Exploring multimodality, literacy and learning with young adult fiction

The author examines how preservice English teachers engaged a sociocultural and critical approach to literacy instruction and the tools of a web-based classroom to discuss young adult fiction with adolescents. A sociocultural approach to literacy instruction emphasizes meaning making as an iterative process between text and a reader's lived social, cultural and linguistic experiences. The author planned and facilitated this project with a secondary language arts teacher as part of a semester long course on adolescent literature from 2006-08.;Within a case study framework, data was generated through preservice teachers' audiotaped planning sessions; archived web-classroom data; document collection; and a series of focus group interviews conducted at the end of the project with preservice teachers and adolescents who volunteered to share their insights. Through use of sustained inductive and deductive coding procedures applied across the data set, a series of key categories emerged that were used as themes to address the research questions. These key categories included: participants' constructs of "community" as a resource for making meaning with young adult fiction; multimodal texts as contributing to adolescents' critical readings of text; and the use of social network sites such as Facebook as resources to interact with text within the space of a web-based classroom. Implications for literacy instruction and teacher education are discussed.