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This department focuses on literacy leaders, including school and instructional leaders, teachers, and external partners, who are working to improve outcomes for adolescent and adult learners in a wide range of education settings. Columns investigate the challenges and complexities inherent in such work and share lessons learned, impactful strategies and approaches, and promising pathways forward.

The authors describe how a community museum created and curated by adult education students acted as an innovative and student‐centered model to support learners in developing and demonstrating their literacy skills and knowledges. Using a case study approach to document and analyze students’ counterstories (i.e., stories that disrupt dominant narratives), the authors highlight the ways in which creating and curating a community museum leveraged adult students’ expertise and opened opportunities for meaningful civic action through counterstorying. The authors aim to provide adult literacy educators with a concrete example of how an expansive understanding of literacy skills within their curriculum, including the literacies of making and design, can support students’ development of relevant content literacies and workforce competencies, including researching, multimodal composing, speaking, and collaborating.

The authors illustrate how literacy and language arts teachers work with students to help them act and engage as agents in and beyond school. The authors demonstrate how teachers design environments for learning and practice and how young people use resulting skills and motivations intentionally as a result of their experiences in those environments. With certain conditions in place, students learn to engage purposefully as leaders their communities. The authors offer examples of how teachers help students engage in literate practices, demonstrate how young people think about literacy in their lives, and celebrate how students use their learning to attain their goals beyond academic achievement. The authors conclude by noting how systematic design of engaging school spaces reflects research-based findings about literacy engagement in high school classrooms, encouraging teachers to create conditions for engagement purposefully to support all youths in all contexts for similar success.

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.

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.

The study focuses on a digital storytelling project conducted in a school district's transition program, in which adolescent refugee and immigrant English learners were invited to share aspects of their identities and social worlds through a range of modes. In this article, the authors look closely at one student's digital story through a multimodal analysis of three slides. The findings show how engaging with nonlinguistic modes provided enhanced opportunities for the student to explore and make visible complex and facets of his life and identity, particularly as they relate to difficult past experiences.

Research has shown that student choice of text and increased time spent on reading independently are two factors that can result in an increase in students’ reading motivation and enjoyment. The authors investigated implementation of evidence‐based practices to show how they played out in a high school English language arts classroom. The research was guided by two questions: (1) How does choice affect the reading motivation of a group of high school students? (2) How does silent reading time in class affect these students’ perceptions of reading? Findings reveal that students valued freedom of text choice, leading to increased reading self‐concepts and reading value. In addition, dedicating class time to reading and literature circle discussions helped students have more positive reading experiences than otherwise. These findings suggest benefits from flexibility in literature selection and instructional time, thereby providing a space in the classroom for student‐driven reading and discussion.

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.

Over a century of research on postsecondary learning has documented that students often struggle with the academic literacy demands of college. Academic literacy tasks are the subset of all academic tasks that involve reading and writing and are rooted within larger cultural practices. These demands are challenging, complex, and varied, so students need help preparing before they enter college. Although there are many reasons why preparing students for academic literacy tasks is difficult, there are some ways that educators can help. The author discusses the academic literacy demands in college by examining some of the reasons why it is difficult to fully prepare students and several ways that educators can help students on the path toward college readiness.

Educators of young students who want to invigorate relationships with students’ families and boost student literacy can do so by cocreating culturally sustaining texts. A culturally sustaining text seeks to sustain a reader’s cultures, literacies, and backgrounds. The author shares step‐by‐step instructions on how to make a culturally sustaining text with students and their families using photos from the students’ neighborhoods and a language experience approach. Four major outcomes were found: School personnel increased their understanding of students’ home context, families were more willing to come into school, schools and families built relationships that paved the way for future communication, and students gained a culturally sustaining text to support their literacy learning.