Across the articles in this volume and across literacy scholarship, it is not unusual to encounter the prefix “multi-.” We have multiliteracies, multimodalities, multiple perspectives, and multifaceted analyses. As editors—who routinely read piles of manuscript pages—we are continually being sensitized to patterns that define our field, and as a result inform our collective thinking. The preponderance

This study explored how engaging in critical inquiry through Project-Based Inquiry (PBI) Global fostered social action with high school students. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from critical inquiry and social action and employing a collective case study approach, we focused on six diverse students from two of the 18 teams who participated in a PBI Global examining global water and sanitation

Digital multimodal composition offers opportunities for emergent bilingual (EB) students to orchestrate semiotic resources in ways that develop their identities, strengthen their understandings of language, and help them to engage with content. To better understand how EBs can participate in varied multimodal composing practices, this study systematically reviews the literature on EBs’ digital multimodal

This article explores how one urban high school under threat of state closure developed a multifaceted literacy program to transform the teaching and learning of literacy in a novel university/school partnership. Analyses of ethnographic and quantitative school data illustrate how the evolution of the literacy program could be understood as a consequence of generative frictions which produced changes

Although research endeavors on global-centric teaching and learning are increasing, there is much yet to understand on how classroom spaces can legitimize students’ capacities as globally literate members of society. In this article, we focus on the relational dimension of global literacies and examine how elementary students involved in a transnational partnership constructed relationality into online

Guided by theories of racialization and through a decolonial analysis, we share findings on the examination of four children’s books written in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane María. In engaging with these books, we situate our work in communal and research activist practices that foreground Puerto Ricans’ hidden stories and knowledges. Our initial analysis focuses on mapping the complex

The present study investigated students’ (N = 404) interpretations of the main message and use of modes in a persuasive multimodal video on vaccines. It also examined whether students’ topic knowledge, language arts grades, and self-identified gender were associated with their interpretations. Students analyzed a YouTube video in which two entertainers demonstrated the importance of vaccinating children

This volume of the Journal of Literacy Research draws on a range of contexts, voices, and positionings to consider what counts as evidence and the making of viable arguments. We are living in a time when public health and science related to climate change are routinely challenged and ignored. False claims are also prevalent in literacy education, where policy and practice decisions are often affected

Literacy researchers have explored how video games might be used as supplementary texts in secondary English language arts (ELA) classrooms to support reading instruction. However, less attention has been focused on how video games, particularly online educational games designed to teach argumentation, might enhance secondary ELA students’ writing development. In this article, we describe how the pedagogical

This critical, integrative qualitative review explores how researchers approach, describe, and justify culturally relevant, culturally responsive, or culturally sustaining literacy instruction in prekindergarten through fifth-grade (P–5) classrooms. We reviewed 56 studies published between 1995 and 2018. We documented terms researchers use, theorists cited, methods, student outcomes, and student populations

Federal accountability policies requiring rapid, measurable outcomes have increasingly shaped the nature and type of public literacy services available to adults. However, little empirical research has explored the impact of accountability policies on program practice in adult basic education, and almost no research has focused on the effect on services for adults who have difficulty reading. This

The internet is a common source of information for parents, educators, and the general public. However, researchers who analyze the quality of internet sources have found they often contain inaccurate and misleading information. Here, we present an analysis of dyslexia on the internet. Employing disability studies in education (DSE), disability critical race studies (DisCrit), and Bakhtin’s construct

This study explores disciplinary literacy instruction integrated within an elementary engineering unit in an urban classroom. A multidisciplinary team of university literacy and engineering educators and classroom teachers served as the research team for this case study. A social semiotic language theory (systemic functional linguistics) and a framework of mechanistic reasoning informed the instruction

For so long, the literacies of Black learners have been ignored, pathologized, and silenced. In addition, an overly broad focus on multiple dimensions of “diversity” often leads us to ignore the unique role anti-Blackness plays in literacy teaching, learning, and research. As scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings (2016) wrote,

Given the persistence of anti-Blackness, the author demonstrates what can happen when Blackness takes precedence over anti-Blackness in an 11th-grade English classroom. This study uses critical autoethnography to explore a collaborative approach to teaching and learning that sustains Blackness. The author uses storying to amplify the significance of relationship building between a Black teacher and

