










































Georgia Journal of Literacy 
2025, Vol. 47(1), pp. 1–3 
https://doi.org/10.56887/galiteracy.193 
ISSN: 2833-7611 

Editorial Article  

 
 

 

CONTACT Dr. Robert A. Griffin, Associate Professor and Assistant Department Chair, Department of Early Childhood 
through Secondary Education and Reading, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA; email rgriffin@westga.edu 
(https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3128-7687). Dr. Bethany L. Scullin, Associate Professor, Department of Early Childhood 
through Secondary Education and Reading, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA; email bscullin@westga.edu. 
 

Beyond the Page: Reimagining Literacy Across 
Media, Cultures, and Classrooms 
 
Robert A. Griffin 
University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA 

Bethany L. Scullin 
University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA 

 
ABSTRACT 

The Spring 2025 issue of the Georgia Journal of Literacy, themed “Beyond the Page: 
Reimagining Literacy Across Media, Cultures, and Classrooms,” challenges, 
expands, and reimagines what literacy means in modern classrooms. This issue 
explores a mix of literacy practices, from digital texts and AI tools to dialect use and 
blending across different genres and fields. The opening research articles invite 
readers to consider early literacy through the lens of multimodality, social-emotional 
development, and teacher identity. A bridging article explores how AI can 
personalize literacy instruction for students with autism, and the teaching-focused 
pieces offer classroom-ready strategies that celebrate linguistic diversity and 
integrate literature with science instruction through blended genres. These 
contributions together illustrate how literacy is not confined to the printed page but 
lived, embodied, and continuously reshaped by the media we use, the identities we 
affirm, and the worlds we seek to understand. 

KEYWORDS 

literacy 
innovation; 
multimodality; 
inclusive 
pedagogy; digital 
texts; 
interdisciplinary 
instruction 

 
hat if we stopped asking what literacy is and started asking what it could become? The 
Spring 2025 issue of the Georgia Journal of Literacy, “Beyond the Page: Reimagining 
Literacy Across Media, Cultures, and Classrooms,” invites our readers to ask that very 

question. In this issue, the contributors treat literacy as a living, evolving practice, one that 
stretches across disciplines, takes shape through new media, honors diverse linguistic and cultural 
identities, and responds to the changing contours of classrooms and communities.  
 We publish this issue at a moment of disruption and possibility. The rise of generative 
artificial intelligence (AI), persistent debates over book access and language use, and the continued 
expansion of what counts as a “text” challenge us as educators to rethink how literacy is taught 
and why it matters (Grote-Garcia et al., 2025; Kalantzis & Cope, 2025). Each article in this issue 
redefines literacy from a different vantage point, whether through the lens of digital storytelling, 
socio-emotional learning (SEL), science integration, linguistic justice, or neurodiverse inclusion.  
The issue begins with research-based inquiries into emerging definitions and practices of literacy, 
moves into a research-practitioner bridge piece focused on AI and neurodiverse learners, and 
concludes with practical teaching tips grounded in culturally responsive, interdisciplinary 
instruction. Together, these pieces ask us not to abandon the page but to move beyond it. These 
contributions also remind us how we can continue to shape, question, and grow as literacy 
educators and advocates in a world that’s constantly changing. 

W 

mailto:rgriffin@westga.edu
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3128-7687
mailto:bscullin@westga.edu


2 Georgia Journal of Literacy 47(1)  
 

Research Articles: Literacy as Digital, Emotional, and Personal Practice 
The issue opens with three research articles that rethink the core of what literacy is and does, 
including its tools, its purposes, and its practitioners. In “Very Mindful, Very Multimodal: Digital 
Texts’ Affordances for Emergent Readers,” Emily Colleen Cobb examines how digital texts are 
reshaping early literacy. Drawing from current scholarship in new literacies and multiliteracies, 
Cobb challenges the assumption that today’s children are digital natives naturally equipped to 
navigate digital content. She argues that digital texts require their own forms of strategic reading, 
interpretation, and meaning making and that these need to be taught explicitly. Instead of treating 
digital texts as extras, Cobb encourages educators to view them as active, engaging spaces where 
young readers can explore, create, and make sense of what they read in fresh ways. 

In “Fostering Social-Emotional Learning in Children’s Books,” Dr. Forrest R. Parker III 
and Dr. Jodi Cronin turn to picturebooks as catalysts for developing social-emotional 
competencies. Using the widely recognized Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional 
Learning (CASEL) framework, Parker and Cronin conduct a quantitative analysis of contemporary 
children’s literature to assess both the presence and the quality of SEL themes. Their findings 
suggest that effective SEL integration depends not only on content but on how that content is 
delivered through compelling narratives, strong visuals, and thoughtfully designed characters that 
model empathy, regulation, and responsible decision-making. 

