Twenty-first Century Literacies Research Articles

A Call for Raciolinguistic Epistemologies: Transnational Languaging of Immigrant Literacy Teacher Educators

ABSTRACT Twenty-first century literacy teacher education in and beyond the United States continues to reinforce standardized languages – often English, and knowledges based on these languages in their preparation of literacy teachers. Despite literacy research informed by a largely white monolingual population of teacher educators, most of whom are predominantly English-speaking and rely very often on best practices in literacy research largely and historically conducted with monolingual (i.e., standard-English speaking) students, there is an expectation that research on diversity in literacy will change the practices of teachers amidst a concomitant failure to examine intentionally, the racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity of language and literacy teacher educators who have been deemed so central to changing teachers, ideologies and practices toward languaging. To address these concerns, this conceptual essay argues that immigrant teacher educators (of Color) possess epistemologies critical to teaching literacy and language to prospective and practicing teachers in teacher education programs within the United States. I present and discuss three epistemological bases of immigrant literacy teacher educators of Color racialized epistemologies – steeped in their racialized languaging, as a paradigmatic shift from Minority World to Majority World knowledges in literacy and language research, policy, and education.

Research Roundup: Upping Your Digital Storytelling Game

In the spring 2021 issue, we discussed the benefits of Vivian Paley’s storytelling practice on language and literacy skills, social emotional development, creativity, and motivation. Traditional storytelling is powerful in its own right, but we would be remiss if we did not also mention the benefits of digital storytelling—the process of using multimedia tools to tell a story. A digital story can be something as simple as narrating a story over a single photo or as complex as a movie with audio and visual effects. Allowing children to use technology to tell stories can generate interest and motivation in content creation, ignite creativity, and support the development of twenty-first century literacy skills. Here’s a look at some storytelling tools that can be used to elevate the voices of children and families across settings.

Film in the Composition Classroom

AbstractInstructors of writing-intensive disciplines infrequently integrate cinematic media in composition curricula. Furthermore, when instructors use films in composition courses, they often treat films merely as supplemental texts tangentially relevant to course topics and prioritize teaching content rather than media or filmmaking. This pedagogical approach overlooks an opportunity to ask students to consider how the audiovisual rhetorical efforts can meaningfully harmonize or create dissonance with the content. In this research study, the author argues that students are active media consumers engaging frequently with media as a form of composition. He navigates the limitations of Gregory Ulmer and Lev Manovitch, whose early work stressing the primacy of media literacies in composition classrooms is nonetheless seminal to the author's larger claims of film's educational import. The author relates the results of the IRB-approved research of his composition students, who offer feedback about the use of film in the class. The author calls for greater attention to film instruction and curricula development for collegiate composition classrooms, urging educators to move beyond film's supplemental use and toward more educationally fruitful practices, including teaching active watching and basic film analysis. Film is a critical form of cultural communication and media, and the author contends that it is a pivotal part of the landscape of twenty-first century literacy engagements.

Radical rubrics: implementing the critical and creative thinking general capability through an ecological approach

This article details how and why we have developed a flexible and responsive process-based rubric exemplar for teaching, learning, and assessing critical and creative thinking. We hope to contribute to global discussions of and efforts toward instrumentalising the challenge of assessing, but not standardising, creativity in compulsory education. Here, we respond to the key ideas of the four interrelated elements in the critical and creative thinking general capability in the Australian Curriculum learning continuum: inquiring; generating ideas, possibilities, actions; reflecting on thinking processes; and analysing, synthesising and evaluating reasoning and procedures. The rubrics, radical because they privilege process over outcome, have been designed to be used alongside the current NAPLAN tests in Years 5, 7 and 9 to build an Australian-based national creativity measure. We do so to argue the need for local and global measures of creativity in education as the first round of testing and results of the PISA Assessment of Creative Thinking approach and to contribute to the recognition of creative thinking (and doing) as a core twenty-first century literacy alongside literacy and numeracy.

Impact of virtual vs. face-to-face learning on 21st-century skills among pre-service bilingual teachers

The so-called ‘twenty-first century skills’ (Dudeney, Hockly and Pegrum, 2014) have been identified as essential literacies for the young generation, who must use creativity and innovation, collaboration and teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving, autonomy, flexibility and lifelong learning to function effectively. Bilingual pre-service teachers are entitled to develop these skills for both their own education and that of their future students (Savage and Barnett, 2015). This research will analyse the opinions of 45 bilingual pre-service teachers on the development of their twenty-first century skills through either online or face-to-face teaching. Quantitative and qualitative data will be scrutinized under a mixed-methods research, which will throw light on how participants think such skills are better developed. Findings will show that teacher students think that some of these skills are better developed under a face-to-face modality of learning (e.g. teamwork and collaboration), whereas others (e.g. autonomy and innovation) evolve better under an online framework of learning. Twenty-first century literacies push the educational boundaries of bilingual teachers as they are entitled to have a repertoire of communication skills that make us, teacher educators, pursue academic rigour regarding our own teaching and updated training.

