This teacher-research study responds to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) call for an integrated model of literacy that simultaneously builds deep content knowledge and develops students' proficiency in writing arguments in science. The author notes that while argument is a cornerstone of the CCSS writing standards, little attention is paid to the issue of “voice.” Asserting that voice is often what makes arguments compelling, the author urges teachers to engage students in the formal study of “voice” while teaching opinion/argumentative writing. The author describes a “science sleuth” simulation unit she implemented to help students perform the production strategies necessary for composing “voiced” scientific arguments. Using grounded theory methodology, the author presents student writing samples to spotlight the challenges, benefits and potential pitfalls of encouraging sixth graders to write scientific arguments with voice—authority, conviction, commitment, and a command of the subject matter.

This study examines the instructional practices around literacy that characterized the work of a community based arts program designed for urban adolescents. Two primary sources of data were collected: field notes on approximately 35 hours of instruction spread across seven months and interviews with the program's staff and students. Four distinct instructional episodic structures were observed: explicit instruction, collaborative or individual construction that provided time for students to engage in creative literacy and artistic activity, serial performance in which teachers are on as equal a footing as possible as students, and scaffolded practice that is informed by a belief that all can succeed can foster deep engagement in literate activity.

We examined middle years adolescents' (ages 12–13) responses to reading and viewing advertisements as part of integrated language arts and health education lessons. We report here on the qualitative results from student and teacher focus groups, and from student journals. Three regular classroom teachers co-developed (with university researchers) and then delivered ten media literacy lessons to three classes of grade seven students. Findings include how students learned to analyze advertisements and think more critically by designed ads which satirized original ads. We saw also that students' informed decision making resulted in both acceptance and resistance of media messages. We conclude that transactional reading models and positioning theory may provide teachers with a valuable foundation upon which to base pedagogy designed to help adolescents' understanding and evaluation of advertisements.

It has been widely recognized for some time that the complexities involved in becoming literate and engaging in the processes of reading require models that go beyond decoding and encoding. Luke and Freebody, for example, offered a model describing four roles for readers, where literacy embraces families of practice; this model was later critiqued for being not sufficient to deal with the complexities of the digital world. Given contemporary views of literacy that embrace multi-literacies and students' in-school and out-of-school practices, it is useful to revision the four roles so that they reflect the demands of current literacy practices. This article presents three navigational practices in order to illustrate the complexities involved in becoming text interpreters and text creators in multiple contexts, for multiple purposes, in contemporary society.

Assessment, as defined by policy mandates such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, is a well‒established concept within education. However, assessing multiliteracies presents new challenges because multiliteracies is about ways of knowing and being in the world rather than mastery of a particular set of cognitive skills. In this article, the author reviews three approaches to multimodal assessment. The author argues that although there are differences between the assessment approaches, the core of a multiliteracies assessment is teacher observation of student engagement, a practice in which good teachers already engage. The shift inherent in a multiliteracies assessment is that a pedagogy of multiliteracies raises a different set of questions about texts and text use, which lead to a new way of envisioning assessment.

The recent call for a disciplinary perspective on literacy instruction in the content areas has generated considerable interest among literacy educators. This column addresses some of the questions that have been raised about disciplinary literacy. These questions concern the definition and assessment of disciplinary literacy, as well as the timing, teacher capacity, evidence base, and target audience for disciplinary literacy instruction.

This column features essays written by current middle school and high school teachers, media specialists, librarians, literacy coaches, curriculum specialists, administrators, preservice teachers, teacher educators, and adolescent and adult learners. They highlight diverse perspectives on teaching and/or learning with literacies to inspire reader reflection.

This column provides reviews of adolescent and adult professional resources and provides a valuable resource for professional resource selection in‒ and outside the classroom.

In this article, we focus on instructional support for 91 students who speak African American Vernacular English and who are at high risk for not passing the required state exams. We profile the instruction that was provided and the results from that instruction, providing examples of how students’ language was scaffolded such that they could code switch between test language (standard academic English) and the languages of their homes.

The field of literacy education encompasses many different modalities of reading and writing the world, including those of drama, theatre, and performance practiced in both school and community settings. As contemporary theatre practices have broadened performance creation approaches available to literacy and arts educators working with youth and adults, playbuilding and devising offer two modes of creating student-authored collective performance. Although the processes of playbuilding and devising overlap, they differ in both intention and practice. Both approaches include important frameworks and possibilities for work across literacy education. Following a discussion on the connections between literacy and drama in education, this paper introduces the forms of playbuilding and devising, followed by step-by-step illustrations of the practices at work in classrooms. This article, then, acts as an invitation to explore these two vehicles of performance creation in educational and literacy contexts.

The idea of offering students choice in their reading materials is not new yet this is not occurring in many high school classrooms. Researchers have identified many academic and personal benefits when students are allowed to choose their own reading materials, including more engagement with reading. This article describes one high school teacher's experiences implementing a three-week reading choice unit to his sophomore English classes. We highlight how he structured this experience and the instructional decisions he made while teaching students all of whom were reading a different book. In addition, we examine the students’ responses to this three week experience.

Today's complex literate environments require contemporary authors to focus on the ethical responsibilities of media creation. This study highlights 12th graders in California who produced a documentary on Latino immigration and chronicles the complex interactions between student-generated media, critical literacy, and ethics. Findings highlight two interrelated ethical tensions related to the filmmaker–subject relationship: the intertwined issues related to reciprocity and relations of power and the personal and political representation of Latino immigration to the United States. An essential component of critical literacy is for students to develop meta-awareness of the choices they make within media production: to reflect on one's choices and the potential impact of these choices on others. Educators should recognize the ethical responsibilities of media making such as students’ interpersonal relationships and potential sociopolitical issues of representation.

In order to understand the culture of the physical, virtual, and blended spheres that adolescents inhabit, we build on Gee's concept of affinity spaces. Drawing on our ethnographic research of adolescent literacies related to The Hunger Games novels, the Neopets online game, and The Sims videogames, this article explores the nature of interest-driven writing in these spaces. We argue that fan-based affinity spaces motivate young adults to write because they offer multiple modes of representation, diverse pathways to participation, and an authentic audience. As scholars and educators, we posit that these out-of-school spaces can offer youth new purposes, modes, and tools for their written work.