Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.