This article explores the power of English language learners' digital stories as student‐centered projects and offers practical suggestions for language teachers interested in trying digital storytelling. The article explains pedagogical practices and digital storytelling in the context of contemporary scholarship on inclusive pedagogy, communities of practice, and multiliteracies. As students develop and produce their stories, they not only choose topics, visual images, and musical materials that are meaningful and of genuine interest to them, they also collaborate with other students and friends and family in the United States and in their home countries. Using examples of students' digital stories, journal entries, final essays, and interviews, the classroom is discussed as a community of practice where various domains of expertise are recognized and shared. Based on three semesters of research and practice, the authors suggest that an engaged language classroom community can develop as students learn to negotiate new digital terrain and gain valuable multiliteracy skills through the creation of their own digital stories. The steps in classroom digital storytelling and resources for teachers are included.

The clichés it's a small world and the world is our classroom are becoming practical realities for many educators. Increasingly accessible transnational contexts for English language teaching and learning offer new opportunities for local–global learning. This article reflects on a content‐based online English course focused on community youth leadership that was offered for Brazilian teens by U.S. instructors and graduate students. The researchers used the backdrop of English learning focused on key concepts to engage students in critical self‐reflection, collaborative discussion with peers, and civic engagement with their home communities. This course focused on communication skills, content knowledge, and technology practices needed for young adults to engage each other as emerging global citizens. Students wrote reflections on identity, planned and reflected on community interviews, and designed community‐based service projects. The authors describe how students and instructors used a variety of formal and informal communication platforms to experiment with the language and communication strategies students needed to get beyond simple vocabulary practice and into meaningful discourse about contested concepts such as identity, community, social responsibility, social hope, leadership, and beliefs. The authors discuss how students creatively used English across multiple online platforms and geographic borders to reimagine and project themselves as agents of positive social change and emerging community leaders.

In the global struggle over discourse and knowledge after 9/11, the voices of otherwise silenced women in Afghanistan were significantly amplified on the Internet. RAWA.org demonstrates how a Web site contended with discourses of fundamentalism and war while envisioning democracy and constructing new leadership identities for women.