In this study I draw upon ethnographic methods to explore three multilingual international students’ first-semester linguistic functioning in their college writing classrooms and beyond. Through the lens of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007) I investigate participants’ experiences beyond their shared membership as Chinese international students and unpack within-group variabilities in relation to their language and literacy backgrounds. The findings indicate that multilingual international students’ varying high school experiences are likely to position them at different acculturative stages for overseas studies; it is crucial to understand their superdiversity beyond the traditional paradigms of supporting “ELLs.” The findings illustrate that superdiversity plays an important role in complicating our understandings of multilingualism and multilingual student support in American higher education. I argue that recognizing and understanding superdiversity is important for both multilingual international students and their teachers. All college educators across the disciplines must go beyond simply acknowledging the existence of superdiversity. Instead they must explicitly teach it to combat the zero point of English (Mignolo 2009). This article outlines hands-on pedagogical activities to facilitate new arrivers’ smooth linguistic transition in college and achieve linguistic empowerment by debunking monolinguistic assumptions.

Research has shown the benefits of peer interaction to scaffold learning of disciplinary literacies. We extend knowledge in this area to examine peer interaction and the affordances it creates when emergent bilinguals engage with multimodal texts in disciplines to make meaning. Using discourse analysis of the interactions of a small group of third graders carrying out a project in science class we explored how four emergent bilinguals collaborated to design produce and distribute traditional and alternative texts. We found that translanguaging and transmodal collaborative structures support learning processes and comprehension to make sense of and contextualize disciplinary knowledge. A dynamic and recursive translanguaging pattern emerges in which the introduction and contextualization of knowledge happens in Spanish the interaction occurs mainly in English and the creation is in both English and Spanish. We discuss the affordances of these collaborative structures for supporting students in science and promoting Spanish and student bilingualism.

For the final In Dialogue of our editorial term we wanted to invite some luminary voices in literacy studies to think together about the future of critical studies in literacy research. We asked Betina Hsieh Danielle Filipiak Tiffany Nyachae David Kirkland and Carol Brochin what they thought would push the field forward: What would or should literacy studies and English education look like in the future including what collective priorities should be emphasized? We invited them to think together to imagine what might be possible or necessary in a world that is on fire. In giving these scholars the “last word” of our editorial term we are hoping that this effort toward intergenerational collaborative knowledge building can be one of the seeds of hope that will help us grow toward a better future.

In this essay two English teacher educators detail a two-year inquiry process in which they worked to frame curriculum and instruction in secondary reading methods around the development of social imagination: the ability to engage imaginatively with the perspectives of others and to envision more just ways of being in the world. In the curricular approach detailed here preservice teachers developed social imagination by reading not only the words on the page but also the world around them attending to the ways in which other readers make meaning within their reading community. In this way classroom communities and intellectual partnerships become central to the teaching of reading and literature in English classrooms and serve as starting points for envisioning new ways of being in schools. The authors describe one particular classroom lesson in depth and discuss the connection between reading pedagogy in English and the imagination of more democratic and equitable classroom spaces.

Various English educators consider what the advent of “intelligent” technology means for ELA education and the ongoing pursuit of equity and justice.

Reading moments of classroom talk as text we explored how prospective teachers in a Teaching Diverse Young Adult Literature course read and responded to Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores a text with a Muslim LGBTQIA+ theme. Thinking with queer theory—and its constituent concept homonationalism more specifically—we examined how discourses of difference both liberatory and oppressive were shaped as notions of collective acceptance tolerance and inclusion intersected with interpersonal contradictions and contingencies. Using critical discourse analysis to trace how the “queer Muslim other” was indexed in conversation we highlight the promises and pitfalls of leveraging diverse youth literature as students examined and extended the privilege of personhood through the particulars of a single text.

Set in one of the least privileged neighborhoods of the US Southeast this research project took a discourse analysis approach to construct a day-in-the-life case study. It illustrates how during an after school storybook cooking class a 7-year-old multilingual Mexican American girl navigated local linguistic microaggressions and extended microaffirmations to her peers. At the same time she contested and critiqued societal power imbalances associated with whiteness. This study widens the corpus of scholarship that has primarily examined children’s sociodramatic play and literacy development in preschool settings. It also broadens the body of research that has predominantly focused on students’ linguistic dexterity and metalinguistic awareness in middle and high school contexts.

This paper highlights the perspectives of first-generation students of color in their first year of college and the ways in which they exercised agency in their writing. Framed by definitions of agency as mediated action that creates meaning the paper reports on qualitative data collected from a summer writing program for first-generation students and students of color and from writing samples and follow-up interviews with six students who participated in the summer program. Findings suggest that students in their first year of college leveraged their social and discoursal identities to offer new ways of understanding an issue. They also wrote using a translingual approach integrating different discourses and forms of knowledge and challenging views of academic writing as monolithic. The findings also suggest the link between awareness and action meaning that what and how students wrote were informed by their awareness of writing and awareness of themselves as writers and cultural beings. The study’s findings have implications for advancing more nuanced views of agency and academic literacies and redesigning writing instruction at the high school and college level.