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In this article, we describe how eighth‐grade students and teacher candidates used sound and listening to remix and attune themselves (Stewart, 2011) to the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (2011). We situate our sound inquiries in relation to critical literacy (Vasquez, Janks, & Comber, 2019; Wargo, 2019) and sound education (Schafer 1992, 2005; Oliveros, 2005). The examples we share suggest how students and teacher candidates used sound to, in the words of a participating teacher candidate, make Fahrenheit 451 "come to life." This work demonstrates how sound inquiry can encourage students' transformative engagement with their surroundings, with each other, and with canonical texts like Fahrenheit 451 in critical literacy classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framing sports culture as a viable site for research and inquiry in the English language arts classroom, this article documents an investigation into the opportunities for research and inquiry teachers provided for students in selected secondary sports literature classes. Data collection involved gathering teacher‐ and student‐generated artifacts, observing classroom instruction, and conducting interviews with teachers and students. Data analysis produced findings that account for three distinct research opportunities: (1) contemporary issues research calling for students to explore "controversial topics" in sports culture; (2) a historical synthesis positioning students to investigate historic sports rivalries; and (3) a media analysis requiring students to replicate published research into the representation of female athletes in media. The study contributes to recent efforts scholars have made to advance the study of sports culture and related texts as a viable approach to teaching English language arts in ways that honor students' interests and experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning how to teach in a hybrid space, such as a museum, opens up possibilities for preservice teachers to expand their definitions of literacy and experience teaching and learning with adolescents in new ways. This two‐year study reports findings from a university‐museum partnership in which preservice teachers (N = 81) worked with sixth‐grade students each week in a museum setting. Findings suggest that being in this hybrid space provided opportunities for preservice teachers to expand their definitions of literacy and text as well as extend and enhance sixth‐graders' curricular connections. Teaching in a hybrid space also provided new opportunities to think about adolescents as learners, including the repositioning of secondary students as teachers. Finally, this study's findings demonstrate the importance of learning how to connect and use hybrid spaces to support adolescents' learning and literacy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purposeful academic conversation engages students as active agents in the process of making meaning from text, negotiating perspectives, and achieving mutual understanding. However, educators often report difficulties in engaging students in talk‐based pedagogies. This concern can be partially addressed by ensuring that students and teachers have similar understandings regarding the purposes of academic conversation. Here, we examine the conceptions of academic conversation held by middle‐school students and their teachers, revealing areas of convergence and divergence in the perspectives held by youth and their educators regarding the purposes of academic conversation and students' roles in these discussions. With direct relevance to instructional practice, we provide suggestions for making these understandings visible and reconciling divergent views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literacy skills enhance opportunities for a meaningful life. Many adults with extensive support needs did not receive effective literacy instruction in school, which limits their future opportunities. We reviewed 17 research studies examining literacy interventions for these adults. We were interested in (a) who were the participants, (b) the types of literacy targets represented, (c) the types of interventions utilized, and (d) the outcomes of these interventions. Findings documented that adults with extensive support needs can and do acquire literacy skills across the lifespan. Although there is a promising trend to teach for meaning using a multi-component approach, few studies examined transfer of learning beyond the intervention setting. We discuss the implications of findings for future research and for practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study examined a Romanticism unit within a Year 9 English class in Sydney, Australia. It considered whether popular culture could build connections between students' lives and Romanticism, and whether the process of remixing 'high' Romantic poetry with 'low' popular culture could foster student engagement. Thematic analysis of interview, survey, observation, and artifact data revealed three key findings. Firstly, through exploring popular culture texts, students believed Romantic concepts related to their world but not to them. Secondly, the extent to which students understood Romanticism through popular culture was influenced by personal, textual, and educational factors. Thirdly, students felt that the collaborative remixing process promoted freedom of expression. While many teachers are concerned that popular culture will displace canonical literature, this study found that this is not the case: incorporating popular culture is not an 'either/or' approach, but it is an enriching, complementary practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study of K-12 teachers' responses to an innovative flipped professional development series focused on literacy instruction. Thirty-six participants voluntarily enrolled in one or more of three professional development courses. Findings address teacher evaluation of the efficacy of both the structure and the content of the courses. The flipped model appears worthy of further exploration as an effective means of offering professional development opportunities in literacy to teachers. A rationale is presented for selecting and applying the flipped model, and the design process is shared to facilitate replication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationwide, virtually all secondary students interact with British literature, a traditionally Anglo, white, male canon. Yet, this revered curriculum provides few mirrors for students from historically marginalized populations to see their own cultures reflected. In this reflective practitioner piece, the authors first illustrate how counterstorytelling-a practice emerging from critical race theory-can break open the canon. Because counterstorytelling invites, values, and projects marginalized voices, when incorporated into the secondary English classroom, the practice helps engage students with the material while developing and honing their literacy skills. Second, the authors detail a lesson demonstrating that the canon and counterstorytelling can work synergistically. Throughout the article, the authors attend to the challenges of using an equity pedagogy to teach a canon that functions as the majoritarian story of the secondary literacy classroom-and society at large. Finally, the authors offer strategies for effectively incorporating counterstorytelling into the secondary English classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three teacher educators who inverted/flipped instruction in their literacy courses describe their experience in this article. Inverted, or flipped, instruction is a blended learning approach that increases opportunities for active engagement in class by moving basic instructor demonstration and presentation outside of class. The authors provide a rationale for inverting instruction and include relevant research that supports it. They also include