From the Editors

Purpose To describe how the digital writing experiences of two collaborating second-grade classrooms are representative of a digital writing cycle that includes barriers, bridges, and outcomes. Additionally, this chapter aims to link theory and practice for teachers working with an increasingly younger generation of multimodal learners by connecting teacher reflections to New Literacies perspectives. Design/methodology/approach The current study is informed by multiple perspectives contributing to New Literacies research. These perspectives blend the traditional disciplines of literacy and technology while recognizing both the growing use of digital tools and the new skills and dispositions required for writing. This chapter uses multiple data points to present (1) how the teachers approached implementation of digital writing tools, (2) how students responded to the use of digital writing tools, and (3) how the digital-related writing experiences aligned with key tenets of New Literacies research. Findings The authors present student barriers for full participation with corresponding bridges implemented by teachers to help students navigate in the digital writing classroom. Each finding is supported with examples from student and teacher interviews as well as classroom observations and artifacts. The chapter concludes with a “lessons learned” section from the perspective of the teachers in the study with each tenet supporting a New Literacies perspective by addressing key considerations of multimodal environments such as the importance of early opportunities for teaching and learning with new literacies, the need to help inexperienced students bridge technical skill gaps, and the benefit of social relationships in the digital community. Practical implications By adapting findings of the study to a digital writing cycle, this chapter discusses how guiding principles of New Literacies research reflects classroom practice, thereby granting current and future teachers a practical guide for bridging theory and practice for implementing digital writing experiences for elementary students in multimodal environments.

It’s Elementary: Social Skills Boost Academics

How professional development is delivered in today's networked world has shifted greatly, and research into online spaces of learning is growing. Numerous questions, however, remain regarding how online spaces can be leveraged to foster meaningful conversations that address current critical educational issues. This qualitative study examines the complex nature of questions and discussions that emerge in and across a critical literacy Web seminar project, Global Conversations in Literacy Research (GCLR), a series of open‐access Web seminars that engage global audiences in discussions around literacy theory, research, and practice. This article addresses the following research questions: (1) When initial questions are posed, how are the discussion questions taken up by participants and speakers in this critical literacy Web seminar project? (2) What learning occurs in online professional development spaces grounded in critical literacy?

As literacy researchers trace how people make meaning across multiple contexts and online environments, ethical complexities arise that require researchers to be culturally attuned, flexible, innovative, and reflexive. This article draws on a transliteracies perspective to argue that ethical issues related to accessibility, positionality, relationality, and temporality must drive literacy research in online spaces. It highlights international research situated in online environments to explore some of the ethical challenges, dilemmas, and opportunities that literacy researchers face as they conceptualize, conduct, and disseminate scholarship in a digital age. It seeks to move the literacy field forward by sharing guiding questions and provocations to inform digitally situated lines of inquiry and by offering recommendations for literacy researchers who seek to conduct ethical research in online spaces.

The tradition of digital writing instructional practices is nearly 50 years old in the US (Handa, 2004). Sometimes, students fully online digital writing courses may fail to engage with and finish the course because they do not feel competent in handling the technologies in the academic context; thus, it is important to find out what equitable practices and what factors influence student success in these courses. Therefore, this study aims to examine digital writing assignments requested in a writing course, with the goal of demonstrating an inclusive and equitable practice: the Labor-based grading contract, in a way that promotes equal and fair grades. This practice is proposed as a solution to the shortcomings detected, since it has been observed that students inexperienced in pre-college education in the delivery of online writing assignments persist in their difficulties with technological educational platforms in college. The creation of a contract between the teacher and the students -at first-, fosters knowledge, motivation, involvement, or engagement with the task; thus, digital writing assignments go from being an unattainable goal to being a feasible task to engage in. Also, the cooperative creation of this online writing with an easy-to-use platform (Eli Peer Review) stimulates them to persist in the following tasks, as they have already reflected on them and have already found out among their peers what they consist of and how to deal with such tasks. In our research we present a case study of a course based on online writing instruction. Therefore, this study aims to examine a particular course in the United States in which multimedia writing assignments and labor-based grading allowed for deep student engagement and success (Dickson,1974; Inoue, 2019). The data comes from the use of mixed methods that combine qualitative information collected through document analysis (teacher materials: syllabi, guidelines, instructions; student materials: personal research, blog entries, and final letter); classroom observation field diaries and the semi-structured teacher interview, with the quantitative methods of a student survey. The results show that there is a high degree of alignment between the course and the best practices of online instruction, and that the nature of the assignments and the Labor-based Grading Contract (Dickson,1974, Inoue, 2019) appear to play key roles in student engagement and success in the course. Likewise, the most highlighted aspect by the students has been the emotional factor, since the tasks have allowed them to get involved and enjoy writing in the digital support. The systematic observation of this writing course aims to deeply understand its provenance, objectives, taxonomy and functionality, with the final purpose of highlighting the capabilities of this methodology in order to offer it as a model in other contexts to promote a fairer and more equitable education.

