Troy Hicks

• PhD
• Professor at Central Michigan University

In a world where technology constantly reshapes ways of learning, playing, working, interacting, and engaging in civic life, digital media literacy is critical. With increased device use, children and teens must develop skills that will help them to be healthy and productive. A limited body of research suggests that increased digital media literacy...

During the 2020–2021 school year, the COVID‐19 pandemic forced millions of students and teachers into hybrid or fully remote modalities. Compiling the experiences of teachers who taught foundational reading skills to their primary‐age students in a hybrid model (a mix of both remote learners at home, joining via video conferencing, as well as in‐pe...

Symposium Various English educators consider what the advent of "intelligent" technology means for ELA education and the ongoing pursuit of equity and justice.

For teachers to integrate generative artificial intelligence writing tools (GAIWTs), like ChatGPT, into their classrooms, we offer insights from a theory-informed pedagogical framework, Bill Green's Literacy in 3D model. This model supports teachers by designing pedagogy relating to three key overlapping domains of 1) operational, 2) cultural and 3...

The global pandemic created new opportunities for the professionalization of educators. In this exploratory case study, we report on a transnational professional development program, focused in Germany and the United States (yet welcoming educators around the world) as a virtual Community of Practice. Using a design-based research process, the prog...

Background and objectives: Despite the requirements of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) to provide feedback, assessments are often not meeting the needs of resident learners. The objective of this study was to explore residents' approach to reviewing, interpreting, and incorporating the feedback provided in written...

As Chinese college students work toward writing proficiency in English, a tension between direct, teacher-led instruction that focuses on proper usage conflicts with changes in literacy practices enabled by technology. As a visiting scholar to an American university, Author 1 was compelled to use strategies she saw in Author 2’s first year writing...

A decade after their EJ article arguing for digital literacy to become a standard element of the English language arts curriculum, Turner and Hicks felt it was time to renew that call.

The present study aimed to assess the current state of professional competencies (PCs) [general and specific competencies (GSCs)] in Iranian agricultural teachers (ATs) for working with students with special needs (SSNs), to compare it with the desired state, and then to analyze their gaps. The statistical population of this study consisted of two...

Predictive text and auto-correct are often seen as distractions, yet engaging writers with these writing assistance technologies can provide students with “micro moments” of instruction.

Tensions between high school writing curricula and students' lived literacies persist in spite of burgeoning research in multimodal composition. Drawn from the second iteration of a multi-year formative experiment, this narrative explores the dissonance stemming from the meeting of these two worlds in a project titled Digital Self Portrait. This co...

As the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to close in the spring of 2020, teacher consultants from a local writing project site were compelled to make their practice public, sharing conversations about what remote learning and the teaching of writing could look like through a series of eight webinars and, subsequently, an open institute in the summer...

We all have stories of the COVID-19 pandemic that have been etched in memory, and it was a combination of two factors within the context of my home state of Michigan that I begin this discussion of my own response across the spring of 2020. It was already late March, and just after Michigan’s governor had issued her first ‘stay safe, stay home’ ord...

For centuries, both the technologies of literacy—from cuneiform tablets to the printing press to, most recently, the smartphone—as well as the practices of reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and visually representing have evolved. In the late 1990s, with the emergence of the hyperlinked and increasingly visual form of the Internet know...

Since the emergence of the World Wide Web and e‐reading devices in the late 1990s and early 2000s, reading research has focused on issues of website credibility, search and navigation strategies, and the ability to comprehend text on‐screen as compared with in print. What has been missing, however, are data about the specific texts that adolescents...

Hypertext and hypermedia refer to compositions that are created with and read/viewed by digital technologies such as computers, tablets, or smartphones. In addition to having textual elements (words, sentences, paragraphs), hypertexts contain links to other documents available on the Internet. In addition, hypermedia is distinguished from hypertext...

Many educators are looking for alternative ways to encourage and recognize student learning, yet new approaches bring forth new challenges. This article recounts a high school teacher’s efforts to implement a digital badging (micro-credentialing) program in the English Language Arts classroom as an alternative to traditional forms of assessment. Af...

