Traditional literacy instruction is perhaps still necessary but is certainly no longer sufficient to prepare learners for participation in the range of literacy practices that characterize an increasingly participatory culture. This article identifies discrepancies between traditional instructional practices that emphasize individual mastery of abstract concepts and skills and new media literacy practices that rely upon collaborative, social, and context-specific activity. In particular, mainstream assessment practices become problematic for teachers who are interested in integrating these so-called "participatory practices" into their classrooms. Through a description of a year-long collaboration around a secondary language arts curriculum, we present an assessment framework designed to support a social model of learning and to help prepare learners for engagement with and participation in a range of knowledge-building and problem-solving activities and communities, while supporting gains in more traditional curricular and standards-based assessments. This framework, which we call "participatory assessment," builds on previous work in science and math instruction, as well as in immersive video games, and extends that work into the secondary English language arts classroom. This article describes the curriculum, the approach, and some of the assessment design principles that emerged.

This paper explores how students, as multimodal storytellers, can weave powerful narratives blending modes, genres, artefacts and literary conventions to represent the real and imagined in their lives. Part of a larger ethnographic case study of student writing in a middle years class for immigrant students learning English as an additional language, the research featured in this paper is framed by a theory of artefactual literacies, narrative theory – particularly the genre of magical realism – and cultural studies, specifically notions of representation and cultural identity. The theoretical emphases on the artefactual, structural and representational aspects of multimodal narratives informs a multilayered, fine‐grained approach to analysing students’ digital narrative poems using the tools of critical discourse analysis, literary analysis and a visual analytic framework developed for analysing student‐produced digital photographs. This process is applied to a selected example, Gabriel's ‘My Name Is’ narrative, a story that plays with elements of magical real‐ism to explore the simultaneity of his experience as an immigrant youth. The illustrative example speaks to the power of the ‘fantastical’ in literacy pedagogies that seek to take seriously students’ cultural identities and their visions for new realities.

Learning through play is often limited to early childhood education, but this study demonstrates that spaces for creative visual play have important implications for adolescents' literacy practices and identities.

Drawing upon notions of symbolic representation and transcultural repositioning, this study uses visual and critical discourse analyses to examine a multimodal photo essay created by seventh-and eighth-grade immigrant youth in an English as a New Language (ENL) class. Collectively titled "I am from aquí and allá" by the students, the photo essay was installed as a public exhibit for an Open House culminating a year-long literacy inquiry the students called "the culture project." Through analyses of students' images and captions, I point to examples of symbolic convergence: the practice of bringing together the multiple sites/sights of students' diasporic identities; offering others alternative sites/sights from which to understand them; and creating new sites/sights from which to position themselves to learn, participate, and contribute to change. The article discusses how this particular multimodal artifact suggests the need for further dialogue about the value of local, learner-centered literacy pedagogies and practice in a time of increasing commercialization and standardization of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.