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This paper aims to explore alternative literacy instruction with incarcerated youth, add to the body of existing literature documenting the literacy of those incarcerated and investigate the construction of book clubs through a critical lens.

This qualitative case study answered the following research questions: What can a critical book club reveal about the literacy lives of these incarcerated youth? What can we learn from incarcerated youth through a critical book club? Data were collected through participant observation and in-depth interviews and analyzed using a critical literacy framework.

Findings indicate students used text connections to critically reflect on selves and schools. They questioned issues of power, particularly the power of literacy in their own lives as well as the power of schools, teachers and curriculum. The paper concludes with the authors’ critical reflection on both the findings and process which results in implications for future book clubs in settings with incarcerated youth.

As educators, administrators and community members living in the “age of incarceration” (Hill, 2013), there is a social responsibility to design curriculum and pedagogy that expands instruction in correctional facilities.

The need for expanded literacy instruction in juvenile detention centers has been widely documented and supported; however, conventional methods of teaching literacy are not always successful for youth who may not have had positive experiences with traditional schooling. This study expands and explores literacy instruction with incarcerated youth through book clubs, an alternative literacy structure which challenges traditional curricula, pedagogical practices and culturally irrelevant texts which often contribute to the alienation and disempowerment of many students. Book clubs can facilitate new understandings through a critical lens.

A collaborative autoethnography (CAE) conducted by six Belizean educators in a US-based PhD program in Language, Literacy, and Culture Education and one of their faculty members is presented in a creative, dialogic format in this chapter. The group of educators embarked on this reflective self-study to explore how their programmatic language and literacy education knowledge was taken up, remixed, rejected, indigenized, or transformed into local Belizean pedagogies and curricula. Using CAE methods of narrative data generation and dialogic analysis and reflection, the educator-researchers examined the degree to which their program met the expectations of Tierney's (2018) global meaning making endeavor. They found that being vulnerable learners and building their own disciplinary confidence and competence enabled them to take up the new ideas they were encountering, and that new learning led to transformative shifts in their pedagogical philosophies that included culturally relevant and proactive pedagogies. They also innovated and remixed pedagogies in their teaching contexts while wobbling with how to create sustainable changes. This work indicates that Western, US-based universities and programs can, with intentional macro- and micro-curriculum design and ongoing critical reflection, facilitate cross-cultural, international language and literacy programs that enact decolonizing and emancipatory curricula and practices.

This chapter details a cultural relevance of text project in-service K-12 teachers engage in during their graduate literacy methods class. Through this project, teachers, who work with emergent bilinguals, learn how to select culturally relevant texts using a rubric. They read their selection with a student and reflect on the experience. Four important conclusions came from an analysis of the projects teachers carried out. Teachers found that their students made connections and were more engaged when reading culturally relevant books. Participants found the rubric helpful in identifying what they should look for in a culturally relevant text. In addition, through this project, the teachers discovered that their libraries tended to lack culturally relevant literature. Finally, participant teachers learned more about their emergent bilingual students through the process of finding and reading culturally relevant stories. While this project was carried out by a limited number of teachers in urban environments, it has implications for teachers of emergent bilingual students in other contexts.

Through a retrospective, reflective, descriptive methodology, three researchers explore their experiences as teacher educators. Interactions with a variety of educational stakeholders in Guatemala resulted in new perspectives about culture, language, instruction, literacy materials, and access. Even though each researcher had a distinct background, global experience, and teaching expertise, they collaborated for data analysis and describe how their new international perspectives renews teaching and subsequently invigorates the learning of students back in the institutions of higher learning in the United States. All three brought their new learning into their higher education venues back in the United States to better prepare literacy educators for today’s global world.

In this qualitative study, we explore 31 preservice teachers’ generative trajectories including how they built on instructional practices learned in the service-learning project, the university methods course, and the field-based experience. We addressed the question: In what ways does participating in a semester-long field-based university course combined with a service-learning program shape preservice teachers’ views about effective literacy practices for emergent bilinguals? We identified four themes in our analysis: importance of choice in literacy pedagogy; learning from and with our students; freedom to apply course methods and ideas; and growing confidence and align them with Ball’s (2009) generative change model and the four processes of change – metacognitive awareness, ideological becoming, internalization, and efficacy.

We found the preservice teachers’ ability to develop an awareness of diversity grew from their work with students both in their field-block experience and writing club. These opportunities provided them with a layering of learning – from course readings, collaborating with teachers, to problem solving and creating lessons that specifically met their students’ needs. By moving in and out of different contexts, preservice teachers developed generative knowledge about ways to support writing for emergent bilinguals. Likewise, they became keenly aware of their own experiences and beliefs. Implications include the importance of providing a variety of opportunities for preservice teachers to work directly with students. This should be accompanied by written and verbal discussions to examine and critique their experiences and ideologies in relation to students’ language and literacy needs.

