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This short article takes the play and passion of children’s literacy as its focal point. Rather than orienting reading and writing around what should be taught or how children should respond and understand written text, in this short reflective essay we aim to explore the play and passion inherent in children’s literacy practices. We do not aim to precisely conceptualise or delineate the nature of play or passion but, instead, to trace the path of these ideas through seminal research studies within the field of New Literacy Studies as well as drawing on the authors’ fieldwork.

This paper begins with an exploration of foundational research in the field of new literacy studies, drawing attention to the abundant presence of children’s play and passion. Then, it visits two moments of play and passion from the authors’ fieldwork that suggest ways of thinking anew about children’s literacy practices beyond responding to text. The first, by Kenneth Pettersen, considers childhood collecting across home/pre-school settings in Norway; the second, by Stefan Kucharczyk, looks at children’s curatorship in Minecraft at an afterschool videogame club in the UK. This paper concludes with a proposed reimagining of literacy education, outlining implications for researchers, policymakers and practitioners.

These observed moments of collecting and gaming are analysed in the context of children’s play and passion. In both cases, we highlight how observing children following their passions and interests can challenge how we, as adult researchers, view their play and how we think about literacy. Rather than being in opposition to one another, our analysis of children’s collecting and worldbuilding account for the felt experience in children’s literacy practices.

Moving inside of two separate research studies, we give a bird’s eye view of what can be gained by observing and drawing out play and passion while children respond and make meaning through varied texts and objects in two different contexts. The article therefore is an invitation to think otherwise about reading and writing by embracing play and passion as children’s pathway into rich literacy moments.

The purpose of this paper is to report on video making in two different contexts within the Community Arts Zone research project, an international research project concerned with the connections between arts, literacy and the community.

At one project site, researchers and parents from the community filmed their children making dens with an artist. At another site, a professional film crew filmed young people engaged in arts practice in school settings.

In both cases, researchers, artists and community participants collaborated to do research and make video. This paper discusses the ways that this work was differently positioned at the two sites. These different positionings had implications for the meaning ascribed to video making from the point of view of the participants, researchers and artists involved.

By drawing on perspectives of researchers and artists, the paper explores implications for video making processes within ethnographic research. These include a need for awareness of the diversity and fragmentation of the fields of both visual research and visual arts practice. In addition, the relationship between research and the visual is unfolding in a context in which the digital is increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life. Therefore the authors argue for the need for researchers and artists to explore their epistemological assumptions with regards to video and film, and to consider the role of the digital in the lives of their participants. The coming together of these positions and experiences is what constructs the meaning of the digital and visual in the field.

Written by a librarian and history professor, the purpose of this paper is to describe a collaborative, primary source literacy project and report its effectiveness in teaching undergraduates to critically analyze information and develop primary source literacy.

The methodology used included a research project with 24 undergraduates and a pre- and post-survey. The research project and student survey incorporated principles from the “Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy”, published in 2017 by the ACRL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section and the Society of American Archivists. The paper offers research and practical implications for librarians and instructors interested in strategies to teach information literacy. For instance, the paper includes a review of literature on “archival intelligence” or “primary source literacy” and describes the 2017 Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy.

Socially, the paper includes implications for how to create an inclusive learning experience for students with mechanisms such as a scaffolded assignment, hands-on instruction, imposter syndrome awareness and a no-Google policy.

Given that this is one of the first articles to document how practitioners are incorporating the new 2017 Guidelines, this is sure to be an original and valuable essay.

This article explores the processes and practices of doing participatory research with children. It explores how this process can be represented in writing. The article comes out of a project funded by Creative Partnerships UK, in which a creative agent, three artists and a researcher all worked within an elementary school in South Yorkshire, UK, for two years, to focus on the children’s Reasons to Write. It considers whether it is truly possible for children to enter the academic domain. Using a number of different voices, the article interrogates this. It particularly focuses on children’s role in analysing and selecting important bits of data. It engages with the lived realities of children as researchers. It considers ways in which children’s voices can be represented, and also acknowledges the limitations of this approach for adults who want to write academic peer reviewed articles. Ideas the adults thought were clever were found to be redundant in relation to children’s epistemologies. The article considers the process that is involved in taking children’s epistemologies seriously.

Critical literacy foregrounds the relationship between language and power by focusing on how texts work and in whose interests (Luke, 2012, p. 5). It is highlighted as an “important skill” within Scotland’s national educational framework for 3-18 year olds, the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), yet, as this paper aims to show, what the concept means is far from clear for policy users (Scottish Government, 2009e).

Using a lens that draws from critical discourse analysis, critical content analysis (Luke, 2001; Beach et al., 2009; Fairclough, 2010) and Ball’s method of policy analysis (2015), the authors find that the term “critical literacy” has been applied incoherently within key CfE documentation, including the frequent conflation of critical literacy with critical reading and critical thinking.

The authors argue that the CfE’s use of “critical literacy” is a misnomer, given that the version presented is an amalgamation of literacy-related competences drawing largely from psychological and not socio-political perspectives of literacy.

This is a missed opportunity, given the Scottish Government’s stated commitment to social justice in policy terms (Scottish Executive, 2000; Scottish Government, 2016), not forgetting the powerful benefits that a critically literate stance could bring to Scotland’s learners at this time of communicative change and challenge.

While the authors offer a contextualized view of the ways in which the term “critical literacy” has been incorporated into Scottish educational policy, they propose that its implications go beyond national boundaries.

Purpose – This chapter discusses youth participation in a Social Justice Literacy Workshop (SJLW). Participants were predominantly Black youth residing in an urban community with a rich history and important community resources such as libraries and churches. The SJLW used a variety of print texts, videos, artwork, documents, and other texts to explore the topic of police brutality and other justice-related topics.

