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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.

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.

Infographics are appearing in children’s magazines, picture books, and informational texts. Understanding, and ultimately creating, these complex visual representations of information or data requires higher level thinking skills to analyze and understand how the text and graphics work together to convey meaning. The authors provide a framework for infographic exploration, investigation, creation, and integration into larger writing pieces. Each phase of the framework includes specific considerations to assist teachers in scaffolding their students’ infographic learning. Providing students with support through exposure to many types of infographics and modeling infographic interpretation prepares students to critically examine and use infographics as they encounter them both in and out of school.

The authors document work in a fifth-grade classroom investigating informational texts. Students investigated a range of informational texts and their potential forms. In the spirit of challenging a given curriculum and conventional understandings of informational texts, texts in the Science Comics series were invited into this learning space. Along with other texts, the science comics were positioned as exemplar informational texts and graphic nonfiction. Additionally, these comics supported students in questioning what nonfiction is and can be. Fifth graders went on to draw from these comics as mentor texts, composing their own nonfiction comics. Students were positioned as investigators and creators, becoming creative experts on informational texts. Working with and creating multiple forms of informational texts supported students in being critical consumers and producers of information.

The authors featured in this department column share instructional practices that support transformative literacy teaching and disrupt “struggling reader” and “struggling writer” labels.

The authors document research completed in 10th‐grade language arts classes where a canonical play was read alongside a graphic novel in the hopes of shifting student understandings of power and privilege in literature. Using teacher action research as a methodological framework for this qualitative study, a teacher and researcher engaged in long‐term fieldwork and participant observation as a means of investigating what happens when nontraditional texts are paired with canonical works in diverse secondary classrooms. Findings illustrate that by placing a work of the dominant literary study tradition in dialogue with a contemporary graphic novel, students accessed multiple perspectives that allowed for emotional, academic, and critical learning. Additionally, findings speak to the value of multimodal composing as a way to privilege student voice in conversations across various literary narratives and forms.

Authors and columns in this department explicitly focus on adult literacy, addressing issues of research, policy, and practice relevant to a wide range of adult learners in different contexts.

The authors detail how one fourth‐grade teacher implemented a comics writers’ workshop in the weeks that concluded the academic school year. Each phase of the comics writers’ workshop is described. Students interpreted and analyzed the words, images, and design features that compose published comics before constructing and publishing their own multimodal comics text. The authors show that multimodal literacies instruction recognizes the multiple ways in which students can represent and communicate their thinking, and they argue that multimodal literacies instruction should occur throughout the curriculum across the school year.

In this case study, the author showcases a Mexican teen’s testimonios, crossing borders through poetry and art. The author grounds this work within Anzaldúa’s nepantla (in‐between space) and nepantlera border artist notions and draws from Sepúlveda’s pedagogy of acompañamiento (accompaniment). During a larger project, the author, a former teacher, reunited with former elementary students the summer before 10th grade. The author focuses on one participant, Valeria, and her nepantlera border artist empathy, revealing her embodied experiences over time. The author seeks to show how acompañamiento coupled with testimonios creates apertures across time. Implications include a teacher’s acompañamiento in establishing creative nepantla spaces outside of traditional educational structures. This fosters confianza (trust) to express testimonios, uncovering a holistic understanding of students’ lives. Testimonios in this study promote healing, empowerment, and transformation amid various modalities for students in the educational system, creatively enhancing teachers’ literacy instruction.

The authors offer a new perspective on close reading that uses a range of multimodal texts to capitalize on the visual nature of contemporary society and to support literacy within the academic disciplines. Specifically, a qualitative study explored teachers' perspectives on the use of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a practice borrowed from museum educators that replicates close reading processes, to support literacy learning within subject areas. The analysis revealed teachers' beliefs that VTS supported students' academic vocabulary development and accountable talk. In addition, the teachers felt that VTS created a safe environment for all students to participate, thus providing access to the curriculum. The authors argue that teachers can adapt VTS to help students meet the needs of 21st century communication modes as they analyze and create print and nonprint texts in different forms of media.