After third grade, students’ motivation and enjoyment of writing begins to wane, and this trend continues through most of their education. Middle grade students especially need high-quality writing instruction; however, many teachers report feeling inadequately prepared to teach writing. To combat these issues, teacher preparation programs should understand how their preservice teachers feel about writing and teaching writing. The present study surveyed 150 middle grade preservice teachers to determine their self-efficacy beliefs about writing and writing instruction. Results indicate that preservice teachers valued writing, but did not feel confident with many specific aspects of writing instruction.

Internet memes are commonly associated with the communication of interests and opinions on social networking sites, and are used to share experiences and negotiate common ground through various contexts. Previous studies on identity construction and the use of Internet memes have not paid sufficient attention to identity construction in education-centred Internet memes. Hundreds of memes were selected from Instagram handles that contain memes on general issues out of which only seventeen representative education-centred Internet memes were selected to illustrate identity negotiation and construction in education-centred memes and to examine identity construction in educational contexts through memes. Adopting aspects of van Dijk's critical discourse analysis (CDA) complemented with Kecskes' sociocognitive approach to common ground, and Staszak's otherness as the framework for the study, data were subjected to discourse analysis. Memes give different representations and identities in the information of all and transformation of higher education through the online space.

The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies—which P. David Marshall has described as "the proliferation of the public self"—has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities (Marshall 163). To the field of persona studies, this essay contributes an approach to the author website as a site of self-presentation that works to "package" an authorial persona for circulation within contemporary literary marketplaces. Significantly, I address these websites not as direct representations of a pre-existing self, but as automedial texts that need to be read and interpreted, and which work to construct the authorial self or persona. I draw on theories of authorship to propose the "author website" as a genre of automedial representation that creates authorial personas for public consumption. Specifically, I consider the website of Erika Moen—a young, female author working in the medium of autobiographical comics—as a case study in order to explore the tensions between Moen's authorial self (as produced in the digital elements of erikamoen.com) and the other, more deliberately autobiographical, renderings of her self that appear in her comics. Although young cartoonists tend to position themselves as artists rather than authors, the recent academic and critical interest in the "graphic novel" form has resulted in a growing sense of these works as literary and their makers as authors. In thinking through this distinction, Andrew Bennett's suggestion that "asking 'what is an author?' is intimately related to the question 'what is literature?'" (118) points to why cartoonists, whose texts are part image and part text and only sometimes bound up as books, have not always been contextualised as authors.

