This study explores the literacy practices that are involved in transnational social and information networking among youths of immigrant backgrounds in the United States. In particular, it investigates the ways in which young migrants of diverse national origins in the United States are utilising digital media to organise social relationships with friends and families, and engage with news and media products across the United States and their native countries. Based on results of interviews with 35 adolescents of diverse national origins, and survey data with a larger group of youths, this paper shows that digital media have become major tools and avenues for these young people to maintain and develop relations with people, media, and events across territorial boundaries. Within their digital networks, the youths mobilise multiple languages to conduct interpersonal relationships and seek out ideas and information from various sources in their 'home' and 'host' societies, and sometimes across a larger diaspora. We suggest that such literacy practices of a transnational scope provide a basis for re-assessing our understanding of multilingualism as both community and transnational resources and envisioning societal education that recognises and leverages such transnational resources in the literacy education of our young people.

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hrough this column, I hope to encourage educators to ground disciplinary literacy instruction in the study of complex social issues that matter to their students' livelihoods-the ways in which the communities that they belong to ensure the safety and well-being of their members. This approach to literacy education ties together ideas from disciplinary literacy

The authors describe themes of cultural persistence, political resistance, and hope in the art of one Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Midwestern United States. The themes are described across three contexts: community mural art, poetry from students in an alternative high school, and poetry from seventh grade students in a neighborhood middle school. In describing currents of Puerto Rican identity-making, resistance to gentrification, and struggles against local oppression that are evident in all three contexts, the authors argue that as they name their worlds, students commit acts of social justice through their perpetuation of historical and cultural themes situated within a tradition of community activism.We are all historical beings, our personhoods shaped by the seemingly fossilized institutions through which we move. We are also all agents of our own making, our histories mediated by the ways in which we creatively participate in and change the world. Yet school can treat students as ahistorical, and students can treat school as disassociated from the rest of their lives. To treat students as historical beings, schools must become permeable. They must allow the practices, tensions, and struggles of students' lives to become a part of the subject of study. In this article, we describe how arts-based permeable pedagogical practices allow for urban young people to place their own historically and locally situated personhoods at the center of study. We further highlight how art, in neighborhood settings and two schools, addresses the historical roots of conflict in the students' neighborhood as cruces of learning.The neighborhood to which we refer, Park Town, 1 is commonly identified as a geographically bounded and ethnically Puerto Rican neighborhood in a Midwestern city in the United States.