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The authors closely analyzed 45 children's books featuring characters with refugee backgrounds that had been published since 2013. With the concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy underpinning the review, analysis revealed that these texts are rich and detailed, providing a starting point for discussing the global refugee crisis with students, but they occasionally fall short in providing complex, multidimensional representations of characters’ lives and experiences. A majority of the texts analyzed focus on the journey in search of a safe place to live, whereas very few focus on the complexity of making a life in a new place. The findings highlight the importance of identifying texts that provide complexity, dimension, and specificity in depicting experiences of refugee‐background characters across settings. Opening classrooms to texts about the diversity of refugee experiences invites teachers and their students to critically explore the important global issues of migration, equity, and ways of being human.

Children's literature text sets can be powerful tools for teaching students about diversity and literacy, engaging students in authentic purposes for literacy practices while exploring complex issues such as Islamophobia. The authors discuss how an intermediate public school teacher integrated a children's literature text set project exploring Muslim characters and communities to foster students' critical thinking, deepen their comprehension, and develop their empathy. Discussion of the texts and multimodal responses inspired students to engage in further inquiry, reflect on stereotypes, and implement a social action project: a pen pal exchange with students in Bangladesh, a Muslim country. This unit provided a safe space for students to explore a complex issue while developing critical literacy skills. As students better understand and learn to empathize with diverse others through text, they realize that people share more similarities than differences, decreasing the potential for Islamophobia in classrooms and society.

Nonfiction children's literature has changed in recent years, including an increase in organizational, design, and text features. The authors conducted a content analysis of 112 nonfiction award-winning and honor books from 2000 to 2018 to examine how the books have changed over time. The authors discuss the patterns, changes, and complexities found in nonfiction children's literature and provide text sets and guiding questions for classroom instruction and exploration of three features that appear in books in a variety of ways and may be challenging for students: atypical text, graphics with information, and supplemental expository information.

Evolving digital technologies provide opportunities to engage students in activities that go beyond print‐based reading and writing and help them develop skills for reading, writing, and communicating with digital technology. Virtual reality apps are a rapidly emerging form of digital technology that provides immersive experiences in real or imagined environments. Virtual reality creates sensory experiences that involve sight, touch, hearing, and motion to allow users to feel as though they are physically present in that environment. These types of immersive experiences can be used to engage learners in multimodal literacy practices as well as scientific practices such as forming hypotheses and interpreting data to inform courses of action. The author provides a classroom example of using virtual reality in an integrated science and literacy lesson to engage students in discovering, answering, and writing about questions they developed as they explored a virtual environment.

This study analyzes the importance of selecting adequate picture books to facilitate the acquisition of new vocabulary with young EFL learners, taking into account the complexity of the narration, the complexity of the illustrations, and the appropriate number of sessions. The study was conducted with a class of twenty‐two 3‐year‐old students at a charter school in Madrid, Spain. Results showed that students learned more vocabulary when the narration consisted of simple sentences or single words and when the books had at most three elements per page, with a clear distinction between those elements and the background. This study shows the importance of making a good selection of picture books to be used as a tool in the EFL class and offers the possibility for further studies with a bigger sample, also analyzing factors such as the length of the books and the number of target vocabulary words considered.

The author shares three preservice teachers’ linked text sets, including young adult literature and other media forms, and their critiques of the linked text sets, centering on a self-selected social justice topic: racism and the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, rape culture, and ending the stigma behind mental health. The author ends with discussion of how the preservice teachers felt advocacy and agency through creating and then critiquing their linked text sets and what recognizing their implicit biases means to their future students and teaching. The author hopes that by sharing what these three preservice teachers found in their critiques of their work, other educators may be able to not only use these text sets and suggested text additions and create new linked text sets for their students, but also think about their own curricular decisions through a critical lens.

Writer's checklists are evidence-based procedural facilitators that prompt students to actively engage in the writing process. Students with diverse learning needs experience problems when composing texts because of the complex steps involved. To write effectively, students must focus on understanding prompts; setting goals; generating, organizing, and translating ideas; revising content; and editing for conventions. This lengthy process often negatively affects struggling writers’ working memory and ability to self-regulate the writing process. A writer's checklist, an explicit step-by-step action plan, can be used to scaffold struggling writers’ progress and minimize challenges. Writers’ checklists serve not only as concrete reminders of the steps needed to accomplish writing tasks but also as self-checks to keep students focused and promote self-regulation. In this teaching tip, the authors recommend using a writer's checklist at the initial stages of the writing process, namely planning and drafting, before implementing it at the revising and editing stages.

Many professionals, including members of the International Literacy Association, are concerned with the lack of reading materials in classrooms across the world. In this paper, the authors present the creation of high‐quality, locally produced, complementary reading materials in Malawi, where there are very few children's books and few opportunities to read extended texts. The authors describe their approach to the creation of those materials, using engagement as their theoretical frame. Because many teachers in countries such as Malawi (and in many schools in the United States) often receive books that are culturally and linguistically inappropriate, the authors argue for the importance of local reading materials that take engagement into consideration as teachers make decisions about the reading materials they use in their classrooms.

Finding culturally relevant informational books for a classroom library can be difficult. However, expanding the definition of informational text to include procedural forms, specifically cookbooks, can enhance the cultural relevance, range, and number of books available for students to read. Reasons for placing cookbooks in the classroom library include promoting reader interest and providing opportunities for students to read short yet predictable texts. Additionally, cookbooks contain the technical vocabulary of the culinary arts, thus helping readers expand their knowledge of food science. Criteria for selecting cookbooks for the classroom library include layout, font, photographs, physical size, content, and representations of the world and its people.

This forum reviews a mix of resources (written texts, graphic novels, documentaries, and mixed‐media pieces) to inform pedagogy and related educational practices that foreground representations of youths and their literacy practices within and outside of school.