Teamwork skills are considered essential in a work environment characterized by diversity and interdependence. Consequently, middle grade teachers arrange cooperative learning so students can acquire experience with solving problems in groups. Teachers also acknowledge that they are frustrated because appropriate instruments are lacking to track student progress and detect learning needs within the social context. A resulting question is: How can teamwork skills and deficits of students be more accurately detected and fairly reported? This presentation describes an instrument to synchronize how teamwork is assessed in classrooms with the way teamwork is evaluated at the workplace. The Teamwork Skills Inventory relies on peer observation and self-evaluation to establish student accountability, acknowledge competencies, and identify learning needs of individuals, teams, and classes. Middle grade students (N = 297) including 39 in special education were administered the Teamwork Skills Inventory after 4 weeks of cooperation in inclusive teams. The peer and self-evaluation ratings of general education students and special education students were compared to determine teamwork skills and deficits for both groups. Results showed special education students rated themselves as demonstrating more teamwork skills than were observed by their general education teammates. Both groups rated the general education students as demonstrating the most teamwork skills. Considerations for improving teamwork skills are recommended to general education teachers, special education teachers, middle grade students, and parents.

University teacher education programs are the “foremost settings for learning how to teach” (Smagorinsky et al., 2003). Yet, how to prepare preservice teachers to teach writing has received little attention from literacy researchers. Despite research reviews for reading teacher research, currently one does not exist for writing teacher education. This article attempts to address this gap by presenting a 20-year literature review (1990–2010) of peer-reviewed studies focused on preparing preservice teachers to teach writing.

Writing instruction in the 21st century must attend to ways that the multimodal nature of digital texts transforms consumption and production of text. With that in mind, the purpose of this chapter is to forward a framework for multimodal writing instruction that informs teacher education. In this chapter, the authors provide an overview of multimodality and suggest pedagogical approaches to prepare educators to teach digital writing skills. Second, they discuss a graduate course on multimodality, illustrating a pedagogical framework for teaching educators to recognize and apply multimodality in their teaching. Understanding gleaned from this chapter will illuminate the ways that teachers and teacher educators can approach writing instruction for the 21st century classroom that takes into account the literacy demands of the workplace and the world in which we live.

Change Processes and Strategies at the Local Level

The importance of students’ identity development has increasingly been acknowledged in the fields of second language acquisition and literacy research. In the cases of two populations receiving growing attention in the research literature, English Language Learners (immigrant students learning English in school settings) and Heritage Language Learners (students attempting, informally or formally, to learn or further develop a language other than English that is spoken in the home environment), identity construction is an especially complicated process. These students move between two environments, one where the native language and culture are represented and another where a second or target language and its culture are engaged. Determining where and with whom they affiliate academically, culturally, linguistically, and socially is an ongoing process. This article describes a qualitative study of four Asian adolescent English Language Learners who participated in an after school literacy club where, through reading multicultural literature and responding to the literature and each other through face to face discussions and electronically via a Wiki site within a Read, Talk, and Wiki (RTW) format, they also engaged in a process of identity construction. The article examines how the RTW club created an important space in which this process occurred and how the students made use of this setting.

Writing instruction in early childhood contexts has increasingly focused on apprenticing students into academic conventions. However, as literacy researchers have noted, within the context of “official” (Dyson, 2003) discourses and practices of learning to write, children negotiate, blend, and transform such parameters in light of their own resources and interests. Drawing from a year-long ethnography of a first-grade writing time, this paper examines how six-year-olds interacted with opportunities to author “how-to” texts. Analysis reveals how play becomes a resource for negotiating academic conventions, attending to power relations, and forwarding alternative perspectives that challenge dominant readings of the world.

Volume 12, Number 1, 2004 Contents: Preface. G.A. Troia, S. Graham, Students Who Are Exceptional and Writing Disabilities: Prevention, Practice, Intervention, and Assessment. ARTICLES. B. Saddler, S. Moran, S. Graham, K.R. Harris, Preventing Writing Difficulties: The Effects of Planning Strategy Instruction on the Writing Performance of Struggling Writers. G.A. Troia, M.E. Maddox, Writing Instruction in Middle Schools: Special and General Education Teachers Share Their Views and Voice Their Concerns. S. Isaacson, Instruction That Helps Students Meet State Standards in Writing. C.A. Espin, J.W. Weissenburger, B.J. Benson, Assessing the Writing Performance of Students in Special Education.