Why are we doing this? Teacher and student perspectives on literary reading

Purpose This paper aims to examine the extent to which students’ experiences and perceptions of their literature classroom align with their teacher’s instructional goals for literary inquiry and what teachers can learn from gaining access to students’ perspectives on their classroom experiences. Design/methodology/approach Thematic analyses were used to examine the data sources: mid-year and end-of-year interviews with six students, audio recordings of the teacher’s rationale for her instructional designs and a reflective discussion with the teacher upon reading the student interviews three years later. Findings Much of what the teacher intended students to get out of her instruction was what they expressed learning and experiencing in the class, yet some understood the purpose of the class to be far from her intentions. All the interviewed students had deeply personal and varied ways of relating what they learned in class to the world and their own lives. The teacher’s reflection on the interviews highlighted the importance of making space for multiple meanings and perspectives on literary works. Originality/value This paper speaks to the importance of surfacing students’ individual and varied ways of making sense of literary texts as part of instruction that values students’ thinking as well as the epistemic commitments of literary reading.

Designing interpretive communities toward justice: indexicality in classroom discourse

Purpose This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality. Findings The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community. Originality/value This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.

Critical, contextualized, content-rich: revisiting the call for humanizing pedagogies in literacy methods instruction

Purpose In this study, the authors draw upon 10 years of collaborative teaching and research as two, White, women literacy teacher educators to theorize the role of humanizing pedagogies within literacy teacher education and share explicit examples of how these pedagogies might be operationalized in actual classroom settings. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on 10 years of qualitative, teacher inquiry research on authors’ shared practice as literacy teacher educators and has included focus groups with students, the collection of student work and extensive field notes on class sessions. Findings Contextualized within decades-old calls for humanizing teacher education practices, this study puts forward a framework for teaching literacy methods that centers critical, locally contextualized, content-rich approaches and provides detailed examples of how this study implemented this framework in two contrastive teacher education settings comprising different institutional barriers, regional student populations and program mandates. Originality/value The proposed framework of critical, locally contextualized and content-rich literacy methods offers one possibility for reconciling the divergent debates that perpetually shape literacy teaching and learning. As teachers are prepared to enter classrooms, the authors model concrete approaches and strategies for teaching reading within and against a sociopolitical landscape imbued with White supremacist ideals and racial bias.

Generating, weaving and curating: disciplinary processes for reading literary text

Purpose The purposes of this study is to expand on previous work in English language arts (ELA) disciplinary literacy and to unpack literary text reading processes across three different participant groups. Design/methodology/approach The authors recruited literary scholars and first-year college students to read literary texts aloud and voice their thoughts. Transcripts were collaboratively coded and analyzed using a priori and emergent coding. Findings This study presents the findings in two ways. First, this study grouped the codes into four categories, namely, background knowledge, comprehension, disciplinary knowledge and building an interpretation. This described the differences in frequencies among the participants’ strategy use. Next, to more fully describe how participants read literary texts, this study presents the data using three processes, namely, generating, weaving and curating. These findings indicate a continuum of strategies and processes used by participants. Practical implications The study suggests using the ELA heuristic for instruction, which includes moving students beyond generating and weaving by asking them to do their own interpretive work of curation. This potential roadmap for instruction avoids a deficit mindset for students by recommending low-stakes opportunities that meet students where they are as they build their capacity for interpretive moves. Originality/value The findings help the field to gain an understanding of what novices and experts do when they read literary text, including both strategies and processes. This study also provide an ELA heuristic that has instructional implications. This study adds to the body of knowledge for disciplinary literacy in ELA in both theoretical and practical ways.

“I haven’t earned the right to just play around with my literacy programme”: strategies, tactics and policy actors/subjects

Purpose The purpose of this New Zealand study is to analyse the influence of the literacy course from an initial teacher education degree, to support beginning teachers to view themselves as policy actors, not mere policy subjects. In our role as teacher educators, we sought to support beginning teachers to find freedom within the constraints of official literacy policy to include multiliteracies. Design/methodology/approach Using de Certeau’s dialectic of strategies and tactics, the authors critically analysed the influence of the literacy course. The data included an assignment from the literacy course, an end-of-literacy course survey and a follow-up interview six months into their first teaching position with a group of five beginning primary school teachers. Findings The findings shed light on our apparent inability to support beginning teachers to see themselves as policy actors/subjects. The analysis reveals the beginning teachers’ tactical responses to our strategies intended to position them as policy actors. The analysis also illustrates how the tactics the authors deployed were viewed as strategies by the beginning teachers, ironically further solidifying the literacy policy they had sought to critique and destabilise and (re)positioning them as policy subjects. Originality/value de Certeau’s framework supported the illumination of the complex interplay of strategies and tactics deployed by ourselves and beginning teachers as the authors sought to support them to identify the freedoms within the constraints of official literacy policy. Any future attempt to develop beginning teachers as policy actors/subjects will benefit from the careful examination of the strategies and tactics at play in initial teacher education.

