ELA Resources

In this article, the author centers the voices and experiences of Yazmin, Valeria, Guadalupe, and Monet, four escritoras that participated in Somos Escritoras, a creative space for Latina girls (grades 6-12) that invites them to share and perform stories from their lived experiences using art, theater, and writing as tools for reflection and examination of self and world. For two weeks, these escritoras created art and composed personal stories from their lives that addressed the tensions and contradictions at the intersections of age, language, culture, and ethnicity they navigate daily as Latina girls.

In deciding to devote a Special Issue of the journal to the topic of adolescent literacy, we thought carefully about the role of literacy within the broader enterprise of education, and we asked ourselves two main questions: First, why literacy? And second, why adolescent literacy in particular?

The concept of emergence is a major theme of this volume. It runs the gamut of literacy education, including early childhood, elementary, secondary, teacher education, and community contexts. Collectively, these studies aim to reveal constraining boundaries related to age, language, ability, or discipline. While the notion of emergence signals the initial revelation of a process or phenomena, these studies go beyond. They show practical ways to not only negotiate and exist within these boundaries, but rather how to transcend them in order to generate a more expansive literacy ecologies.

The preponderance of “multi-” is aptly reflected in the articles that we have brought together in this volume. Some of these articles explore how students use and interpret multimodal resources; others examine the multimodal products that students create and how they use those products to produce meaning. Still others focus on multiple perspectives and various aspects of schooling.

This study investigated the extent to which students’ questioning ability is associated with their literacy abilities, attitudes, perceived text understanding, and interest in the text they read. We further examined these relationships by the type of text they read to generate questions.

If literacy educators were to take up the restorative justice paradigm in their teaching, they would use the
three questions in restorative justice to think about the role of English and writing classrooms as gatekeeping
mechanisms in schools:Who has been harmed? What are their needs? Whose obligations are these?

This special issue of Urban Education provides a vision of literacy education that takes seriously the lives, knowledge, and cultures of Girls of Color, creating educational opportunities they deserve. Through articles that explore the connections between research, theory, and practice, this special issue emphasizes the literacies that emerge across multiple communities, within classrooms, in alternative learning spaces, and alongside Women of Color educators.

Research demonstrates that many literary curricula and classroom activities are strongly influenced by standardized tests. This article argues for a definition of rigorous reading that supports critical literacy pedagogy and opposes the narrowing definitions of rigor and complexity that are asserted by the Common Core and PARCC.

"The goal of the #DisruptTexts social media hashtag was to advocate for a more inclusive and restorative curriculum and pedagogical approach in English language arts. By intentionally practicing anti-oppressive and culturally relevant and sustaining literacies, we want to address historic violence and the erasure of marginalized communities, resulting in a pathway toward healing for all students. Here, Ebarvia et al describe the core principles of the work."

"Rodriguez interviews Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena German, Kimberly N. Parker, and Julia Torres, co-founders of #DisruptTexts their together for grassroots change and action in classrooms, libraries, schools, and communities, how they value diversed inclusive education for all students, and how can teachers be more impactful."

In this article, the authors begin by defining critical literacy and critical expressionism. Next, they detail how to teach students to become critically literate and engage in critical expressionism. Then, the authors provide classroom examples of critical literacy in action, traditional and multimodal texts, and critical expressions that students created in response to reading from a critical stance.

This article outlines an understanding of critical literacy, explores its historical roots and theoretical perspectives, discusses critical literacy as a way of being around the globe, highlights orientations to critical literacy and influential models for instruction, shares key tenets, and suggests new directions include: finding new ways to engage with multimodalities and new technologies; engaging with spatiality, time, and space; place-based pedagogies; working across the curriculum in the content areas; and working with multilingual learners.

This paper aims to draw from work in the field of English that questions the “limits of critique” in order to consider the limits of critical literacy approaches to literature instruction. The study focuses on the relational and affective demands that resistant reading places on readers and texts.

This qualitative case study in an urban middle school highlights students’ critical meta-awareness of their identities-in-practice in the figured world of their classroom via a narrative analysis of students’ writing, interviews, and focus group discussions. The author focuses on students’ internalization and/or resistance of the curriculum as a basis for developing culturally sustaining stances toward curriculum, pedagogy, and research that actively disrupt cultural, ethnic, racial, and epistemological hierarchies of power in academic contexts and beyond.

Critical literacy pedagogies are underpinned by theories of social justice. Given the global escalation of gaps between rich and poor, educators everywhere need to put poverty on the agenda in policy and practice.