One of the guiding assumptions of the SSHRC-Funded New Literacies Workshop we hosted in 2011, and from which these papers emanate, is that new literacy practices include an understanding of interactive technologies as part of the new media landscape, providing increased opportunities for learners to develop the competencies to participate in contemporary global cultures (e.g., Yet with these opportunities come new challenges for teachers and students tantamount to a renegotiation of the curricula at all levels.

In the research area of writing development, an increasing number of researchers suggest that graphomotor skills could be much more important than they appear to be (Christensen, 2009). Few researchers have studied the link between handwriting and teaching practices, despite the fact that some studies indicate its importance (Graham, 2010). The general objective of this study is to explore the relationship between different handwriting styles and the development of writing skills among 715 children in Grade 2. Generally, our results show that the three handwriting styles (manuscript/cursive, manuscript, and cursive) have different effects on writing development (speed, quality, word production, and text production).

Through an examination of digital poetry explorations created by the researcher based on conversations with four Canadian poets, this paper explores the convergence of poetry and new media and attempts to address what happens when the pedagogical ideals outlined by the poets are represented digitally. The poets and researcher discuss the affordances the digital poetry explorations might offer a potential reader or aspiring writer.

I work in literacy education, encouraging teacher candidates to experiment with the arts to make a novel come alive for adolescent readers. Part of my research agenda, which is intertwined with my teaching, seeks to make sense of the question: What are the effects of arts-based learning on the teacher candidates’ theoretical and classroom practices? To firstconsider the above research question from my own pedagogical perspective, I draw on my earlier recollections (Adler, 1958) of arts and classroom living using the methodology of narrative inquiry—the study of the ways humans experience the world via the construction and reconstruction of their own stories (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Informed by my teaching narrative, crafted in the backdrop of remembered times, I venture forth to address the effects of arts-based learning on the teacher candidates’ theoretical and classroom practices. A more informed construction of our recurring narratives, rekindled by the illumination of early recollections, will play an integral role.

This paper examines contrasting representations of minority language students in a linguistically diverse junior high classroom in an urban area of Western Canada. The majority of the research participants was of Asian heritage, and spoke English as a second language. Drawing on the construct of learner identity, I explore how these minority language learners’ identities affected their experience in school. The study points to hybrid language practices, with particular attention to academic discourse, as a solution to developing English literacy in schools with students from multilingual backgrounds.

At least once a year, I teach a graduate course titled Narrative Inquiry. At the beginning of the course I always inform students that they will not likely learn how to do narrative inquiry in the narrative inquiry course. Instead they will interrogate the strategies, purposes, practices, and challenges of narrativeinquiry, and they will learn how complicated, even messy, the whole business of narrative inquiry really is. I organize the course around an investigation of three principal dynamics involved in narrative inquiry: story, interpretation, and discourse. I invite students to consider matters related to story and interpretation, but I encourage them especially to attend to the art of discourse.

This paper recounts a controversial incident in a classroom that ultimately involved the student, her teacher, her parents, the school’s administrators, government curriculum, and a university professor. Using discourse theory, the author traces the beliefs that underlie the positions taken by the stakeholders, and discusses the vulnerable spaces that teachers inhabit when they practice critical literacy in elementary classrooms using difficult texts and subjects.

It gives me great honour to welcome you to this special issue of Language & Literacy. In this issue you will find a range of thoughtful and provocative inquiries that reflect some of the diverse range of research in language and literacy education today. This issue was born of the recent marriage of the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada (LLRC) and Language & Literacy: A Canadian ejournal. From this point forward these two organizations have made a commitment to support each other in their efforts to sustain critical conversations about language and literacy education and research.

This past summer my family and I set out on a challenging trek in Gros Morne National Park. We would hike the park's namesake, a foreboding 800-meter dome of ancient seabed, the highest point in the Long Range Mountains of western Newfoundland. We walked an hour through gnarled tuckamore -centuries old white spruce tortured and twisted to form an impenetrable canopy just a few feet over our heads. The thin peat at our feet was veined with a network of hardened roots. Shards of white granite scree pushed through the black loam like skeletal remains-a charnel house to commemorate the millennia of unimaginable geological forces. The shadows were deep and silent; the wind swept over us, but was unable to find a way in. It was a series of these elvin gullies interspersed with spongy open bogs that brought us to the base of Gros Morne Mountain.