In 2021, the authors pivoted their university’s Literacy Clinic to online to continue providing literacy services to educators, K-12 students, and families during the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and continuing systemic racism. Alongside of the educators in the Literacy Clinic, they wondered how they would engage students in literacy lessons that would further their agency with literacies in a digital setting while also navigating connectivity, devices and platforms, and the concomitant grief of living in an era of ongoing racial injustices and COVID-19. This paper focuses on a case study of a teacher’s journey designing critical literacies online. Data sources include recorded literacy lessons, artifacts of student and teacher learning, and reflective documents. The extended case analysis attended to emergent and fluid meanings made across texts, interactions, and time. Over the course of 12 weeks, one educator’s pathways with teaching critical literacies online transformed as she built relationships with her student and his mother, centered inquiry, and scaffolded her student to design a public service announcement. In data-rich vignettes that capture the complexity of critical literacy episodes that cross media spaces, the authors illustrate the transformation of meanings across time, model, and space. This case provides a window into an online critical literacy teaching, an experience that has largely been out of focus.
English/Language Arts Education
CITE (English) is sponsored by the English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Because ELATE members are engaged in the preparation, support and continuing education of teachers of the English language arts and literacy, they understand the need to explore English education with and through technology. CITE (English) offers a space to explore those issues through well-grounded, timely, and informative research manuscripts directly relevant to the field of English education.
Manuscripts for CITE (English) should focus on the interconnectedness of the English language arts content area, technology, and English teacher education; they should also explore some area or perspective not already covered at length in the literature. While manuscripts that present original research are encouraged, other formats or approaches that explore the theory, research and practice of practical and innovative technology applications in the English language arts and English teacher education are certainly considered. Manuscripts that take advantage of an online format are particularly encouraged, as articles in CITE (English) can include web links, streaming video, sound files, and other interactive technologies.
Most Recent
Teacher Candidates’ Pivot to Virtual Literacy Field Experiences: The Interplay of Culturally Responsive Sustaining Pedagogies and Improvisation
This qualitative investigation examines how teacher candidates enrolled in literacy courses navigated virtual field work experiences during summer and fall 2020. The study is grounded in theories of improvisation as a pedagogical practice and culturally responsive and sustaining approaches to teaching. Data show that teacher candidates took advantage of the affordances of the environment and adapted their practice to suit the new situation by improvising and growing their virtual teaching skillset for culturally responsive literacy instruction. Findings reveal the importance of teacher candidates developing improvisational culturally responsive and sustaining practices, including learning about students’ interests, cultures, and experiences and applying that knowledge to build rapport and curricular connections.
Re-Mediating and Transmediating Middle-School Students’ Writing Through Teacher Professional Development
Because ever-expanding opportunities for communication have not been well-represented instructionally, this study investigated the impact of teacher professional development in new literacies on students’ writing achievement. Further, the study considered professional development characteristics that support instructional shifts to include new literacies. Ten teachers and 892 students participated, with a matched control group. Participating teachers received a classroom set of laptops and up to 46 hours of training. Analyses indicate that professional learning opportunities that fostered conceptual understandings included the opportunity to observe in classrooms that were using new literacies and provided opportunities for hands-on practice and social construction of knowledge appear to have supported instructional changes. Students whose teachers were minimally trained did not have significant increases in writing achievement; however, students whose teachers received sustained training significantly increased their scores on high-stakes assessments. Increased scores were more pronounced for students who had been previously labeled as underachieving, a finding that fosters conceptualization of new literacies as transmediational and re-mediational.
An Inquiry Into the Possibilities of Collaborative Digital Storytelling
This article explores the possibilities of incorporating collaborative digital storytelling into preservice teacher education to support teachers in learning about their students’ rich perspectives on teaching and learning. Data were gathered in an elementary literacy methods course at a public university in the northeastern United States to explore the possibilities of a digital storytelling collaboration between undergraduate preservice teachers and elementary students. The article concludes with a discussion of ways teacher education researchers and practitioners might utilize digital storytelling to keep record of the ways diverse students experience teaching and learning.