Design/Methodology/Approach – This chapter uses the gradual release of responsibility (GRR) model as a lens to revisit the SJLW as designed and implemented by the first author Tiffany Nyachae. Nyachae designed and implemented the SJLW as space to inspire students to engage in critical thinking and analysis of authentic texts, and to use these textual interactions as an impetus for activism in their community. With the help of her co-authors, Nyachae reflects on the SJLW through a GRR lens to describe how students were scaffolded and supported as they moved toward activism.

Findings – Students brought their own understandings of police brutality and awareness of activism to the SJLW. These prior understandings were shaped both by their own lived experiences but also by their awareness of and interaction with social media. During the SJLW, youth read and discussed the novels All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely (2015) and Hush by Jacqueline Woodson (2002). The youth engaged in activities and discussions about how prevalent issues in each novel connected to larger social and political concerns. Students discussed the current events, engaged in reflective writing, read short pieces, and analyzed documents and videos. The SJLW was successful in such a way that all students felt comfortable voicing their opinions, even when opinions differed from their peers. Students demonstrated critical thinking about issues related to justice. All students completed an action plan to address injustice in their community. While applying the GRR to this context and reflecting, first author Nyachae began to consider the other scaffolds for youth that could have been included, particularly one youth, JaQuan, who was skeptical about what his community had done to support him. Nyachae revisits the SJLW to consider how the GRR helped to reveal the need for additional scaffolding that JaQuan or other youth may have needed from leaders in the SJLW. A literature review also revealed that very few literacy practices have brought together the GRR and social justice teaching or learning.

Research Limitations/Implications – This chapter demonstrates that the GRR framework can be effectively applied to a justice-centered teaching and learning context as a reflective tool. Since very little research exists on using the GRR framework with justice-centered teaching, there is a need for additional research in this area as the GRR model offers many affordances for researchers and teachers. There is also a need for literacy researchers to consider elements of justice even when applying the GRR framework to any classroom or out-of-school context with children and youth.

Practical Implications – The GRR can be a useful tool for reflecting the practices of literacy and justice-centered teaching. Just as the GRR can be a useful framework to help teachers think about teaching reading comprehension, it can be an effective tool to help teachers think about supporting students to grow from awareness to activism in justice-centered teaching and learning.

Originality/Value of Paper – This chapter is one of only a handful of published works that brings together a social justice perspective with the GRR.

Purpose – To consider the ways two pre-service teachers evaluated digital information sources about climate change in order to highlight the challenges and possibilities of an instructional approach aimed at cultivating digital literacies about climate change among pre-service teachers.

Design – The qualitative research design focuses on two pre-service teachers’ written reflections and participation during class discussions across two sessions in a content literacy course. The theoretical framework that guided the analysis was civic media literacy.

Findings – Findings of this study highlight conceptions of reliability that two participants held (reliability as relative or as evidentiary support) as they worked with web sources about climate change. These conceptions reflected a denialist orientation to climate change science.

Practical Implications – This study contributes to the literature that considers the ways pre-service teachers work with websites about socioscientific topics. It highlights how an instructional model can help promote digital literacy practices that center on evaluating the reliability of websites about climate change. It also includes a companion framework called fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking, and conspiracy theories (FLICC) that can be used to guide students to better understand techniques and practices of science denial.

In an editorial introduction essay for the special issue on Religion, Literacies, and English Education in Global Dialogue, the editors frame papers in the special issue in dialogue with previous scholarly literature around three central lines of inquiry: How do children, youth and families navigate relationships among religion, spirituality, language and literacy? What challenges are faced by language and literacy teachers and teacher educators around the globe who seek to respond to diverse religious and spiritual perspectives in their work? And what opportunities do teachers seize or create toward this end? How are developments of language and literacy theory, policy, curriculum and ritual entangled with race and religion?

Taking an essayist, humanistic approach, this paper summarizes, interprets and comments on previous scholarly works to frame the articles published in the special issue “Religion, Literacies, and English Education in Global Dialogue” in relation to the field and in relation to one another.

Denise Dávila, Matthew Deroo and Ilhan Mohamud reveal the relationships young people and families forge and navigate among spiritual literacies and literatures, digital technologies and ethnic identities. Heidi Hadley, Jennifer Wargo and Erin McNeill illuminate how teachers’ vocations, as well as their pedagogical goals and curricular artifacts, can become deeply entangled with religious and spiritual sense-making. Kasun Gajasinghe and Priyanka Jayakodi expand perspectives on both the ritualization and racialization of religion through nationalist policies surrounding national anthem performances in Sri Lanka. Anne Whitney and Suresh Canagarajah discuss how spiritual commitments, communities and experiences interact with their scholarly trajectories.

The essay concludes with a discussion of scholarly capacity building that may be needed for conducting research on religion and spirituality in relation to languages, literacies and English education on a global scale.

The second section of the essay discusses challenges faced by language and literacy teachers and teacher educators around the globe who seek to integrate diverse religious and spiritual perspectives into their work. It foregrounds how many teachers and teacher educators work within contexts where ethnoreligious nationalism is on the rise. It highlights the need for language and literacy educators to develop curiosity and basic knowledge about diverse religions. Further it calls for teacher educators to engage with teacher candidates’ religious identities and sense-making.

Because it considers religious and spiritual sense-making in relation to language and literacy education, the social implications of this work are significant and wide-reaching. For examples, the paper questions the conceit of secularism within education, pushing readers to consider their own spiritual and religious identifications and influences when they work across religious differences.

This paper identifies, interprets and assesses current threads of work on religious and spiritual sense-making within scholarship on languages, literacies and English education.