In this article, the authors engage the theoretical lens of multimodality in rethinking the practices and processes of composing in classrooms. Specifically, they focus on how learning new composing practices led some fifth-grade students to author new literate identities—what they call authorial stances—in their classroom community. Their analysis adds to the current research on the production and analysis of multimodal texts through an analysis of the interrelationships between multimodal composing processes and the development of literate identities. They found that by extending the composing process beyond print modalities students’ composing shifted in significant ways to reflect the circulating nature of literacies and texts and increased the modes of participation and engagement within the classroom curriculum.These findings are based on an ethnographic study of a multimodal storytelling project in a fifth-grade urban classroom.

In this article, the authors argue that teachers and researchers must expand current verbo-and logo-centric definitions of critical literacy to recognize how texts and responses are embodied.

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In the increasingly digital and multimodal landscape of adolescents' literacies, it is particularly interesting to explore how young people are making and remaking their identities in online and offline spaces. These self-authoring practices are especially significant when the authors are African American adolescent boys, whose lives are often storied by others. This article brings the lenses of counterstorytelling and multimodality together to explore one boy's representation of his multiple selves through his engagement with various technologies and the production of visual texts.

The vast landscape of youths' literacies can leave teachers of adolescents feeling caught between the possibility of creativity and the confining practices of labeling, measurement, and evaluation. Recent research demonstrates that attending to the rich, multimodal literacy practices of young people opens up ways of getting to know them and creating new points of learning and engagement (Mahiri, 2004).In this article, I explore the literacy journey that a student and I embarked on over the course of eight months. The "low literate" label attached to him belied his creativity, expressive practices, and intellect, yet it continued to follow him beyond our time together. As it was in this case, school-sanctioned literacy, defined by an arbitrary standard, is often at the center of school labeling practices. But that standard's function is out of sync with the worlds that youths currently navigate and the work and higher education worlds that they will have to navigate in the future. Here, I explore what happened when teacher and student moved beyond labels to learn, compose, and "know" together. Meeting AngelAngel (all names are pseudonyms) was one of several young men I met while teaching in an education program in a northeastern U.S. city. Participants came from across the city and were mandated by the courts and their probation officers (POs) to attend the program for varying lengths of time. Although the program was mixed race and gender, the majority of the student population comprised African American and Latino males. I focused on literacy in the classes I taught with another teacher. We spent most mornings working with students individually and used the afternoons for whole-group activities.Angel walked into our classroom in the early fall of my second year in the program. He wore an oversized white T-shirt and faded jeans that almost entirely covered the tops of his boots. Joe, one of the other teachers, followed behind him and handed me a blue folder with a corner of the Test of Adult Basic English (TABE) visible.The program had an open-entry/open-exit policy, so there were between 12 and 25 youths between the ages of 16 and 20 who attended the © 2006 INTERNATIONAL READING ASSOCIATION (pp. 252-256)