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This article introduces a transliteracies framework to conceptually account for the contingency and instability of literacy practices on the move and to offer a set of methodological tools for investigating these mobilities. Taking the paradox of mobility-the simultaneous restricting or regulation of movement that accompanies mobility-as its central dialectic, a transliteracies framework functions as a flexible heuristic for attending to how meaning making and power are intertwined in and distributed across social and material relationships. We argue that a transliteracies framework encompasses two primary dimensions of mobile literacy practices: (a) the everyday activity of creating, maintaining, and disassembling associations across movements of people and things (indicated by the prefix trans-) and (b) the dynamic and material nature of meaning making in activity (indicated by the plural root word literacies). To trace the emergent and consequential ways mobilities are managed within and across systems, we introduce four analytical tools for inquiry: emergence, uptake, resonance, and scale. These inquiry tools address the paradox of mobility by highlighting the systemic dimensions of practice that create and perpetuate inequities. We argue that these transliteracies tools facilitate an inquiry stance that positions researchers to attend to people's emic meaning-making processes, work to balance multiple perspectives, account for privilege and position, question normative assumptions and beliefs, and engage in and value multiple ways of knowing.

School science continues to alienate students identifying with nondominant, non‐western cultures, and learners of color, and considers science as an enterprise where success necessitates divorcing the self and corporeal body from ideas and the mind. Resisting the colonizing pedagogy of the mind–body divide, we aimed at creating pedagogical spaces and places in science classes that sustain equitable opportunities for engagement and meaning making where body and mind are enmeshed. In the context of a partnership between school‐ and university‐based educators and researchers, we explored how multimodal literacies cultivated through the performing arts, provide students from minoritized communities opportunities to both create knowledge and to position themselves as science experts and brilliant and creative meaning makers. Four theoretical perspectives (social semiotics and multimodality; dramatizing and the embodied mind; dismantling master narratives for minoritized peoples; and the relationship of knowledge production and identity construction) framed this multiple case study of classes of elementary and middle school students who made sense of and communicated science concepts and practices through embodied performances. The study provided evidence that embodied science representations afford students abundant opportunities to construct science knowledge and positionings that support engagement with science, whether performed on a small scale in classrooms, or for the whole school through a large‐scale science play. Embodied dramatizing led to opportunities for collective meaning making as student‐performers coordinated across various movements and modes in order to represent ideas. Multiple enactments of the same concept nurtured the development of multi‐dimensional scientific, sociocultural, and sociopolitical meanings. During embodiments, students positioned themselves and others in ways that allowed expanded science identities to become possible, intertwined with other salient identities. By treating children's bodies as sites of knowledge, imagination, and expertise, integrating performing arts and science has the potential to facilitate the development of connections among ideas and between self and ideas.

Based on two years of ethnographic engagement in a school‐based digital design studio in a high school on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, this paper conceptualizes the development and maintenance of an ethos of care in teaching and learning through sustaining affective resonance. Adopting musical metaphors as a vocabulary for affective movements, we operationalize practical and practiced methods for sustaining (actively extending) affective (care‐giving and care‐taking intensities) resonance (shared meaning making and cultural production). Sharing examples across years, we show the specific ways that mentors and students in the digital design studio built and nurtured care‐full practices. The purpose of the paper is to explicate the development and enactment of mentoring practices that we observed in the design studio and then to consider how these practices might be shared, spread, and adapted across contexts of teaching and learning.

This department column explores digital and disciplinary literacies across learning contexts and disciplines within and outside of school. Digital enhancements will encourage readers to post questions, comments, and connections.