Showcasing cutting-edge findings on adolescent literacy teaching and learning, this unique handbook is grounded in the realities of students' daily lives. It highlights research methods and instructional approaches that capitalize on adolescents' interests, knowledge, and new literacies. Attention is given to how race, gender, language, and other dimensions of identity--along with curriculum and teaching methods--shape youths' literacy development and engagement. The volume explores innovative ways that educators are using a variety of multimodal texts, from textbooks to graphic novels and digital productions. It reviews a range of pedagogical approaches; key topics include collaborative inquiry, argumentation, close reading, and composition.ÿ

Through an innovative approach of critical ethnography and literacy research via case-study methodologies, Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites analyzes Latino/a adolescents’ engagement with the elements of literacy for English language arts learning and understanding. How young people enact literacies in their bicultural lives and understand literary traditions today reveals their own interests in democracy, equity, and opportunity. Moreover, the rites they perform often recover buried histories, mirrors, and stories similar to the pre-Columbian scribes whose intellectual legacy is relevant in the twenty-first century. R. Joseph Rodríguez illustrates how adolescents experience scribal identities and language pluralism that sustains their cultural knowledge as they make meaning and enact literacies with diverse audiences in civic and schooling communities.

This book explores the dynamic range of literacy practices in and out of school that are reconstructing youth gender identities in both empowering and disempowering ways and the implications for local literacy classrooms.

This book presents results from a four-year project addressing the central question: What factors, challenges, and contexts contribute to and constrain literacy achievement among at-risk adolescent learners with culturally diverse backgrounds? Researchers consider the importance of several, interrelated factors that support the development of adolescents’ literacies in multilingual contexts: support from educators, community groups, families, and peers; recognition of the multi-faceted complexity of literacy through multiple, complementary methods of research and assessment; approaches to pedagogy that engage learners’ zones of proximal development in humanistic and purposeful ways; and promoting students’ vocabulary knowledge, strategies for reading, writing, and learning, and orientations to engaging with epistemic purposes of literacy critically, through multiple media, and with self-confidence.

Testifying to the maturity of the youth literacy education field, this collection of papers displays the increasing sophistication of research on the subject, and at the same time offers pointers to its potential for development in the next decade. The contributors track the rapid proliferation of youth literacies in today’s digital age, from video games to social media and film production. Drawing on detailed research and an intimate knowledge of youth communities in nations as diverse as Canada and Uganda, they provide notable examples of digital literacies in situ, and challenge conventional wisdom about literacy education. The chapters do more, however, than merely offer reportage of a crisis in literacy education. The authors embrace the core challenge faced by educators everywhere: how to incorporate and utilize new modes of literacy in education, and how to realize the potential benefits of heterogeneous modern media in youth literacy education, especially in marginalized, remote, and disadvantaged communities. This volume expands our view of digital communications technologies and digital literacies to include complex understandings of how media such as translated videos can serve as learning tools for youths whose access to literacy education is limited. In particular, a number of contributing scholars provide important new information about the praxis of teachers and the literacies adopted by young people in Africa, a continent largely neglected by literacy researchers. This book’s global perspective, and its ground-level viewpoint of youth literacy practices in a variety of locations, problematizes normative assumptions about researching literacy as well as about literacy itself.

"Living in an age of communication, literacy is an extremely integral part of our society. We are impacted by literature during our infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. This work includes information from specialists in the field who discuss the influence of popular culture, media, and technology on literacy. Together, they offer a comprehensive outline of the study and practice of literacy in the United States. The first volume, Early Literacy, covers infancy and early childhood. Topics such as oral language development, phonics, beginning writing, storytelling and drama, and instruction for second language learners and special needs children are all addressed. Volume two, Childhood Literacy, includes information on popular approaches to reading instruction, children's literature, spelling, computer and instructional technology, book clubs, and after-school programs. Adolescent Literacy, the third volume, covers supplementary literacy programs for at-risk adolescents, literacy tutors, young adult literature, gender issues, digital literacy, and blogging. Finally, volume four, Adult Literacy, offers chapters on adult basic education, programs for English language learners, and workplace literacy."--publisher's description.

Prominent researchers analyze existing knowledge on adolescent literacy, examine the implications for classroom instruction, and offer specific goals for future research. Particular attention is given to how teaching literacy across disciplines can improve students' content-area learning, and the book includes chapters dedicated to literacy in math and science classrooms. --from publisher description.

This dissertation explores a technologically intensive after-school program to determine what literacy practices develop, and what alternative spaces are created in which learning can take place. Using qualitative methods and a socio-cultural lens, this research is an examination of adolescents' learning and development, in the process of creating digital stories (multimedia compositions) over two semesters. It documents the complexities and opportunities that are born when participants from different cultural worlds come together to learn and play.

"International scholars and practitioners apply the principles of the New Literacy Studies, which views literacy as a social practice, to diverse educational contexts. Sixteen case studies explore what it means for students of all ages to learn and teachers to teach across diverse contexts"--Provided by the publisher. place like home : a teacher education perspective on literacies across educational contexts / Jennifer Rowsell and Dorothy Rajaratnam -- Deconstructing academic practices through self-reflexive pedagogies / Penny Jane Burke and Monika Hermerschmidt.