In this academic counternarrative, we examine how Black students and adults get positioned by, and come to resist, discourses that favor dominant linguistic and cultural practices. We ask, How do Black youth and adults resist the gaze of whiteness, or dominant discourses, in schools and communities, and what are pedagogical implications of such resistances? We address these questions by discussing

In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits re-turns to data. These re-turns draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of re-turn is not simply about revisiting a data scene; it is about re-sensing the social and what it means to be human through

Drawing on Black feminist/womanist storytelling and the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space, this article showcases how one Black girl uses speculative fiction as testimony and counterstory, calling for readers to bear witness to her experiences and inviting witnesses to respond to the negative experiences she faces as a Black girl in the United States. I argue that situating speculative fiction

Research on Black girls’ and women’s literacies reveals how they utilize literacy practices to resist oppression and define their identities. Yet, these practices are frequently absent from or marginalized in formalized schooling spaces. In addition, Black girlhood is rarely placed at the center of equity interventions in schools. As the history of activism in the United States is tied to Black women’s

When I look back before 2020, before the murder of Mr. George Floyd in particular, and think about this special issue, “Black Lives Matter in Literacy Research,” a question comes to my mind: Are we, the field of literacy research, sure that we want to include literacy research among the incalculable responses (already in progress) to racist killings, anti-Blackness, Black living and dying, and ongoing

This article examines the partnership between a teacher and teacher educator disrupting a colonized early childhood curriculum that fosters a dominance of whiteness by replacing it with the beauty and brilliance of Blackness. We explore the following research question: “What are the affordances of teaching from an Afrocentric stance in a first-grade classroom?” We employ Afrocentrism, which includes

The Journal of Literacy Research (JLR) is pleased to publish our latest issue on the state of literacy education. Throughout the volume, contributors examine literacy through the unifying themes of identity, diversity, and inclusion. From the use of picture books to talk about race, dis/ability, and literacy with preschoolers to a meta-analysis of existing publications on literacy, this issue digs

With renewed emphasis on civic education in K–12 schools, educators and politicians call for young people to engage in civic action. Worth considering are the kinds of ideas taken up, the performances deemed critical enough, and actions recognized in schools as civic engagement. Drawing from a case study of second graders in New York City (NYC), I move away from hypervisible expressions of civic participation

In this content analysis, a research team examined the articles in 15 journals published over a span of 10 years to obtain an overview of the current field of literacy. Researchers coded the topics, theoretical perspectives, designs, and data sources in a total of 4,305 literacy-related articles. Analyses revealed statistically significant differences in the topics, perspectives, designs, and data

In educational contexts, including early childhood settings, ableism and racism circulate interdependently to define normalcy and deviance. Book reading offers an important platform for dismantling these interlocking ideologies with young children. In this article, we examine dis/ability and race talk in the context of picture-book reading, analyzing the ways four white, nondisabled teacher candidates

Scholars have examined the myth of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) as model minorities in education and specifically within mathematics education, yet less is known about how this myth reveals an intersection of race and language that shapes the experiences of AAPIs in the literacy field. In this article, I argue that a monolingual model rooted in nativist ideologies of English is part

This collaborative action research project in Alberta, Canada, explored how dual-language books (DLBs) can foster literacy instruction and learner engagement through language awareness. Canada’s changing demographics have resulted in mother tongue diversity and many urban schools identifying at least 25% of students as being English language learners, making it crucial to include a mix of languages

This study explores the disciplinary literacy perspectives of middle school students of color attending urban parochial schools and the reader subject positions they took up across content-area classrooms. Qualitative analysis of 19 student interviews and accompanying observations of subject-area classes revealed that students’ constructions of reading, circumscribed by classroom literacy activities

This article reports on one undergraduate student’s journey toward critical literacy about rape culture as a result of reading and discussing a young adult novel in a book study with peers. Using ethnographic and case study methods, the author examines the personal and cultural resources the student brought to the experience, the critical stance she developed, the critical social practices in which

Through in-home ethnographic observations of three multilingual immigrant families’ shared book reading, we identified recurring literacy practices in the home in which mothers, older siblings, and younger children participated during the reading. We found that families engaged in context-sensitive and cooperative shared reading practices, wherein decoding tended to be the focus. This practice—which

