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Diverse classroom libraries offer opportunities for students to not only see themselves represented in books but also encounter lived experiences and perspectives that are different from their own. As classrooms increasingly include learners with cognitively and physically diverse abilities, teachers are faced with the challenge of selecting literature with humanizing depictions of individuals with disability labels. Historically, portrayals of disabilities in children's literature have included themes of pity and exclusion. In this article, the authors introduce a framework that educators can employ when selecting inclusive literature for their classroom libraries. Using this framework, the authors analyzed three sample picture books that teachers might also share with students to help them read with and against these texts. As a whole, this article offers a starting point for teachers beginning the process of creating inclusive spaces that foster the multitude of ways that students come to be, know, and learn.

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.

The author explores the possibilities that posthumanist thinking offers for amplifying our understanding of multimodality in children's literacies in school and beyond. Drawing on data from a five‐month case study on the multimodal literacy practices of six fifth‐grade students across home, community, and school settings, the author focuses on one 10‐year‐old student. The author uses the student's engagement with graphic novels as a starting place for considering what students’ entanglements with multimodal literacies beyond the classroom can teach us about multimodality in classrooms. The author first discusses multimodality as it is typically framed and then puts this framing into conversation with posthumanist perspectives on literacy learning to open up considerations of what counts as multimodality. Finally, the author discusses ways that thinking with posthumanist concepts such as affect, embodiment, relationship, movement, and place can enhance both multimodal literacy instruction and students’ engagement with literacy.

In this article, the authors present a literacy research project in which humor, popular culture, and improvisational comedy (improv) are viewed as curricular resources to engage students' minds and bodies in multimodal story building, following a posthuman assemblage theory approach to literacy learning. This approach takes students' learning beyond the skills of the six language arts strands to consider how affect, gesture, space, time, and improvisation work together in story writing. The authors invited improv artist Ben Cannon to work in collaboration with two fifth‐grade classroom teachers, their 50 students, and the research team to develop a children's comedy composing workshop. Over the course of two weeks, half‐day workshops employed improv techniques and related activities for composing comedic characters and collaborative comedic stories. In this article, the authors share some of the activities and what they learned about students' oral and written story‐building processes.

Critical literacy provides the opportunity to queer picture books and challenge normative depictions of family. In this autoethnography, the author describes her 4‐year‐old's journey of learning to talk back to texts as she actively constructs a better, more just world. The author argues that a critical literacy tool kit is vital to every child's first experiences with books. Implications for classroom teaching are discussed.

The purpose of this article is to explore the potential of artistic design to promote critical literacy among adult learners. Conducted by a university literacy educator and a university art educator, this qualitative study examined adults’ divergent perspectives in the design of a mosaic at a center for the homeless. Participants included a university art educator, undergraduates, and outreach center clients. Data included transcribed interviews, written reflections, and field notes. Data were coded and themes identified and reexamined to accurately describe the project's potential for promoting critical literacy. Findings demonstrate how design, a contested literacy space, disrupted social habits, challenged stereotypes, negotiated texts, and transformed perceptions. Yet, time, institutional constraints, missed opportunities for critical dialogue, and other coercive elements limited the project's transformative potential. This suggests that such projects can be an important step toward adults’ critical literacy but are insufficient for garnering long‐term consequences.

The authors investigated improvisational theater and the possibilities that it presents for reconsidering reading pedagogy, with a focus on discussions of reading. The authors conducted empirical, qualitative studies of improvisational practice and instruction and analyzed improv through the construct of worlding. In this article, the authors explore different dimensions of worlding, a concept that generally describes how ensembles make present and create unique events in time. Next, the authors offer a vision of reading discussions that emerges from rethinking and refeeling such discussions through forms of worlding found in improvisation. The authors conclude by offering five improvinspired teaching practices for discussions of reading: (1) teaching as invoking the text, (2) teaching as exchanging offers, (3) teaching as attuning, (4) teaching as following lines of flight, and (5) teaching as activating embodied energy.

Throughout its history, the ecology of the picturebook has been impacted by various social and cultural changes. Postmodernism is one perspective, among other conceptual and theoretical frameworks, that has been proposed to explain some of the fundamental changes evident in many contemporary picturebooks. A review of the literature (Pantaleo & Sipe, 2008) reveals agreement among researchers and theorists that metafiction is one of the most prominent features exhibited in postmodern literature. Succinctly, metafiction draws the attention of readers to how texts work and to how meaning is created through the use of a number of devices or techniques. Following an overview of postmodern picturebooks and metafictive devices, the author provides an analysis of the metafictive devices evident in the picturebook NO BEARS (McKinlay & Rudge, 2012). The article concludes with a discussion of how postmodern picturebooks with metafictive devices can contribute to students' development as readers, writers, and creative thinkers.

Adolescents often use root word and affix knowledge to figure out unknown words. Anglin (1993) found that younger readers favor the Part-to-Whole strategy, and Tyler and Nagy (1989) confirmed the importance of root-word knowledge for middle school students. This study seeks to understand the different strategies middle school readers use so that teachers can leverage these approaches in future morphological instruction. The authors interviewed 20 seventh- and eighth-grade students from two middle schools in the Southeastern United States. Males and females were represented evenly across sites. They chose these two schools because each served populations of either proficient or struggling readers and could showcase the problem-solving strategies used by these different groups of readers. Study data were collected through 20-minute interviews led by the authors of this article. Students were asked to problem solve 12 morphologically complex words, with follow-up questions about their problem-solving processes. Because they focused on how students might use morphology beyond orthography and phonology, when students mispronounced a word, the interviewer gave them the correct pronunciation. Based on their findings, the authors discuss strategies and make instructional recommendations to support students in determining word meanings. The article concludes that although only part of comprehensive vocabulary instruction, morphological problem-solving strategies can be powerful tools in a student's literacy tool belt. Their analysis suggests students use sophisticated strategies when trying to figure out the meanings of morphologically complex words. (Contains 6 figures and 3 tables.)

This column addresses the importance of developing critical thinking to meet the demands of 21st‐century literacies and participatory democracy. The author argues for a critical approach to digital literacies that explores the sociological nature of literacy practices. Students examine examples of new literacies and analyze how ideologies are represented in multimodal texts. Then students use critical understandings of how these texts work in the world to create their own multimodal texts that can act as counter narratives pushing back against mainstream ideologies that exclude diverse perspectives.