ABSTRACT Naming the language often spoken by Black Americans has historically been an area of debate within U.S. society. Debates carry over into schooling and result in the linguistic oppression of Black American adolescents. In this single qualitative case study, I examine a group of Black American adolescents as they interact with Black literature during a summer book club program. Black linguistic consciousness and culturally situated reader response theories were used to explore how the language awareness of these adolescents influenced their literary responses. Findings suggest they demonstrated an awareness of the societal positioning of Black language, which was reflected in their homeplace positions and through windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. Therefore, further discussion is needed surrounding the role of asset‐based perspectives on marginalized languages and the impact it has on how multilingual and multidialectical adolescents engage in meaning‐making.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to describe the explicit and implicit depictions of reading and cultural characteristics in the 60 books that were distributed by Dolly Parton's Imagination Library (DPIL) to millions of American children from birth until kindergarten entry in 2022. DPIL's book‐gifting intervention is inspired by research correlating the number of books a family owns with children's educational success. Increasing book ownership is intended to promote joyful shared reading between adults and children to increase kindergarten preparedness. Shared reading improves vocabulary, book affinity, belonging, connection, and shared understandings. Importantly, shared understandings can include shared biases. Stereotypes and erasures surrounding race, gender, class, ability, and literacy are common in expertly curated picture book collections. The current content analysis of this collection of DPIL books focused on representations of reading, books, race, gender, class, and ability in all parts of the books. Both explicit and implicit representations were documented. The frequent implicit representations of racial diversity could be potentially transformative after decades of White character domination in picture books. However, disability and non‐dominant gender and sexual identities were erased. Only able‐bodied, gender‐normative, and heteronormative characters were represented. Further, reading and family reading were neither plentiful nor joyful; they were rare and outcome oriented. Furthermore, race intersected with class and literacy. Apparent inconsistencies between such erasures and Dolly Parton's public advocacy for and acceptance of all identities are discussed. Results suggest that both DPIL and US residents must advocate for adequate, accurate, and authentic representation in the picture books gifted to children nationwide.

ABSTRACT This study explores how AI‐enabled, culturally relevant, narrative‐based learning pedagogy influences engagement among ninth‐grade students in an Earth Science course. Conducted in two classrooms in a southeastern U.S. school predominantly attended by African American and Latinx students, we developed lesson plans on Earth Systems and Climate Change. Using a qualitative case study design, we examined one educator's implementation of AI‐enhanced lessons. Thematic analysis of exit surveys and students' artifacts revealed that narrative‐based learning significantly increased students' desire, engagement, and confidence in scientific concepts compared to conventional methods. This approach allowed students to integrate local and global knowledge, fostering deep questions about their science learning and encouraging exploration of problems and solutions.

ABSTRACT Stories unfold across a varied landscape of mediums, including video games, tabletop games, interactive films, and traditional literary texts. As that landscape continues to diversify, educators and scholars face growing challenges conceptualizing reading in a way that captures the multifaceted, consequential ways that readers interact with and shape those stories. Building on New Literacy Studies, scholarship from games studies, and reader response theory, this theoretical article proposes a cross‐disciplinary model for understanding narrative interactivity in contemporary reading experiences: The Reader–Player Interactivity Framework. The authors analyze seven layers of narrative interactivity: embodied interaction, navigating and wayfinding, transactional meaning‐making, two forms of reader authorship, co‐constructing stories, and socially embedded meaning‐making. These categories provide a language for analyzing how readers, viewers, and players co‐construct stories in both fixed and variable narrative texts. The framework illuminates how meaning arises not only in explicitly interactive media, but across all forms of narrative, and provides literacy teachers and researchers with theoretical tools and explicit language for navigating varied types of texts and interactions. The article concludes by outlining implications for research and pedagogy in literacy education.

ABSTRACT This qualitative study examined how Black women secondary teachers developed and enacted their agency to teach literacy to diverse youth. I interviewed six English language arts and history teachers working in racially and ethnically diverse Title 1 schools. Findings reveal that participants drew from watershed moments in their cultural histories to render a socially‐ and politically‐oriented view of literacy. Their expanded view of literacy informed a political agency that encouraged them to reformulate curriculum. Reformulating curriculum focused on the participants' willingness and capacity to redefine rigor in ways that foregrounded students' experiential knowledge. Further, participants described how they incorporated diverse representations of people of Color into the standard curriculum. Drawing on scholarship about humanizing approaches to literacy, Black feminist perspectives, and teacher agency, this study affirms the political legacy of Black women educators and offers hope to future ones. It also advocates for equity‐oriented leadership and professional learning to support Black women teachers and positively impact diverse youth's literacy in schools.

ABSTRACT This study examines teacher reading instruction strategies, defined as specific teaching activities aimed at developing students' reading comprehension skills, including guiding students to identify main ideas, make inferences, predict text content, self‐monitor understanding, and evaluate text credibility. Using PIRLS 2021 data from primary schools, the study analyzes how the frequency of these instructional strategies affects students' reading achievement. Regression results show a significant positive relationship between the use of diverse reading instruction strategies and student reading performance. Advanced methods such as double machine learning (DML) and instrumental variable (IV) methods further confirm a robust causal impact of these teaching strategies, even after controlling for potential biases and endogeneity. The effect is particularly strong when teachers engage in daily reading for pleasure and when students have a solid literacy foundation. Additionally, mediation analysis reveals that teacher assessment strategies partially mediate the positive impact of reading instruction, highlighting the role of formative assessment in supporting reading development. These findings emphasize the importance of equipping teachers with effective reading instructional practices and fostering teacher reading engagement to enhance literacy outcomes. The study offers practical implications for educational policymakers aiming to improve reading achievement through evidence‐based instructional and assessment strategies.

ABSTRACT Archival data were analyzed with piecewise growth models to determine the seasonal growth of students not reading proficiently who did (treatment students = 144) and did not (control students = 1113) participate in their school district's summer reading program. The rising first‐ through fifth graders (48% female) were predominately White (74%) and economically disadvantaged (79%). Control students tended to exhibit stable or declining spring‐to‐fall performance that was significant only in Grade 2, where a measurement artifact may have influenced results. When including a summer testing point in the models for treatment students, performance tended to be stable or declining while the students were receiving summer instruction but then improved during their subsequent summer‐to‐fall break. Conditional models revealed demographic subgroups had varying patterns of higher or lower growth rates compared to the reference groups, but rarely were these significant. Issues with measurement and implications for planning summer programs are discussed.

ABSTRACT Using a community translanguaging lens, this paper focuses on the collective translanguaging practices of second‐grade students who come from multilingual language backgrounds but were attending a school where English was the mandated language of instruction. The research question addressed is: How did students construct and employ a community language repertoire during writing interactions in a multilingual, English‐medium classroom? Data were drawn from a year‐long, qualitative study employing ethnographic and practitioner research methods to examine teacher and students' daily writing practices in one second‐grade classroom. Data were analyzed using descriptive and thematic coding of students' language learning interactions. Findings illustrate how the community repertoire was drawn on and constructed as students: (1) talked about their own and others' language histories, (2) interacted with peers and materials to learn language(s), and (3) at times reproduced historical, macro‐level discourses. Representative, interactional examples are used to illustrate and describe each theme in detail. Implications for theory and pedagogy are discussed, arguing that a focus on community translanguaging offers a more nuanced view of classroom language learning.