Media

Abstract

Dear JAAL Readers, Dictionary.com lists a number of synonyms for the theme that we have selected for this issue: Media (n.d.). Way, form, channel, vehicle, avenue, mode, and organ are among the terms listed. These synonyms are all straightforwardly related to the original meaning of the term as “an intervening agency, means, or instrument,” a meaning which we associate with old sayings such as “striking a happy medium,” to represent a compromise between two paths. As media rapidly evolve—see Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and the recently defunct Vine as quickly changing examples—media and messages are intertwined, with new literacies emerging to accompany new forms and ideas. This is particularly apparent in the articles in this issue, which is why we chose Media as our theme. The authors of the articles that follow describe how teachers and their students can use new literacies in bold, innovative ways that may result in vivid, authentic insights that we could not have imagined even 20 years ago. There is no better example of how changes in media influence literacy instruction for adolescents and adults than in our opening commentary, “Becoming Literate Digitally in a Digitally Literate Environment of Their Own,” by W. Ian O'Byrne and Kristine E. Pytash. They argue that each young person should be assigned space in A Domain of One's Own, a phrase that plays on Virginia Woolf's famous title, A Room of One's Own. This domain allows youths the space needed to curate the digital artifacts that they create, build, and modify. Such a repository represents affordances of the K–12 writing portfolio, augmented with space for the multimodal compositions of new literacies. It gives learners the chance to store, reflect on, and repurpose their work over time despite location, device, and operating system changes. The first three feature articles of this issue also bring the realities of new media and their commingled new literacies to life in poignant, authentic ways. Silvia Noguerón-Liu delineates how adults’ desire to engage with social media is shaped by their affiliations with a variety of local and transnational networks in “‘Everybody Knows Your Business’/’Todo Mundo Se Da Cuenta’: Immigrant Adults’ Construction of Privacy, Risk, and Vulnerability in Online Platforms.” In “‘We're Already Somebody’: High School Students Practicing Critical Literacy IRL (in Real Life),” Jane M. Saunders, Gwynne Ellen Ash, and Isabelle Salazar, with five student authors, describe how high school students deployed digital literacies to critique assumptions of a speaker who visited their school. Kelly N. Tracy, Kristin Menickelli, and Roya Q. Scales show how one teacher inspired her students to identify and learn to address important social issues in “Courageous Voices: Using Text Sets to Inspire Change.” The next four articles explore ways to make the exponentially varied forms of new media more explicit for adolescent and adult readers and writers. For instance, in “Leveraging Digital Mentor Texts to Write Like a Digital Writer,” Donna E. Werderich, Michael Manderino, and Gabriella Godinez propose a teaching method that shows adolescents and adults how to read with the savvy of digital writers. Erica H. Newhouse cautions readers to consider the limitations of en vogue educational ideas when their students’ responses tell them something different, in “Revealing the Naturalization of Language and Literacy: The Common Sense of Text Complexity.” “Multimodal Literacies: Imagining Lives Through Korean Dramas,” by Grace MyHyun Kim and Delila Omerbašić, argues that imaginative multimodal literacy practices can emerge from readers’ engagement with another country's popular-culture texts. In our last feature article, Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and John Hattie suggest that literacy teachers should choose strategies that make learning explicit based on desired student learning, in “Surface, Deep, and Transfer? Considering the Role of Content Literacy Instructional Strategies.” Note. © Nerthuz/Shutterstock.com. The color figure can be viewed in the online version of this article at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/. Another meaning of the term media comes from the visual arts. Artists are keenly aware of the affordances offered by specific media, whether they use oil paint reminiscent of Rembrandt's atelier or computer approaches to animation pioneered by Pixar. Our department editors have authored or brokered other authors’ contributions with similarly careful choices about the approaches they use to support adolescents’ and adults’ literacies across media. Jennifer J. Wimmer, Daniel Siebert, and Roni Jo Draper offer a precise look at “Digital Mathematics Literacies” in the Digital Literacies for Disciplinary Learning department edited by Michael Manderino and Jill Castek. In the Unlocking Literacy Learning department, edited by Evan Ortlieb and Yolanda Majors, Ezekiel Joubert III shares insights gleaned about “Reading Things Not Seen: A Reflection on Teaching Reading, Race, and Ghosts in Juvenile Detention.” The Partnership Literacies department, edited by Kristien Zenkov, features “Partnership Literacies in a Writing Methods Course: Practicing, Advocating, and Feeling Together” by Elizabeth Dutro, Ashley Cartun, Kim Melnychenko, Ellie Haberl, and Briana Pacheco Williams, a team of educators working in shared space to position children and youths as “positive contributors and knowledge generators.” Finally, in “Move Over, Reading, Writing Matters!” a column for the Policy and Practice Remix department that she shares with Colin Harrison, Donna E. Alvermann draws on Deborah Brandt's recent book, The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, to make direct, epistolary appeals to three constituencies—classroom teachers and administrators; literacy teacher educators and researchers; and instructional coaches, curriculum developers, and coordinators of professional growth workshops—that she argues should center writing more squarely in their ongoing efforts. The columns in our Text & Resource Review Forum offer other ways to see media multiply. In “Witnessing Race,” Challenging Texts editor Antero Garcia and contributors Peter Carlson and Nicole Mirra review two texts with constructions of race at their center: a graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's classic science fiction novel Kindred and Yaa Gyasi's continent- and era-spanning Homegoing. This column is supported by an interview with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas about the impact of digitally mediated communities on recent calls for more diverse books for young people. Stergios Botzakis, the editor of the Visual and Digital texts department, reviews media that can be employed in service of disciplinary learning in “Websites and Apps for Teaching and Learning Mathematics.” The Professional Resources department, edited by Lalitha Vasudevan and Kristine Rodriguez Kerr, features “Our World Is Text: Foregrounding Racial Literacy Through a Classroom Reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates” by Pauli Badenhorst. In different ways, all three columns stretch conventional conceptions of what counts as a resource to support student and teacher learning in literacy. If the contents of this issue spark new thinking for you about literacy research, theory, and/or practice, we hope that you'll share those insights with friends and colleagues via whatever media are available to you, knowing as you do that your choice of channel will shape and contribute to the meaning of those insights in new and perhaps hard-to-predict ways. We encourage you to interact with other JAAL readers via our recently created Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/122130841525201/), whose member list has been steadily growing over the past few months. We also hope that you'll consider JAAL as a channel to share findings as you test and refine approaches that you learn about here in your own classroom contexts. Such a communication chain, linking us all in service of adolescent and adult literacy, would be deeply satisfying to us as editors. Best, Kelly and Kathy