From The Editors

Abstract

Dear JAAL community, This issue is all about the central role that relationships play in literacy growth and development. The cover art, “The Best of Friendships” by Manning Pruden, illustrates, quite literally in a large public space, the crucial import of relationships through the development of friendships. Articles in this issue demonstrate that it is through collaboration and with others that literacies develop, deepen, and thrive. Karen Spector's commentary, “Meeting Pedagogical Encounters Halfway,” offers a critique of literacy pedagogy that focuses solely upon a best practices approach to teaching and learning and instead makes a case for a relational pedagogy that relies upon diffractive thinking, reading, and writing. Ian O'Bryne, Katerina Schenke, James Willis, and Daniel Hickey discuss the design principles of open digital badges, which are web-enabled tokens of accomplishment representing learning and achievement in online contexts, in this month's Multiliteracies column, “Digital Badges: Recognizing, Assessing, and Motivating Learners In and Out of School Contexts.” In Literacy Lenses, Lana Kalfas reflects on her writing growth and medium preferences over a year's time by revisiting her blog posts and comments made online by her sixth-grade peers in Mrs. Donnelly's language arts class. She explains the importance of both writing solo and in community to develop her inner voice and to write for broader audiences. The feature articles extend the theme of relationships in a variety of learning contexts. Christine Baron and Christina Dobbs' article, “Expanding the Notion of Historical Text Through Historic Building Analysis,” describes how high school social studies teachers might engage students in the disciplinary practice of studying historical buildings, nontraditional text that students can decode and use to construct meaning about multiple historical contexts. Delila Omerbas´ic´'s article, “Literacy as a Translocal Practice: Digital Multimodal Literacy Practices Among Girls Resettled as Refugees,” recounts a qualitative study of nine adolescent girls who resettled as refugees from Thailand and engaged in productions of translocality through multimodal literacy practices in digital spaces. In “e-Textbooks: A Personalized Learning Experience or a Digital Distraction?” Elizabeth Dobler explores the digital reading preferences and strategies used by preservice teachers when using an e-textbook in a literacy methods course. Julie Rust grapples with the affordances and challenges of students' online self representation within a school-based social networking site set up for discussions of assigned literature in two high school English classes in “Students' Playful Tactics: Teaching at the Intersection of New Media and the Official Curriculum” Byeong-Young Cho and Peter Afflerbach analyze and describe the successful online reading strategies of Amelia, an accomplished high school student, and provide suggestions for classroom practices to develop strategic Internet readers in their article “Reading on the Internet: Realizing and Constructing Potential Texts.” This issue's reviews and conversation columns cover a range of digital and print texts for adolescents and adults. Rachelle Savitz analyzes public domain resources in her column, “Using Public Domain Resources for Literacy Learning,” shared in Stergios Botzakis' Visual and Digital Texts department. Jim Blasingame shares three reviews in the Print-Based Texts department including Cress, the third book in the The Lunar Chronicle (2014) series by Marissa Mayer. Sarah Fleming gives a thorough review from her teacher-researcher perspective of Service Learning in Literacy Education (2014) edited by Valerie Kinloch and Peter Smagorinsky in Marcelle Haddix's Professional Resources department. Finally, Peggy Semingson's Meeting of the Minds features comments from JAAL Facebook users who continue to engage in dialogue online about significant topics of literacies teaching and learning. We hope this issue opens new possibilities and brings up more questions about relationships and literacies. Happy reading, Margaret Carmody Hagood & Emily Skinner