Dr. Matt Sroka’s “Teachers as Readers: Examining the Personal Reading Lives of English 
Educators” offers a more inward-looking perspective. Through a participatory action research 
design, Sroka follows four English teachers as they reflect on their personal reading habits, 
histories, and identities. The study reveals how these inner literate lives shape classroom practice 
in subtle but important ways, from the texts teachers choose to the culture of reading they create. 
Ultimately, Sroka suggests that fostering engaged student readers begins with teachers who 
themselves live as readers and who are willing to reflect on and share that identity. 

Bridging Research and Practice: Personalized Possibilities with Technology 
Next, Alexis Lawton’s “Leveraging AI to Enhance Literacy in Students with ASD” offers an 
appropriate bridge between research and application, exploring how generative AI tools, such as 
ChatGPT, Otter.AI, and image generators, can provide personalized literacy supports for 
neurodiverse learners. Drawing from her experiences as a speech-language pathologist, Lawton 
illustrates how these tools can scaffold vocabulary, comprehension, and writing development in 
ways that honor student strengths and needs. Instead of seeing AI as something that replaces human 
teaching, she presents it as a helpful, adaptable tool for inclusive learning and one that needs to be 
used thoughtfully and responsibly. Lawton’s classroom-based insights echo the broader theoretical 
implications of scholars like Kalantzis and Cope (2025), who position generative AI as a new 
medium of literacy that invites educators to rethink reading and writing as dynamic, design-driven 
practices shaped by both human input and machine output. 

Teaching in Action: Language, Science, and Story 
The final section of the issue turns to classroom-ready practices that celebrate language diversity 
and expand the possibilities of interdisciplinary literacy instruction. In “Teaching with a Twist: 
Embracing Appalachian (and Other) Dialects—Y’all Ready for This?” Dr. Melissa Comer 
advocates for bringing marginalized dialects, particularly Appalachian English, into the heart of 
English language arts instruction. Calling on personal narrative and cultural linguistics, Comer 
makes a strong push for honoring students’ “first voices” as legitimate and valuable. Activities 



Griffin & Scullin 3 
 

like student-created dialect glossaries and digital storytelling model an asset-based approach that 
affirms linguistic identity while deepening engagement with language, literature, and critical 
inquiry. 

One of our biggest contributors, Dr. William Bintz, supplies two practical pieces to this 
issue that extend the reach of literacy into the sciences through the innovative use of blended 
genres. In “Combining Picturebooks and Poetry as Blended Genres to Teach Life Science,” Bintz 
shares examples and strategies, such as the H-Map, for helping students connect poetic and 
narrative texts with life science concepts. In the companion piece, “Combining Picturebooks and 
Poetry as Blended Genres to Teach Earth and Space Science,” he expands this approach to include 
earth and space content, introducing instructional tools like the Z-Map and interlocking spheres of 
intertextuality. These pieces provide K–8 educators with imaginative ways to integrate literacy 
into STEM as a bridge across disciplines. 
 
Takeaways: Connection, Complexity, and Possibility 
Together, these seven articles offer a rich and varied look at what teaching and promoting literacy 
means by highlighting the different ways literacy advocacy shows up in classrooms, communities, 
and everyday life. We see literacy reimagined: 
 As emotional and interpersonal, through children’s SEL texts, dialect affirmation, and 

teacher identity; 
 As multimodal and digital, through screen-based reading, generative AI, and the layering 

of genres and tools; 
 And as interdisciplinary, where literacy lives not just in novels and essays, but in science, 

culture, and new media landscapes. 
The literacy scholars and educators who add their voices to this issue do not accept the status quo. 
Instead, they challenge us to blur the lines between genres, subjects, modes, and traditions to build 
more expansive, equitable, and imaginative literacy spaces. This issue adds layers to our evolving 
definition of literacy by expanding and reshaping the definition itself, and it calls on us to move 
beyond the page, not to leave it behind, but to let it lead us into new spaces of meaning. In doing 
so, this issue reframes literacy as a generative, connective act shaped as much by curiosity and 
design as by rules and convention. 

 
References 
Grote-Garcia, S., Ortlieb, E., & Cardona, S. L. (2025). What’s hot in literacy: Misguided trends in 

a divided field. Literacy Research and Instruction, 64(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/
19388071.2024.2409130 

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2025). Literacy in the time of artificial intelligence. Reading Research 
Quarterly, 60(1), e591. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.591 

 
 
Published: May 20, 2025 

https://doi.org/10.1080/19388071.2024.2409130
https://doi.org/10.1080/19388071.2024.2409130
https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.591

	Research Articles: Literacy as Digital, Emotional, and Personal Practice
	Bridging Research and Practice: Personalized Possibilities with Technology
	Teaching in Action: Language, Science, and Story
	Takeaways: Connection, Complexity, and Possibility
	References

