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Teachers and students often express an aversion to poetry based on their experiences with printbased poetry texts that typically dominate school curricula. Given this challenge and the potential affordances of new and multimodal technologies, we investigate how preservice and inservice teachers enrolled in a new literacies master's course began to interpret poetry multimodally, through PowerPoint. Using scholarship in multiliteracies, multimodality, and semiotic design, this paper presents an analysis of one student's interpretation of Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider." Through this case, we explore what happened when digital tools were used to create, express, represent, and interpret poetry. We then discuss one student's poetic representations and learning in relation to several other students in the course to explore implications, considerations, limitations and potential affordances of new literacies for learning. (Contains 5 figures and 3 notes.)

While many teachers and teacher educators agree that it is important to integrate new literacies and technologies into their teaching, educators are often perplexed about how to begin thinking about this task. Research reveals that educators use technologies for personal and communicative purposes, but teachers, for the most part, have not yet applied these technologies in their classroom teaching and learning. Given these challenges, the current study was undertaken as an instance of teacher research carried out in the context of a teacher education course in new literacies and technologies wherein teacher educators attempted to take up new literacies practices. Study participants were pre- and in-service teachers. Findings indicate that teacher educators must foster environments to share problem-solving and distributed learning, to support design and multimodal redesign of texts, and to explore literacy and technology as transactional processes. Whereas both teachers and teacher educators may be tempted to wait until they are technologically adept before attempting to integrate new literacies and new technologies into their teaching, this study suggests that the learning environment, approach to learning, knowledge about multimodal text design, and stance toward literacy and technology may be far more important than the technologies that teachers use to enact their instructional plans. (Contains 1 table.)

A monolingual English-speaking teacher and bilingual researchers analyzed the discursive practices in a third-grade classroom that affected the literacy learning opportunities available to a monolingual Spanish-speaking migrant student. Literacy learning opportunities were shaped and influenced by the specific contexts in which the student acted and interacted. (Contains 48 references.) (Author/SV)

Research has shown that international students experience challenges in the United States. This study explored how ten Chinese students drew upon their funds of knowledge to deal with challenges within higher education and analyzed how these students studying abroad positioned themselves within their experiences in the United States. Theoretical perspectives included funds of knowledge and positioning theory. Data sources included twenty interviews with ten participants. Findings showed how participants drew upon their funds of knowledge such as first language and social networks to deal with challenges. Findings also showed (a) how these participants positioned themselves within the storyline of challenges in their early years in college, and (b) how these participants repositioned themselves within the storyline of future plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the increasing importance of a college education, this study investigates the college access trajectories of targeted racial and linguistic minority students and recommends ways to promote their college access. High school completers drawn from the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics were tracked for eight years, and a series of discrete-time survival analyses was conducted. The results revealed significantly lower college access rates for racial and linguistic minority students than for comparable White English-speaking students. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) access and ICT use for educational purposes were identified as potential ways to support college access for racial and linguistic minority students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a conceptual and methodological adaptation of the Positioning Theory diamond as originally proposed by Slocum-Bradley (2009). The authors propose an updated graphic representation that foregrounds the diamond in moral fields within arrays of identities and relationships that are not bound by space and time. The positioning diamond is illustrated as an analytical, research tool by applying it to study the social interactions, including multimodal interactions, of children (ages 7-10 years) in an afterschool engineering club. The paper illustrates how the authors applied the Positioning Theory diamond jointly with Bamberg's three-tiered positioning analysis and multimodal analysis to develop a clearer perspective on one particular learner. The authors argue that scholars of positioning theory should look to studies of multimodality to deepen their analysis of speech and other acts. Multimodal analysis and the Positioning Theory diamond can be used effectively to explore social interactions in addition to speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This department column explores digital and disciplinary literacies across learning contexts and disciplines within and outside of school. Digital enhancements will encourage readers to post questions, comments, and connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a pen pal project to encourage cross-cultural understanding, which was piloted in a tenth-grade honors English class of twenty-six students, pairing them with an advanced English class in an urban western New York international school. It mentions that project highlighted the importance of cultivating sensitivity, encouraging friendships, and emphasizing global perspectives.

Provides information on several teaching ideas. Description on projects that use technology to create literary products; Discussion on letter recognition fluency; Information on alphabet Web sites; Ways to use a rubric to evaluate a software.