Exploring Diverse Elementary Students' Literacy Development in a Literacy Club

Abstract

This study explored diverse students’ literacy development in Grades 3–5 in a literacy club. It also served as a self-study to examine how I developed and facilitated this literacy club. This study focused on a group of diverse students engaged in a literacy club across two study phases. The first phase consisted of an after-school literacy club pre-COVID-19 and the second phase occurred in an online literacy club during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings from this study suggest that diverse students benefited from co-creating the literacy events in the literacy club. Students developed their literacy through socioculturaly engaging literacy activities, which enabled them to have choice and ownership of their literacy events. Students learned from and through their peer collaboration and dialogic exchanges around culturally relevant topics to include social justice, racism, and inequity to promote their literacy development. Students benefited from opportunities to discuss their own cultural identities and use their rich socio-cultural and lived experiences to foster their literacy development. Additionally, findings suggest that these diverse students applied multimodal literacies as tools to further their literacy development. This study contributes to the current research related to literacy development, diverse students, culturally responsive pedagogy, and literacy practices in elementary schools.