Pre‐service teachers collaborated with 6th grade students to audit a College of Education building looking for possibilities to “go green.” The student/teacher teams developed an e‐book collection of project descriptions, completed budgets, estimated timelines, and sustainability requirements for the university to consider. The e‐books also included short films in which the students promoted their ideas for green awareness. In this project, flipping instructional spaces and real‐izing the curriculum created new possibilities for student‐led inquiry. In other words, literacy in the service of communicating meaningful messages, rather than literacy for literacy's sake, created a current of intent in which the students learned genres to achieve their green goals and the teachers learned how to develop authentic tasks and texts to develop students' expertise.

In this article, we describe how literacy strategies can be adapted for playing (and reading) video games—games that embed disciplinary content in multimedia texts. Using close viewing and guided playing strategies with online games and simulations, we share ideas for helping students navigate and comprehend multimedia texts in order to learn discipline‐specific vocabulary and concepts.

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The study took place at a Catholic PreK-8 school/parish where two faculty instructors taught undergraduate methods courses. At the parish site, the pre-service teachers worked with elementary students to create a range of multi-media projects. These projects showcased the oral histories of the people, places, and events of the school and church community and allowed the pre-service teachers to integrate technology into their teaching. The researchers analyzed observational, interview, and textual data and found a range of behaviors that reflected the pre-service teachers’ familiarity/unfamiliarity with technology, teaching, and the community in which they were learning. As a result, their attempts at learning through and teaching with technology, along with our attempts to teach with and learn through technology, revealed a multiplicity of enactments of fast literacies (Schneider, King, Kozdras, Minick, & Welsh, 2006). In this chapter, we share examples from the themes of our analysis, which reflect Kinzer’s (2005) notion of the “intersection” between school, community, and technology.

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