How Feeling Supports Students’ Interpretive Discussions About Literature

Research indicates that feeling is fundamental to the multilayered experience of literary interpretation. However, despite great strides in U.S. high school classrooms, discussions about literature are still often characterized by known-answer discourses that exclude feeling. This article builds on small-scale studies of affective evaluation, an interpretive approach in which readers attend to and reflect on their feeling-based responses to texts. Those studies, focused on individual students, showed that when responding to texts with feeling, students were more likely to build multilayered interpretations as opposed to summary or one-dimensional thematic interpretations. The current study explores affective evaluation in the more complex arena of class discussion, where known-answer discourses are particularly entrenched. We compared the same teachers and students using affective evaluation in one discussion, but not the other. Discussions using affective evaluation were correlated with increased multidimensional interpretation, adding to evidence that feeling enriches students’ literary sense-making and disrupts known-answer discourses.

Black Youth Poetry of 2020 and Reimagined Literacies

In response to anti-Black policing in 2020 that led to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Black children and teens turned to poetry as a means to channel their self-described terror, rage, pain, horror, tiredness, and need for change. Reminiscent of the poetry of the Black Arts Movement and works published in The Black Panther newspaper, these poems, many of which call for a “revolution,” are reflective of young people’s critical engagements with the world and the word. With critical literacy as a framework, I engage in critical discourse analysis to determine how the young poets reimagine literacy as they protest anti-Black policing and racism. By focusing on young people’s own grassroots literacy initiatives, which call for the reimagination of blackness and whiteness, and demand truth, justice, and reimagined futures, I demonstrate how educators can reimagine literacy practices to center students’ criticalities and prioritize racial justice.

Bringing a Culturally Sustaining Lens to Reading Intervention

This study explores the possibilities and tensions that emerged when a literacy specialist brought a culturally sustaining lens to her work in a reading intervention setting with five emergent bilinguals. Utilizing a case study methodology, the study draws on data from class transcripts, interviews, student writing and artwork, and fieldnotes collected over 2 years. During data analysis, three themes, “get proximate,” “get connected,” and “get moving,” were constructed. Findings illustrate the complex relationship between practices designed to bring students’ linguistic and cultural resources into the classroom (“get proximate” and “get connected”) within a context designed to facilitate measurable growth in students’ reading skills ("get moving"). Findings contain seeds for further exploration related to engaging students’ languages and lived experiences to build foundational skills. The study suggests that more cohesive incorporation of culturally sustaining practices would require a (re)consideration of monolingualism and narrow definitions of literacy within interventions and assessments.

Righting the Literacy Teacher Education Debt: A Matter of Justice

The literacies of Black and other communities of Color have long been narrated pathologically in literacy teacher education. Literacy teacher educators have been complicit in upholding linguistic injustice and enacting linguistic violence in and through their practices, devaluing the practices, marginalizing the experiences, and interrogating the humanity of Black and other teachers of Color. In this article, extending Ladson-Billings's concept of the education debt, I assess the literacy teacher education debt, unveiling how white English and whiteness in general have been (over)valued and positioned as currency in literacy teacher education. After (re)examining and (re)assessing offenses and harms inflicted by literacy teacher education across historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral realms, composing the literacy teacher education debt, I take a restorative justice approach and offer an invitation to right literacy teacher education by addressing obligations and committing to healing as a matter of justice.

Gateway Moments to Literate Identities

Drawing from theories of identity, language, and race, we conceptualize gateway moments to literate identities in high school English language arts classrooms enrolling language-minoritized youth. Gateways were interactions that afforded particular kinds of literate identities for youth. Deficit literate identities often invoked racialized language and literacy ideologies; authoritative literate identities engaged youths’ full cultural and linguistic repertoires to create and critique knowledge. Occasionally, youth enacted authoritative classroom literate identities alongside or in response to dominant deficit frames of their literate abilities during planned and spontaneous classroom interaction. We note in each type of gateway opportunities for teachers to open space for youths’ authoritative knowledge-producing literate identities. We aim to illustrate how a single instructional choice or classroom interaction ranges in effect from maintaining and reinforcing oppressive legacies and deficit literate identities to centering youth and their language and literacy repertoires in learning experiences for more socially just interactions and learning.

Always at the Bottom: Ideologies in Assessment of Emergent Bilinguals

Recent scholarship has identified how the reading assessment process can be improved by adapting to and accounting for emergent bilinguals’ multilingual resources. While this work provides guidance about how teachers can take this approach within their assessment practices, this article strengthens and builds on this scholarship by combining translanguaging and raciolinguistic lenses to examine the ideologies that circulate through assessment. By comparing interview data from English as a new language and dual-language bilingual teachers, we found that while reading assessments fail to capture the complexity of all emergent bilinguals’ reading abilities, they particularly marginalize emergent bilinguals of color. Thus, we expose the myths of neutrality and validity around reading assessment and demonstrate how they are linked to ideologies about race and language. We offer a critical translingual approach to professional learning that encourages teachers to grapple with these ideologies and shift toward a more critical implementation of reading assessments.

From Haiti to Detroit Through Black Immigrant Languages and Literacies

This article undertakes a textual analysis of an autobiographically informed novel, American Street, to analyze the process of identity formation of a Black Haitian immigrant youth in the United States. Black immigrant youth remain an understudied demographic in literacy research compared with their Latinx and Asian immigrant counterparts. The goal of this analysis is to provide insights into the role of languages and literacies for Black immigrant youth in (re)constructing their identities in nations like the United States. Analysis revealed the significance of one youth’s resistance to raciolinguistic ideologies, reliance on her Haitian faith literacies, and deployment of multiliteracy practices in (re)constructing her identity. We call for increased research that illuminates the complexity of the language and literacy processes involved in Black immigrant youth’s negotiations with identity in new homelands, and offer textual analysis as an underutilized but promising inquiry method for generating such knowledge. The article also offers pedagogical implications.

Literacy and Identity Development of Indigenous Rukai Children

This study examines the development of literacy and identity for young Indigenous Taiwanese children using ethnographic methods and the theories of multiple literacies, Indigenous knowledge, and identity construction, and it provides insights into the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge and literacies to create hybrid literacy spaces. Focused-upon participants included four 6-year-old Rukai-tribe children—two who lived in a city and two who lived in a village—and their families and teachers. We found that all children learned literacies in culturally meaningful contexts that involved stories and hybrid literacy practices, Indigenous foods, religious activities, traditional life skills, Indigenous language, and multiple forms of text. The two city children developed Rukai knowledge and literacies through performance-based contexts, whereas the village children learned through authentic contexts (e.g., observing farming and hunting). The literacy and identity of the two city children may be undermined due to limited access to Rukai resources, stemming from racism, classism, and linguicism.