a sample literacy module before and after inverting it. In addition, both student and instructor benefits to and challenges of inverted instruction are shared. Inverted instruction seemed to allow students to personalize their learning outside of class and affords them greater opportunities to apply and synthesize information during class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction of the Common Core State Standards and assessments like the synthesis performance task pose new challenges for secondary English teachers. As students of all ability levels engage with complex text and in tasks that target higher level cognitive skills, teachers need strategies to support their understanding. This article describes development and implementation of a differentiated unit for a synthesis performance task in three ninth-grade English classes. The unit's summative assessment required students to evaluate the credibility of survivor accounts of the tragic events atop Mt. Everest in 1996, select the most credible account, and support their argument with evidence from multiple sources. This article includes descriptions of how the unit was differentiated for students of varying skill levels, examples of student work to illustrate how all were able to complete the synthesis task, and reflections for future practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secondary students are often challenged to make sense of conceptually complex content area texts. Text-based discussion has the potential to facilitate comprehension by engaging students in collaboratively constructing their understanding of important ideas and relationships among ideas while interacting with a demanding text. However, teachers often find it difficult to construct prompts for discussion that effectively facilitate deep thinking. This article describes a professional development process in which middle and high school teachers analyzed texts and prepared plans with prompts to facilitate thinking in the context of text-based discussion. Teacher responses to this experience included (a) implementing the planning process using strong disciplinary knowledge, demonstrating student learning; (b) striving to create a thoughtful discussion plan while balancing competing demands for instructional focus, (c) constrained by required, low-quality curricular materials; and (d) contesting the demands of the professional development experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent interest in materials culture and artifactual literacies has helped the authors of this article rethink how they teach preservice and inservice teachers and collaborate with K-12 teachers. Each discipline has its own stuff that can help students understand the products and practices of a field beyond what they might be able to glean from text. To that end, every teacher should see their classroom and content area as a 'place for my stuff' because objects speak and communicate more messages through form, color, size, and texture than print alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid or blended learning is defined as a pedagogical approach that includes a combination of face-to-face instruction with computer-mediated instruction. The terms blended learning, hybrid learning, and mixed-mode learning are used interchangeably in current research; however, in the United States, hybrid learning is used most often. Although hybrid learning can be diverse in how it is implemented, educators agree that this approach has the opportunity to provide personalized instruction with some element of student control over path, pace, time, and place. Educators and students need to be given the latitude to teach and learn in these hybrid spaces while being protected and supported by schools. Ultimately, teachers and students bear an equal responsibility as they collaboratively learn and experiment in these evolving spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising expectations for middle grade students to independently read and comprehend complex, discipline-specific texts have also raised expectations for the ways teachers will teach. Helping all students, despite assessed reading levels, to access grade level texts calls for instructional approaches that not only meet readers where they are, but also integrate three key elements: motivation and engagement, instructional intensity, and cognitive challenge. This article examines how instruction incorporating these elements promotes students' comprehension and uses a middle school learning scenario to illustrate how teachers might integrate these elements into their own instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ubiquitous and instant access to information on the Web is challenging what constitutes 21st century literacies. This article explores the notion of Web-mediated knowledge synthesis, an approach to integrating Web-based learning that may result in generative synthesis of ideas. This article describes the skills and strategies that may support learning in this way, including: (1) divergent keyword search phrases; (2) synthesis for meaning; (3) in-the-moment insights; (4) repurposing; (5) reinforcement; and, (6) note-taking. Several suggestions for how to begin scaffolding these processes are also provided, based on examples from in-service teachers during a master's level educational technology course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apps, specialized programs used on mobile computers, can be used in innovative ways to enhance science and literacy learning. With the skilled guidance of their teachers, students can exploit app affordances for learning and acquire disciplinary literacies unique to science. This article showcases apps that help students to access information, make sense of it, and create their own products that include rich visual representations. We also describe teaching approaches that support the close reading of science texts through the use of note-taking and annotation apps. Classroom examples that are featured illustrate that these app affordances are not simply in the apps, but rather, fostered by how the teachers exploit these affordances to achieve their own particular learning objectives. As we become more familiar with new apps as educational tools, we need to be mindful about how these tools strategically in ways that best enhance our students' own learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, the the author invites readers to consider the body and its central place in literacy pedagogy, practice and research. She emphasizes two interrelated paths for teachers and researchers interested in literacies to tend to the body: (1) the ways literacies are engaged and cultivated for making sense of bodies, and (2) the literacies embedded in, performed through, and experienced as bodies. Drawing on poststructural theories and her analysis of round robin reading, the author reminds readers that literacies are not inherently good, and educators concerned with issues of inequities and injustice can study and reimagine the literacies in bodies that propel too many of us forward in an automaton fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how middle school students use morphemes, or units of meaning within a word, to conclude the meaning of an unknown word and what teaching methods can be used to promote this. The authors note that many students use morphological knowledge, or awareness of a root word's meaning, along with morphological awareness, or the ability to relate a morpheme to a word's meaning, to improve their vocabulary, spelling, and reading comprehension. Particular attention is given to how this learning strategy is used by English language learners (ELs) as well as on a study of effective teaching methods for U.S. middle school students.

This column provides reviews of adolescent and adult professional resources and is a valuable resource for professional resource selection within and outside the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]