Teacher educators in rural settings where few English learners (ELs) may be enrolled in PK-12 schools are responsible for creating learning experiences that support preservice teachers in building a foundation for teaching culturally and linguistically diverse learners. The goal of the self-study described in this chapter was to investigate a teacher educator’s practice in a largely White, English-speaking rural area in the northeastern US. Learning experiences embedded in the one required course for preparing to teach ELs were grounded in extant research. This chapter highlights one unique experience in which the preservice teachers interacted with international ESL peers on campus to negotiate meaning of a complex text. The preservice teachers reported that this interaction led to analogous understandings for planning and implementing literacy instruction with ELs. These results may be useful to other teacher educators in rural areas who seek principled ways to strengthen preservice teachers’ preparedness for teaching ELs.

For teachers to fully enact pedagogy rooted in equity and inclusion, they must have access to purposeful systems and tools supporting proactive and collaborative planning built explicitly to center the needs of those historically denied full access to learning. This chapter takes on the historical injustices that have been perpetuated within public education in the United States since its inception and presents practical tools and systems (rooted in research and refined in the field) that can promote more equitable day-to-day teaching and learning in classrooms.

Affect is central to the process of teaching and learning. The recent affective turn in literacy education has further underscored its critical potential as an act of resistance against dehumanizing forces that impact students’ schooling and life experiences (Dutro, 2019; Leander and Ehret, 2019). This article, taking up the notion of affect as relational and performed forces that emerge from the in-betweenness among people, objects and material and discursive contexts, examines how two US Latinx teachers and their young bilingual students co-constructed affect and play in translanguaging read-alouds with a bilingual text that centered their culturally rooted ways of knowing and being.

Drawing on data from a larger practitioner research study that aimed at developing teacher candidates’ culturally and linguistically sustaining literacy instruction, the authors took a discourse analytic approach to examine how the two teachers created curricular opportunities for affect and play in designing the translanguaging read-alouds and how bilingual children and their teachers playfully engaged with the bilingual text during the read-alouds.

The analysis indicated that the teachers’ intentional selection of the Spanish–English bilingual picturebook Niño Wrestles the World created opportunities for the children to leverage their full linguistic repertoire and funds of knowledge to engage with the text. During the read-alouds, the children and the teachers co-constructed affect and playfulness through embodied performance and translanguaging.

This study contributes to the research and practice of literacy instruction of bilingual children by illustrating how affect figures into the process of literacy instruction and how translanguaging read-alouds can afford bilingual children opportunities to playfully engage with the text that centers their cultural epistemologies.

Overemphasis on teaching academic literacy and legislating high-stakes accountability measures have foregrounded narrow literacy approaches in early childhood settings and sparked debates over teacher professionalism (Reinking et al., 2023). This study examines the experiences of early childhood teachers following a two-year in-service Professional Development (PD) program. The PD program was designed to enhance the teachers' professional capital in early childhood literacies.

Using phenomenology as the design of the study, three focus groups, one survey, and observations during two events were conducted to document “the essence” of participant teachers’ views and lived experiences (Creswell, 2013).

Our data analysis revealed that participant teachers demonstrated an increased awareness of different literacy teaching approaches and applied new strategies in their literacy teaching through continuous discussions with other participant teachers and co-workers within their schools.

This phenomenological study underscores the value of integrating collaboration into in-service PD programs for leveraging teachers’ professional capital, in addition to strengthening their human and decisional capital, as reported by the teachers. The study also contributes to scientific knowledge about the ways teachers experience collaborative PD opportunities and their self-initiated strategies to create a cooperative learning environment at their schools.

This manuscript describes the findings of an examination of 21 pre-service teachers and one literacy course instructor within the context of a program focused on urban teacher preparation. Using inductive thematic analysis of multiple data sources, the research team identified three themes. First, general agreement existed amongst the pre-service teachers that Barack Obama’s 2008 election was a critical, important moment in U.S. history with consistent rationales for why they should include information about President Obama’s life and work as part of the curriculum, especially for African American students. This theme comprised three trends: the importance of teaching civics, the historical importance of the first African American president, and the importance of President Obama as a role model. Second, pre-service teachers enacted and responded to barriers to teaching critical literacy about the Obama presidency. This second theme also comprised three trends: a reluctance to detract from President Obama’s positive image, an unease in teaching politics, and the references to developmental issues related to the ages of the kindergarten children they taught. Third, inconsistencies occurred amongst pre-service teachers’ understandings of critical literacy.