#Digital parents: Intergenerational learning through a digital literacy workshop

In this article, we present findings of a research study centered around a 10-week digital production workshop developed specifically for families in an urban school board, a population rich with culturally diverse immigrant families and English language learners (ELLs). The aim of this research was to support parents/guardians in an urban community in their development of a practical, hands-on understanding of twenty-first century literacies, using a ‘production pedagogy’ framework that emphasizes learner agency. We sought to critically reflect, alongside parents/guardians, on how new media and new literacies are being utilized in schools today, and to provide models, tools and practices for parents/guardians and their children to enact digital competences together, specifically, through the production of a short digital story.

Parents' beliefs about and associations to their elementary children's home technology usage.

This study sought to gather information through a survey of how newcomer parents’ beliefs about technology usage and how they engage with technology as they support their children with twenty-first century literacies. Parent respondents (N = 70) were drawn from two publicly funded schools in the Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada, where the population tends to be immigrant, visible minority, with post-secondary education, but unemployed and low income. Descriptive statistics quantified daily technology activities as being communication-oriented with the majority of parents holding distinct beliefs about the amount and type of their children’s technology usage. Chi-square tests indicated significant associations for demographic characteristics such as the gender, age, education, first language, and ethnicity of the parents as determinants of their beliefs about their children’s technology usage (e.g., social media, mobile phones, television). As well, levels of access and use varied in terms of the number of new technologies and the types of literacy practices that families engage in. Immigrant parents might hold misconceptions about twenty-first century literacies, therefore there should be an attempt to assist them to provide responsive twenty-first century literacy and technology support for their children.

The myth of sharing publicly as 21st century literacy

PurposeThis paper highlights the fluidity with which youth make decisions about engaging with digital technologies including online social media. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities that literacy curriculum that centers digital technologies can have for students from immigrant communities through tracing the case of a Bangladeshi–American girl named Sabina.Design/methodology/approachGrounded in a transliteracies frame, this qualitative case study explores the digital literacy practices of youth in an urban public secondary school in the USA. Data collection included participant observation across various spaces including an eighth grade digital media studies class, school cafeteria and hallways, participants’ homes and online communities. Further data included formal interviews, informal conversations and digital and print artifact collection. Data were analyzed through the lenses of flow and space–time path.FindingsThe findings of this paper highlight how Sabina made space for social networking using digital technologies on her own terms as well as how the ways that she collaborated through the use of digital technologies created opportunities for her to be an active participant in her social worlds across home and school contexts.Originality/valueAnalyzing Sabina’s digital literacy practices across diverse social spaces offers insights for educators to create opportunities for diverse youth to leverage digital technologies to support skills such as collaboration and civic engagement, which have been identified as defining characteristics of twenty-first century literacies. This case points to the imperative for teachers to create connected learning classrooms that offer opportunities for youth to use digital technologies to support their efforts to make change in the world on their own terms.

Designing multimodal texts in a girls’ afterschool journalism club in rural Kenya

Characteristic of the twenty-first century are new literacy practices that require users and producers to be fluent with the affordances of multiple modes across print and digital media. In under-resourced contexts such as East Africa, these complex new multimodal practices have not been well documented. In this paper, we explore the context of an afterschool journalism club in rural Kenya as an informal learning space for 32 adolescent girls to realize multimodal text design following our donation of a laptop, digital camera and voice recorder. Using ethnographic methods that positioned the girls as researchers of their own practices, we collaboratively documented the girls’ changing social practices as they produced and designed videos in the context of their community and journalism club. As we proceeded through our analysis, we drew inspiration from Luke and Freebody’s Four Resources Model for reading print texts and Serafini’s reconceptualization of the Four Resources required for reading visual and multimodal texts, taking up their call to critique and reformulate the model within the rapidly changing context of twenty-first century literacy practices. Our study identifies the emergent and dynamic nested social practices of: (1) explorer, (2) participant-user, (3) performer, and (4) activist as integral to the design of videos.

