The authors examined how middle and high school students participating in a literacy‐and‐songwriting initiative in Detroit, Michigan, experienced moments of possibility that supported the youth in envisioning themselves as college bound. The authors explain how they drew from culturally relevant and sustaining educational approaches to design literacy instruction for youth of color that built from students’ interests as strengths, challenging educational disparities related to college readiness and access. The authors describe three workshops that they facilitated with youth participants, examine and share examples of multimodal artifacts generated by youth participants during the workshops, and provide recommendations for adolescent and adult literacy educators seeking to enact similar approaches for supporting students’ college readiness in their own work.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how youth from varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds came together to collaboratively analyze data they collected across two research projects in a community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative, a less understood aspect of YPAR. Specifically, this study discusses how youth enacted collaborative data analysis to foreground lived experience and experiential knowledge while enacting critical literacy practices and building toward an open and reflective form of relationality. Design/methodology/approach The examination of youths’ data analysis practices is situated in a larger qualitative research study of the Central City Youth Participatory Action Research initiative, a six-month, community-based, out-of-school program. This study discusses the relational and humanizing practices of youth through collaborative data analysis practices. Findings This study focuses on two small-group research teams, examining how youth enacted critical literacy practices and humanizing modes of learning through relational practices as data analysis. This study discusses two themes in the findings: making sense of data through personal experience and negotiating researcher roles as stancetaking in collaborative data analysis Originality/value In analyzing students’ collaborative data analysis practices across the small-group YPAR projects they enacted, this study contributes new understandings about how youth analyzed data to examine aspects of educational equity important to them.

This is a review of the 6th International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry held at Bowling Green State University, and graciously hosted by Sandra Faulkner. This symposium meets biennially with presenters from many different areas of the world such as Nova Scotia, Canada, and New Zealand. The theme this year was poetry in/as/for social justice. In this review, I seek to think through some of the questions and uncertainties that arose over the course of the few days we met in November. We complicated meanings of social justice at this contemporary time and revisited formulations of social justice through past events. Within this review, I write a personal/theoretical piece embedded with citations from poets, and in the end compose a poem that is an amalgamation of language from presenters' abstracts and my own ideas.

What does it mean to be home? We began asking this provocative question well before COVID-19, well before the collective crisis the world experienced which sent both of us back into our current homes. Exploring such a question through poetry writing may provide insights about individuals’ lived experiences, and, therefore, we contend it is worthwhile for scholars, artists and educators to widen possibilities for poetic method and craft related to writing about home. In this paper, we, two poets, arts-based education scholars, and Pittsburgh natives, offer pathways into exploring notions of home through the writing of poetry grounded in the ideas of Gaston Bachelard’s (1958/1964) seminal text, The Poetics of Space. To do so, we each offer and discuss two original poems on the topic of home to illustrate a number of compelling avenues scholars and research participants; educators and students might explore as they write poems evoking their own unique conceptions of home.