The author recounts an interview she did years earlier with Louise Rosenblatt.

Shonna Crawford uses picture books to interrogate her four-year-old daughter’s views about the kinds of careers that mommies can have demonstrating that even very young children can be critical with literature.

April Sanders provides an overview of Louise Rosenblatt’s work and of new literacies and draws connections between these two realms of literacy thinking and research.

WLU President Rick Meyer suggests that whole language teachers are in a prime position to understand and use new literacies.

The editors introduce the issue which is themed “Re-Seeing Response Refining New Literacies.”

Phyllis and David Whitin’s work with fifth graders demonstrates what can happen when teachers support students as they investigate the texts that surround them every day.

Heather Statz shows how creating found poetry can help high school students think more deeply about their world.

Books discussed this issue encourage us to collaborate with our students to help them build literate lives.

WLU President Rick Meyer invites us to participate in the upcoming Summer Institute. There is also WLU news of interest to members.

Friends colleagues and students remember Jennifer Wilson and provide information about scholarships established in her honor.

Lucy Spence introduces us to “generous reading” through her story of Vidal a fifth grader. When we read Vidal’s work with a generous lens he is positioned not as a limited English speaker or struggling writer but as someone who can already write well in specific ways.

Readers can find expanded resources about the issue of labeling in Kathryn Mitchell Pierce’s thoughtful column Professional Book Talks.

Curt Dudley-Marling considers the labels we attach to students as metaphors that actually help shape our realities of those students.

Sally Brown describes how Tomás a second grader labeled both ESL and “at-risk” was able to become a resource to others when he engaged in inquiry using technology.

Kathryn Mitchell Pierce and her colleagues share their thoughts about books that have influenced their teaching.

The inquiry described in this article is meant to extend the work of Johnston (Choice Words) and others specifically in the area of naming the effective ways teachers use language during conferences with students who are reading nonfiction. In an effort to identify what might occur during this type of conference I audiotaped transcribed and analyzed eight reading conferences with third-grade students who were reading nonfiction texts during a reading workshop.

Observation (“kidwatching”) is the basis for all the assessment and curriculum development that happen in this third-grade classroom. Professional inquiry into the naturally occurring data from the classroom promotes an expanded view of literacy and gives the teacher a detailed picture of what students are learning.

Dana Maloney and Monica Taylor share Maloney’s experience of using real-world problems to transform the traditional research process and motivate a group of high school seniors to critically understand their worlds.

New editors Jennifer Wilson and Carol Gilles introduce their first issue of Talking Points.

Kim Duckett and Brown look at Eye Movement Miscue Analysis (EMMA) as a way to help preservice and inservice teachers transition from a more traditional view of reading to one of reading as meaning-making.

This paper will argue that young children are rapidly becoming the “new rich” in regard to engaging with understanding and exploiting the many forms of popular culture. Children are tending to ignore school-based texts engaging instead in reading texts that represent internalization of cultural understanding and require a new set of associated reading skills. In this presentation we aim to demonstrate and discuss the nature and elements of the new “societal literacy” and the nature of the engagement with popular culture and community- based texts.

Two college professors in different settings and with dissimilar groups of students explored “the place of language” in homes and communities as their students wrote poems modeled on George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From.” The simple format and familiar experiences of Lyon’s poem created an accessible model for students to think deeply and write authentically about their cultural backgrounds.

Future teachers should prepare to teach technologically capable learners and to write engaging lessons to promote higher-order thinking skills. This research highlights the results of a study of students’ multimodal literacies to see how technologically enhanced responses such as blogs enable students to respond to literature with higher-order critical thinking.