In this essay, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo explore new trends in reader response for a digital age, particularly the phenomenon of bending texts using social media. They argue that bending is one form of restorying, a process by which people reshape narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences that are often missing or silenced in mainstream texts, media, and popular discourse. Building on Louise Rosenblatt's influential transactional theory of reading, the authors theorize restorying as a participatory textual practice in which young people use new media tools to inscribe themselves into existence. The authors build on theorists from Mikhail Bakthin to Noliwe Rooks in order to illustrate tensions between individualistic “ideological becoming” and critical reader response as a means of protest. After discussing six forms of restorying, they focus on bending as one way youth make manifest their embodied, lived realities and identities, providing examples from sites of fan communities where participants are producing racebent fanwork based on popular children's and young adult books, movies, comics, and other media. Situating these phenomena within a larger tradition of narrating the self into existence, the authors explore broader implications for literacy education.

Many educational researchers across the United States have found that inquiry-based learning (IBL) supports the development of deep, meaningful content knowledge. However, integrating IBL into classroom practice has been challenging, in part because of contrasting conceptualizations and practices across educational fields. In this article, we (a) describe differing conceptions of IBL, (b) summarize our own studies of IBL in three fields of education, (c) compare and contrast the processes and purposes of IBL in our studies and fields, and (d) suggest numerous opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaborations on IBL curriculum, teaching, and research that could bolster its inclusion in K-12 education. We ground our exploration in knowledge-generating conceptualizations and practices in these fields.

This article reviews scholarship on youth and young adult activism in digital spaces, as young users of participatory media sites are engaging in political, civic, social, or cultural action and advocacy online to create social change. The authors argue that youth’s digital activism serves as a central mechanism to disrupt inequality, and that education research should focus on these youth practices, particularly by young people from marginalized communities or identities, in order to provide important counter-narratives to predominant stories circulating about “at-risk”or disaffected youth. The article examines young people’s use of online tools for organizing toward social change across three lines of inquiry—young people’s cultural and political uses of participatory tools and spaces online, new forms of youth civic engagement and activism, and adult-supported programs and spaces facilitating youth activism. In centering the review on youth digital activism, the authors suggest that education researchers can learn from youth themselves about how to disrupt educational inequalities, resulting in a more humanizing stance for education research that takes into fuller account the human potential of all youth, beyond school walls.

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