin with the International Society for Technology in Education framework for digital citizenship. They expand on these standards to argue for an awareness of the ethical questions facing citizens online that are difficult to encompass as a set of skills or competencies. The authors then take these considerations into a set of practical steps for teachers to nurture participatory and social justice–oriented digital citizenship as part of the curriculum. The authors conclude by noting the digital divide and social inequities that have been highlighted by the current crisis.

Since the 1960s, a group of educators and researchers have championed the idea that learning coding and learning to read and write are, in some sense, part of the same skill set, but the grounds for asserting that similarity have continually shifted. Some have argued that as texts increasingly integrate digital components, expertise in coding will become a central part of reading in the 21st century. Others seem to use the word literacy simply to mean an important skill, without necessarily asserting a deeper similarity. In this study of novice writers and programmers in a second‐grade classroom, the authors explored a third hypothesis: that there is a fundamental relation between the activities involved in creating a written story and in creating a computer program. The findings of this research suggest that teachers can use a combination of coding and writing to reinforce students’ acquisition of the writing process.

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.

There is far more to the digital divide than meets the eye. In this article, the authors consolidate existing research on the digital divide to offer some tangible ways for educators to bridge the gap between the haves and have‐nots, or the cans and cannots. Drawing on Aldous Huxley's notion of a “brave new world,” some digital divide approaches and frameworks require debunking and are strongly associated with first‐world nations that fail to account for the differential access to technologies that people who live in poverty have. Taking a closer look at current realities, the authors send out a call to teachers, administrators, and researchers to think more seriously and consequentially about the effect the widespread adoption of technologies has had on younger generations and the role of the digital on knowledge creation and on imagined futures.

This department column is a venue for thoughtful discussions of contemporary issues dealing with policy and practice, remixed in ways that generate new insights into enduring dilemmas, debates, and controversies.

In an age of mobile technologies, digital animation creation can be an important tool for teaching adolescents how to communicate emotions multimodally. This article draws on appraisal theory and original research to illustrate the power of digital animation for multimodal literacy learning. Students from a culturally diverse cohort were taught how to interpret emotions in animated films and produced 2‐D cartoon animations using drawings with an iPad application and stylus. The findings show that impassioned multimodal communication is enhanced by knowledge of how feelings produce different facial expressions, gestures, body movements, and physiological changes in characters that are often exaggerated to powerful effect in animations. This includes an ability to invoke different intensities of emotions. The research has significant implications for engaging adolescents in the multimodal communication of emotions and feelings through vocabulary, images, and body language.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing from Appadurai’s notion of mediascape, in which global cultural flows simultaneously construct local/global perspectives, I explored how youth and young adults across the globe make sense of digitally shared space, with a specific focus on the Webtoon reader discussion forum. Findings illustrated that the participants constructed the notion of care as standing up for others, raised awareness of social justice, and mobilized transcultural values to construct a cross-cultural community with multimodal engagements. By understanding the reader discussion forum as a mutually constitutive negotiated space, the voluntary decision of these young individuals to engage in Korean Webtoon digital space underscores how they construct literacy practices across the globe while transcending demarcated categories of race, gender, language, culture, and other essentialized identity markers.