Interpreting old texts with new tools: Digital multimodal composition for a high school reading assignment

Purpose Research on nonschool settings suggests young people benefit from digital multimodal composition. Less is known about how digital composing can support students as they interpret required literary class texts. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of digitally composing for literary analysis, design interviews with two high school students were conducted to examine their processes as they designed digital multimodal compositions to interpret Anglo-Saxon poems. Grounded in the social semiotic theory of multimodality, this study aims to examine how students engaged in literary analysis and interpretive digital composition within secondary ELA. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative classroom data were collected through digital means over a six-week period: a whole-class student survey, focal student semistructured design interviews, emails, field notes, analytic memos and student-created digital artifacts. Findings Students’ print-based literary engagements and digital multimodal composition processes were mutually shaped. Additionally, digital multimodal composition offered entry points into challenging print-based literary texts, resulting in understandings enacted across multiple forms of mediation. Research limitations/implications The study focused on one cycle of multimodal composition. Additional studies of students’ digital multimodal composition processes in ELA classrooms over time could be beneficial to the field. Practical implications The study identifies an approach to digital multimodal composition that may help teachers address and integrate core disciplinary objectives. Originality/value This study contributes to scholarship concerned with how “new” technologies and “old” literacies co-exist in contexts requiring students to engage in expanded communication modes alongside specific academic literacies.

“Wearing Only Our Skin”: the multimodal literacies classroom as a living arrangement

Purpose Literacy research exploring multimodal composition and justice-oriented children’s literature each have rich landscapes and histories. This paper aims to add to both of these bodies of scholarship through the emerging assemblage of Studio F, a fifth-grade classroom. The authors share poststructural analytic encounters with attention to the unexpected multimodal relationships and the justice-oriented talk and texts that emerged, as well as the classroom conditions that produce them. Design/methodology/approach The authors think with assemblage theory to examine the newness that emerged as one small group of students wrestled with the emerging instances of racism present in Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles. Findings Together, the living arrangement of bodies, materials and discourses created openings for students’ explorations of race and racism. Originality/value This paper offers teachers and researchers space to rethink what is possible in the literacy classroom when the authors re-envision classrooms as vibrant assemblages, support emergent multimodal composing processes and follow students’ critical encounters toward justice-oriented literacies.

“I Drew Myself Right There”: third grade girls restorying for visual justice

Purpose This paper aims to present three girls’ visual annotations and digital responses that restory a scene in the picturebook I’m New Here. The authors focus on how children use multimodal tools to reflect their critical knowledge of the world by illuminating how this group of girls responded to and incorporated broader social issues. Design/methodology/approach This study takes place in a third-grade classroom. Using qualitative methods that build on critical multimodal literacy, the authors documented and analyzed children’s visual and digital interpretations. Data were generated from classroom sessions that incorporated interactive readalouds, as well as students’ annotated visual images, sketches, video and digital responses. The collaborative analytic process involved multiple passes to interpret visual, textual and multimodal elements. Findings The analyses revealed how Aliyah, Tiana and Carissa used multimodal tools to engage in the process of restorying. Through their multimodal composition, they designed images that illuminated their solidarity with the young female character wearing the hijab; their desire to disrupt xenophobic bullying; and their hope for a respectful and inclusive climate in their own classroom. Originality/value In this paper, the authors examine how three girls in a third-grade classroom restory using critical multimodal literacy methods. These girls’ multimodal responses reflected how they disrupted dominant storylines of exclusionary practices. Their authentic acts of visual advocacy give us hope for the future.

Once upon an anti-black time: unpacking the counter fairy tales (CFT) model to support culturally responsive literacy instruction for black girls

Purpose This paper aims to argue that culturally responsive approaches to literacy instruction are necessary not only to celebrate Black girl literacies but to also expose, challenge and disrupt antiblackness in English education. However, without explicit exemplars to guide classroom practice, this type of instruction will remain elusive. The present paper expands upon the original conceptualization of Counter Fairy Tales (CFT) by further explicating the framework and providing recommendations to inform culturally responsive literacy practices to disrupt antiblackness. Design/methodology/approach The question that drives this study asks how can the CFT model be applied as a form of culturally responsive literacy instruction to best teach Black girls? Findings The CFT framework places value on Black girls’ ways of knowing and gives primacy to their voice and unique experiences through culturally responsive literacy instruction. Research limitations/implications The larger implication of this research is for teachers to begin to create culturally responsive literacy instruction that honors the lived experiences of today’s Black adolescent girls, particularly those in young grades. Inclusive and affirming literary practices must be established, an environment in which Black girls can share their voices and visions as they explore themselves through writing. Originality/value This conceptual paper is one of few that specifically focuses on how teachers can use CFTs to facilitate the inclusion of Black girls’ experiential and communal ways of knowing to support culturally responsive literacy instruction in younger grades.