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The author conducted a qualitative study of multimodal digital response to children's historical fiction that his 23 pre-service graduate students read in book clubs. Grounded in sociocultural and multimodal theories of literacy, the study addresses the following two research questions: What influence did sociocultural and multimodal engagements with text have on students' meaning-making? What influence did these engagements have on their conceptions of texts, readers, and response? Findings show how social negotiation of meaning and robustness of design work expanded participants' understandings of texts, readers, and response that challenge current autonomous, verbocentric conceptions of literacy that predominate in schools.

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A team of four general education second grade teachers, who work in a neighbourhood state elementary school in a large urban area in the northeast United States, and their staff developer, redesigned their Kevin Henkes Author Study to equally value pictures and design, along with writing. They asked, what narrative understandings do children express by designing on the page? Using a framework of multiliteracies, they showed how they transformed writing workshop into composing workshop to support their emergent bi- and multilingual population. Through content analysis of 80 students’ completed picturebooks and constant comparison of 13 selected students’ retrospective accounts, findings show how students developed a metalanguage of composing for both writing and design craft moves that facilitated and supported their narrative understandings. Their narrative understandings were supported within the sociocultural contexts of our writing communities. Findings show the value of author studies and transforming writing workshop into composing workshop for primary grade writers. Findings have implications for classroom-based research and teaching of composing workshop, particularly for emergent bi- and multilingual populations.

The author presents four approaches to shared reading that he used with first through third graders in a high‐needs, urban elementary school with a large population of students from immigrant homes. Using sociocultural and cognitive constructivist principles, the author shows how these approaches built students' academic vocabulary and comprehension of the decontextualized language of books.

Children's literature plays an essential role in the literacy development of children. This department column focuses on the teaching and use of children's literature and provides educators with information about a wide range of books across multiple genres that are representative of the diverse world in which we live. A strong emphasis is placed on the importance of having diverse library collections that take into account numerous factors, such as race, class, disability, and religion. This column also offers innovative approaches for bringing children and books together, as well as content analyses and rich descriptions of titles that share common features (e.g., endpapers, the blending of poetry and nonfiction).

In this Teaching Tips article, the author argues for a dialogic conception of voice, based in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. He demonstrates a dialogic view of voice in action, using two writing examples about the same topic from his daughter, a fifth‐grade student. He then provides five practical tips for teaching a dialogic conception of voice in elementary and middle school classroom settings.