This case study explores the digital literacy and identity‐making practices of a Caribbean American high school student across three interrelated areas: immigrant, female adolescent, and learner. Data were drawn from interviews, participant observations, and digital documents. Narrative analysis provides the framework from which to analyze and represent the adolescent's experiences. The findings show that the adolescent actively used digital media and online social networking sites to construct her identities across her native and adopted homes. Virtual spaces afforded the adolescent the agency to make a space called “home” and mitigate what was lost in migration by re‐authoring cultural models, performing her identities, and constructing virtual ethnic enclaves. Understanding the texts, motivations, and contexts of youth digital literacies offers opportunities to create literacy connections with diverse learners in the contemporary classroom.

I (Cheryl, second author) recently observed 2 ninth-grade general English classrooms in an urban high school in which I do research. Both were print rich-walls covered with posters, charts, and artwork that referenced literature texts, content knowledge, and curriculum standards. In both classrooms, similar content was covered, including literature texts such as Monster, Who Am I Without Him? and Day of Tears.Yet, upon closer inspection, the practices in each of the spaces were different; and these practices made a difference in the levels of engagement and student performance. Though each space was print rich, the visually rich environment in one classroom was a product of the students' literacies, including studentcreated CDs of musical narratives of Monster and Who Am I Without Him?; photos and drawings/paintings and artistic renderings of literature characters, themes, and settings; poetry and lyrics from songs of protest; and Facebook pages from characters of the novels. In the room, students moved fluidly across literacy stations and book clubs, worked individually to create artifacts, and had gallery walks of their peers' published works that prompted their own reflection, commentary, discussion, and writing.Observing and participating in this particular classroom, I realized that I could see these students' worlds, their thinking, and knowledge: The texts that the students produced and interacted with demonstrated a discerning use of color, shape, spatial representation, print, message and meaning/communication, and critical knowledge of canonical and popular culture.The teacher used her students' visual literacies to help drive instruction and ground knowledge. The "visual literacy" in this ninth-grade class was not restricted to traditional graphic organizers and webs. Using this as a model, how can educators purposefully tap into our students' visual literacies in the secondary school classroom?

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The article examines high school students' writing composition practices in multimodal instructional environments. We use Rosenblatt's transactional theory to look across the findings of 2 studies that blend traditional and digital modes of instruction in order to explore how modal switching can support students' reading and writing. We also address the tensions and challenges faced when attempting to create multimodal learning environments that use traditional texts to improve students' composition.Two photographs are featured as a preface to our article: one by Cassidy Kramer (all names are pseudonyms) titled Madness (see Figure 1) and the other one by Kiasha titled Plantation Pain (see Figure 2). These two visuals from our classroom research studies represent these adolescents' complex use of their new literacies and also illustrate how students use multimodal practices to communicate and make meaning in a classroom environment that promotes multimodal pedagogies. One of the many challenges of teaching English literature to secondary school students is not so much a lack of technology or digital presence per se; instead, it is the stark contrast between how readers experience a traditional printed book and other texts (many of which are on screens). How do English teachers and English teacher educators respond to a paradigm shift from a print mindset to a digital mindset when teaching literature? Granted, it has never been a simple task to teach