From the Editors

Abstract

Dear JAAL community, The title for this issue, “Enlightened Brotherhood,” refers to the cover image, a photograph taken by M. Denzell Moton from the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. Although Moton does not consider himself a photographer, he has made it a practice to catch off-guard moments of his fraternity brothers with his iPhone. This particular photo illustrates the young men choosing a song to play at the reception where one of their brothers was “jumping the broom” with his fiancée. This issue pays homage to Walter Dean Myers in Alfred Tatum's commentary, “Writing Through the Labyrinth of Fears: The Legacy of Walter Dean Myers.” Tatum's commentary celebrates Myers's near-50-year body of work and charges writing teachers to develop the critical writing voices of adolescents, especially young black men during a time in U.S. history that needs to hear these perspectives. Guadalupe López-Bonilla's column, “Curricular Reforms in Mexico: Challenges for Developing Disciplinary Literacy in Upper Secondary Education” featured in Raul Mora's Policy and Advocacy department, describes the challenges and debates associated with recent educational reforms in Mexico that have extended national public schooling and disciplinary learning up to age 15. In this issue's Pop Culture/Digital Literacies department (edited by Jennifer Scott Curwood), Jill Castek and Julie Coiro summarize some key findings about online reading comprehension and share design considerations and challenges for capturing online research and skills to inspire new ideas about literacy instruction that uses digital literacies and new technologies. Sharon Pitcher's Literacy Lens, “Web 2.0 Reflective Inquiry: A Transformative Literacy Teacher Education Tool,” discusses a blog where teachers shared the challenges of incorporating digital literacies instruction in their classrooms. Benjamin Boche's feature article, “Multimodal Scaffolding in the Secondary English Classroom Curriculum,” illustrates how an English teacher used a variety of multimodal texts to help students understand complex texts as part of an interdisciplinary environmental studies curriculum in which English, environmental studies, and social studies were team-taught through thematic units. Anne Guerin and Brian Murphy discuss the reading fluency development of three young adolescent striving readers in a seven-week intervention program in Southern Ireland in “Repeated Reading as a Method to Improve Reading Fluency for Struggling Adolescent Readers.” Lee Mountain explains a content area assignment given to preservice teachers across various disciplines to better understand the connections between their content area vocabulary and comprehension in “Recurrent Prefixes, Roots, and Suffixes: A Morphemic Approach to Disciplinary Literacy.” In “The Affordances of Blogs and Digital Video: New Potentials for Exploring Topics and Representing Meaning,” Jason Ranker describes how two ninth-grade adolescent males used blogs and digital video (among other media) to inquire into the subject matter of fast food in a self-chosen topic of a class-assigned inquiry project. Finally, male zine authors' composing processes are explored and analyzed, with implications provided for content area learning, in “‘Nomadic Knowledge’: Men Writing Zines for Content Learning” by Barbara Guzzetti, Leslie Foley, and Mellinee Lesley. Stergios Botzakis's Visual and Digital Texts review, “Smartphone Resources for Teachers,” describes apps that connect teachers to students and their parents. James Blasingame's Print-Based Texts column includes three book reviews: Bill Nye's (2014) Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, Ellen Hopkins's (2014) Rumble, and Jack Gantos's (2014) The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza. In selecting these texts, Blasingame presents topics and characters whose identities are often marginalized in mainstream literature and institutions. In the Professional Resources column, Marcelle Haddix further examines the significance of “Enlightened Brotherhood” as she reiterates the need to continuously and explicitly state that “Black Lives Matter.” This call is highlighted this month in reviews written by Darrell Cleveland Hucks of Trayvon Martin, Race, and American Justice: Writing Wrong edited by Fasching-Varner, Reynolds, Albert, and Martin and by Kenneth Fasching-Varner of (Re)Teaching Trayvon: Education for Racial Justice and Human Freedom edited by Evans-Winters and Bethune. Finally, Peggy Semingson's Meeting of the Minds asks JAAL users to name the literacy leader who most informs their thinking, wrapping up the issue with the important recognition of the connection between scholarship and practice. Happy reading, Emily Neil Skinner & Margaret Carmody Hagood