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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.

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.

Being literate in today’s world involves more than reading and writing traditional works in print. Students need experiences with a range of multimodal narratives, including animation. Multimodal narratives offer many entry points for engagement, and design plays an important role as readers/viewers navigate their way through these works and make meaning. This qualitative study took place in the U.S. Southwest and involved 20 university students enrolled in a Studio Ghibli Films course. Analysis of coursework using grounded theory and open coding revealed that participants designed nine viewing paths to interpret the films, approaching animated works as narratives, multimodal compositions, cultural/historical artifacts, transformed source materials, products of a director, objects of value, conversations between texts, commentaries, and personal experiences. Participants also composed a wide variety of creative projects that drew on their out‐of‐school interests. Animated works, such as the films of Studio Ghibli, have great potential in education.

Individuals who self‐identify as poor readers can have a range of reading experiences, practices, and abilities. The author examined how adolescents and adults who self‐identified as poor readers (a) found enjoyment in reading an interactive fiction app, (b) why they chose to engage with a text‐based app, and (c) if their involvement with the app changed their reading practices. Participants were heavily involved in reading on the app, and their experiences allowed them to enjoy reading and begin to see themselves as readers in a positive light. However, all participants reported that they were uninterested in reading outside the app. Findings indicate that a positive experience can help youth and adults change how they engage with texts, but more support is required to help them engage with texts more broadly.

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.

Emergent bilingual students draw on their linguistic repertoires, moving fluidly between named languages and varieties to meet communicative ends. However, these translanguaging abilities are often not supported in English‐dominant school settings. The author proposes six design principles that educators can use to create instructional strategies that support emergent bilinguals’ translanguaging in the classroom. The author then describes an instructional activity that was created and implemented following the design principles. During this activity, second‐grade emergent bilingual students used tablets to record and share multilingual e‐books. As a result, not only were students’ translanguaging abilities supported, but students were also able to create bilingual written texts and develop strategies to effectively translate for one another.

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.

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

As our students’ consumption of internet memes through social media increases, a critical perspective toward these memes becomes increasingly important. Memes present teachers with a powerful and relevant way to approach critical analysis and discussion in the 21st‐century classroom. In this article, the authors present a framework for incorporating critical discussion and creation of memes into classrooms. Harnessing the power and prevalence of memes, the authors explore how internet memes can be used as a vehicle for critically engaging students. When they understand the characteristics that make memes an effective vector of cultural transmission, students can more critically recognize, consume, and produce these tools for humor and social and political critique.

This department column explores digital and disciplinary literacies across learning contexts and disciplines within and outside of school. Digital enhancements will encourage readers to post questions, comments, and connections.