This book presents an ethnographic and discourse analytic study of a highly popular online fan fiction writing space. Its analyses highlight the range of sophisticated literacy practices that English language learning youth engage in through their fan-related activities. Discussion also centers on how opportunities for language socialization, literacy, and identity development converge and diverge between academic settings and informal learning contexts such as fan fiction sites.

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

Youth Online chronicles the stories of young people from several countries - the US, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and Holland - and their interactions in online communities over a seven-year period. It examines how young people construct their identities in various social contexts: social, fantasy, role-playing; and for various social purposes: leadership, learning, power, rebellion and romance. It explores the ways youth are deploying both visual and literary cues to develop a full sense of presence online and to effectively communicate with their peers. Using methods of textual, visual, and socio-psychological analysis, this book illuminates the ways in which young people are making sense of their own identities and their place within broader communities.

This book is about the teaching practices that technology enables. It addresses the ways in which teachers and students work together to navigate continuous change and what it means to read, write, view, listen, and communicate in the twenty-first century. The author offers solutions for connecting these activities with the literacy practices required by classroom curricula.

Adolescents' Online Literacies: Connecting Classrooms, Digital Media, and Popular Culture is a compilation of new work that makes concrete connections between what the research literature portrays and what teachers, school librarians, and media specialists know to be the case in their own situations. The authors (educators and researchers who span three continents) focus on ways to incorporate and use the digital literacies that young people bring to school.

Research on middle level education indicates that student learning at the middle level has a deep and abiding influence on post-secondary opportunities and career paths. As research continues to highlight the urgency of engaging middle level students in academic learning, it is increasingly clear that these students’ multiple literacies must become a part of teaching and learning. Understanding how to infuse the literacies of middle level students across classroom activities is a critical part of improving student achievement. This volume in The Handbook series shares literacy research from multiple contexts and deepens our understanding of the literacies that middle level students use in and out of school. This volume includes research that identifies how to best teach and learn with our increasingly diverse students. The perspectives that emerge from this volume help us examine the current state of new and evolving literacies and construct a cutting edge research agenda for middle level literacy education. Research reports focus on digital literacies including social networking media and games, English language learners, high stakes literacy tests and middle level learners, specifically boys, and literacy teaching and learning in middle level teacher education programs. A wide range of research methods and modes are used in these reports including case studies, teacher research, narrative inquiry, survey research, and action research.

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.

Through stories of youth using their many voices in and out of school to explore and express their ideas about the world, this book brings to the forefront the reality of lived literacy experiences of adolescents in today’s culture in which literacy practices reflect important cultural messages about the interplay of local and global civic engagement. The focus is on three areas of youth civic engagement and cultural critique: homelessness, violence, and performing adolescence. The authors explore how youth appropriate the arts, media, and literacy as resources and how this enables them to express their identities and engage in social and cultural engagement and critique. The book describes how the youth in the various projects represented entered the public sphere; the claims they made; the ways readers might think about pedagogical engagements, practice, and goals as forms of civic engagement; and implications for critical and arts and media-based literacy pedagogies in schools that forward democratic citizenship in a time when we are losing sight of issues of equity and social justice in our communities and nations.

How do students’ online literacy practices intersect with online popular culture? In this book scholars from a range of countries including Australia, Lebanon, Nepal, Qatar, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States illustrate and analyze how literacy practices that are mediated through and influenced by popular culture create both opportunities and tensions for secondary and university students. The authors examine issues of theory, identity, and pedagogy as they address participatory popular culture sites such as fan forums, video, blogs, social networking sites, anime, memes, and comics and graphic novels. Uniquely bringing together scholarship about online literacy practices and the growing body of work on participatory popular culture, New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture across Borders makes distinctive contributions to an emerging field of study, pushing forward scholarship about literacy and identity in cross-cultural situations and advancing important conversations about issues of global flows and local responses to popular culture.

Thorough and accessible, this professional resource and text shows how the latest research in adolescent literacy can be translated into effective practice in middle and high school classrooms. Leading authorities discuss findings on the adolescent learner, addressing such essential topics as comprehension, content-area literacy, differentiated instruction, gender differences in literacy learning, and English language learners. With a focus on evidence-based methods, coverage ranges from techniques for building digital literacy and comprehension skills to strategies for flexible grouping and writing instruction. Ideal for courses in adolescent literacy, each chapter includes guiding questions, discussion questions, and classroom examples.