These belief statements were developed in 2018 by the ELATE commission's Digital Literacies in Teacher Education commission. They offer a layered framework to support colleagues in their efforts to confidently and creatively explore networked, ubiquitous technologies in a way that deepens and expands the core principles of practice that have emerge...

In today's global culture and economy, in which individuals have access to information at their fingertips at all times, digital and media literacy are essential to participate in society. But what specific competencies must young citizens acquire? How do these competencies influence pedagogy? How are student knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors cha...

Undergraduate engineering laboratory courses are designed to increase students' hands-on capabilities through application of theoretical knowledge. However, a laboratory manual may lack any connection to prior content, and expectations for thoughtful, developed writing are minimal. In this article, an instructor's implementation of a collaborative...

In this article, we draw on the experiences of two young adults, Beth and Jamie (pseudonyms), who participated in a connectivist Massive Open Online Course (cMOOC) to explore how adolescents can become active members in a community of learners and the digital literacy practices that support this entry. We argue that Beth and Jamie engaged in digita...

By sharing instructional practices and describing digital tools, the authors argue that a mindful, social model of connected reading is a crucial part of any research activity.—

Even though book responses have, in recent years, begun to take on new forms such as blogs, podcasts, or short digital films, students can still suffer from shallow thinking about what they have read. To counteract this problem, this article proposes ways to teach “beyond the book response,” requiring students to push toward deeper analysis of char...

Educators Troy Hicks and Franki Sibberson discuss the challenges of and arguments for teaching digital composition with elementary and middle school students.

In this article, we reflect upon "the teacher as writer" and describe how we see this concept and movement developing. We articulate a view of the teacher-writer as empowered advocate. Using examples from our scholarship, we illustrate how this powerful idea can transform research conducted about and with teachers. Finally, we draw attention to the...

Find out how to incorporate digital tools into your English language arts class to improve students’ reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Authors Jeremy Hyler and Troy Hicks show you that technology is not just about making a lesson engaging; it’s about helping students become effective creators and consumers of information in today’s...

Though many teachers, including the authors in this collection, are incorporating digital writing tools and making significant changes in their instruction, too many other teachers are not. Based on the results of a Pew Internet and National Writing Project survey, this chapter explores six skills that a majority of writing teachers describe as "es...

Opportunities for teachers to engage in professional development that leads to substantive change in their instructional practice are few, yet the National Writing Project (NWP) provides one such “transformational” experience through their summer institutes (Whitney, 2008). Also, despite recent moves in the field of English education to integrate d...

Building on Hillocks’ (1995) concepts of the declarative and procedural knowledge that writers need in order to craft effective writing, this article explores the writing process of one pre-service teacher as she moved from a personal narrative to an essay to a digital story. The authors argue that digital writers—in addition to needing declarative...

Opportunities for teachers to engage in professional development that leads to substantive change in their instructional practice are few, yet the National Writing Project (NWP) provides one such "transformational" experience through their summer institutes (Whitney, 2008). Also, despite recent moves in the field of English education to integrate d...

Communities—and their literacies—exist within larger contexts, and writing has the potential to empower or oppress, to maintain the status quo, or to transform the collective community. School is one such context and, in recent years, the nature of writing has changed; digital writing skills needed to participate in contemporary society do not alwa...

Creating a group paper has always made unusual demands on students as they figure out their role in the process of collaborative authorship. Inviting writers to work with newer technologies, such as online word processors and wikis, can provide opportunities to make the process and outcomes of collaboration more transparent. In this article, collab...

As digital portfolios become more prevalent in teacher education, the purposes and processes for creating them have become contested. Originally meant to be critical and reflective spaces for learning about multimedia and conceived as contributing to professional growth, research shows that digital portfolios are now increasingly being used to prov...

As a commentary aimed toward revision of "Beliefs About Techno logy and the Preparation of English Teachers: Beginning the Conversation" (Swenson, Rozema, Young, McGrail, & Whitin, 2005), this paper encourages the authors to focus on the multiliteracies that technologies enable as a guiding theme rather than on techno logies themselves. It also con...

The authors have made digital portfolios and blogging the centerpieces of their teacher-research group as ways to share their research and get input from their peers. The group discusses the many benefits this collaborative project has offered their teaching.