Considering Visual Text Complexity: A Guide for Teachers

Twenty-first century literacy requires students to analyze and create images for communication across and within academic disciplines. Thus, literacy teachers are now responsible for supporting students as they engage with visual texts. We must carefully and intentionally choose images for teaching practice and consider the reader, instructional task, and visual text complexity. This teaching tip offers support for teachers making decisions about what images to embed in their practice and includes a scale to illuminate visual text complexity based on the qualitative criteria outlined in the Common Core State Standards.

Renewing Assessment Practices: Literacy Teaching and Learning in Digital Environments

Interpretations of “literacy” and approaches to literacy pedagogy and assessment are under renewal as meaning-making and learning are increasingly situated in digitized environments. While the implications of these shifts are in part technological, they are also relational, as students are increasingly positioned as interactive with participatory roles in self-knowledge and increased responsibility for their learning. However, while shifts are occurring in understandings of literacy and approaches to literacy pedagogy, the same cannot be said for the way in which assessments of digital literacies are undertaken. There is a lack of valid, reliable, and practical assessments of new literacies to inform and help students to become better prepared for study, work, and citizenship in digital environments. This article maps five characteristics of effective formative assessment in print-based classrooms with seven affordancesin digital learning and assessment to suggest an analytical framework for examining teacher and student assessment in digital environments. Drawing on data from a research project in which a team of teachers introduced a one-to-one computing program and worked to renew their literacy assessment practices, this article discusses how each of the seven affordances are enacted in the assessment practices in a years five and six primary school classroom. The findings from this research project show that educational technologies have the potential to enable new approaches to teaching, learning, and assessment that better align with the needs of twenty-first century literacy learners. The findings alsosupport approaches to formative assessment that value print and multimodality and engage students in more flexible and differentiated ways. They can enable teachers and students to be re-positioned as designers, knowledge producers, and collaborative learners. The seven affordances provide a framework that holds rich possibilities for teacher learning and planning as prompts to support reflection on formative assessment practices, critique habitual practices, and considernew opportunities.

Metaphors that teachers live by: a cultural model of literacy in the era of new literacies

Bridging home literacy practices and school has been a key theme for many New Literacy Studies researchers, yet there is no clear consensus on the impact of multiple or new literacies in K-12 classrooms. American classrooms remain book-centric. Multiple literacies represent a fundamental paradigm shift in the ways we understand and enact literacy and learning, but most teachers continue to respond to literacy instruction in ways that inadequately address the complexities of twenty-first century literacy needs. While the existing structures and policies of education make schools problematic sites for enacting multiple and new literacies, one important explanation can be found in the metaphors that constitute teachers’ cultural model of literacy. This study provides a metaphorical analysis of interview excerpts from classroom teachers in order to reconstruct their cultural model of literacy that I presuppose underlies their talk about bookishness. But membership in this category is determined by an ideal exemplar. Teachers’ metaphors reveal a moral model that draws upon a conceptual category where bookishness serves as a cognitive prototype. Understanding teachers’ cultural model of literacy and its associated metaphors offers opportunities to reframe critical conversations about twenty-first century classroom literacy pedagogy.

‘The Transpoemations Project’: digital storytelling, contemporary poetry, and refugee boys

This article describes a five-week summer literacy program designed for a group of 70 multilingual refugee boys resettled from their home countries in Africa and Asia to a city in the Southeastern USA. The students attended local public schools but struggled to experience academic success in the traditional classroom. The summer program addressed this issue by offering the students a curriculum in which they worked, alongside American teachers, in small learning groups, completing activities premised on specific twenty-first century literacies, such as critical thinking and the creative manipulation of texts and technologies. The students interacted with high-interest literature written in English and with selected productivity tools, including the filmmaking software MovieMaker. The program culminated with each student producing a digital story – a ‘transpoemation’ – adapted from an autobiographical response to George Ella Lyon’s poem, ‘Where I’m From.’ The students translated their own poems through a series of scaffolded steps in order to create short films for preview and critique. Working with the computer, with texts they had generated, and with images and music, the students showcased their facility with storytelling, with the English vocabulary they were acquiring, and with visual media, demonstrating a growing sense of academic confidence.

Twenty-First Century Literacy: A Matter of Scale from Micro to Mega

Twenty-first century technologies require educators to look for new ways to teach literacy skills. Current communication methods are combinations of traditional and newer, network-driven forms. This article describes the changes twenty-first century technologies cause in the perception of time, size, distance, audience, and available data, and offers suggestions for teaching with these differences in mind.

Preparing Students for Twenty-First Century Literacy

Preparing Students for Twenty-First Century Literacy