Entanglements among humans, nonhuman objects, and spatial matter in a research site necessitate greater attention to the interwoven and sometimes invisible connections across relational bodies. This piece comments on how reevaluating approaches to participant observations in qualitative research can lead to better understandings of the dynamic interconnectedness among participants, researchers, and

This qualitative study, based on data from an ongoing after-school literacy and songwriting initiative, examines the multiliteracy practices of Noriah Rose and Koral, Black adolescent girls, and their socially situated meaning-making and sharing about loss. Specifically, we asked, “In what ways do youth grapple with complicated meanings of loss as they share creative and artistic songwriting practices

Recent literacy research has made substantial contributions to expanding definitions of literacies beyond stringent parameters of decoding print. These inquiries have intersected with topics such as multimodality and critical literacy in general education literacy classrooms. However, students in isolated special education settings labeled with dis/abilities such as autism or intellectual disability

Although research suggests that teachers turn to their state departments of education for curricular resources, little is known about the resources teachers find on state websites and the recommendations these resources make, especially for teaching writing. We analyze state-provided resources focused on writing (n = 123) for their type, standard(s), and sponsor(s). We also analyze a subset of 40 resources

In this Insights essay, we propose a new concept of offlineness that builds on current language around digital practices, yet addresses an element of young people’s experience that is not adequately represented in current research or educational discourse. This work is informed by a recent cross-national arts-based research project that highlighted the limitations of the discourse ascribed to the nature

This article explores how a secondary ethnic studies course leveraged immigrant families’ literacies rooted in the Mexican spiritual ritual of Las Posadas for in-school literacy instruction and to engage in community-responsive grassroots processions as social protest. Using ethnographic and participatory design research, the authors—one a university researcher and the other an ethnic studies teacher—examine

There is growing interest in foregrounding bodies in literacy research and pedagogy. Drawing across multiple conceptualizations of bodies as tools, mediums, and social texts, this qualitative case study examines the multifaceted nature of embodiment in two adolescent girls’ school writing. Situated in a research-practice partnership that included researchers, the teacher, adolescent youth, and their

This metasynthesis presents the collective findings based on a small corpus of studies (n = 28) that examined literacy coaching in elementary and secondary settings from a relational perspective. We frame our analysis using Lysaker’s notions of relational teaching and theorize that, like classroom teaching, powerful literacy coaching is grounded in dialogic, co-constructive interactions in which the

This research sought to develop argument as a problem-solving process by adding debate to social studies instruction with three groups of fifth-grade students. This design-based research (DBR) reports on the ways that instruction was refined across three topical units to develop argumentative agency and a critical participatory literacy. Students addressed current issues extended from historical events

The field of literacy research has seen a recent surge in scholarship focusing on how matter—both human and nonhuman—comes to matter in literacy research and practice. This article explores how new materialist theories may be recruited for literacy research motivated by an anti-racist ethic. We present an illustrative intra-action analysis of a short autobiographical video produced by Malcolm, a Black

This article argues that for disciplinary literacy to be addressed successfully by subject-area teachers and students, it needs to choose a different path than the one it has been on. It explains how the road disciplinary literacy has traveled to date has been marked by justifiable subject-area teacher resistance to requirements to infuse literacy teaching and learning strategies into their teaching

Civic writing has appeared on walls over centuries, across cultures, and in response to political concerns. This article advances a civic interrogation of how civic writing is publicly authored, read, and discussed as openly accessible and multimodal texts on digital walls. Drawing upon critical literacy perspectives, we examine how a repertoire of 10 civic writing practices associated with open web

This conceptual article addresses theories of ethics in literacy studies. Here, ethics means people’s ways of defining, asking about, and living good lives. Although literacy researchers have paid some attention to ethics, they rarely theorize ethics overtly. To demonstrate the need for a clearer concept of the ethical dimension of literacy, this article shows how the author’s earlier study of activists’

Growing numbers of scholars in composition studies support translingual orientations in their postsecondary writing classrooms. However, translingual orientations are rarely extended to elementary school writers, who are often asked to compose exclusively in Dominant American English. Drawing on theories of translingualism and emergent biliteracy, we use case study methods to examine children’s translingual

In this critique, race is centralized to draw attention to the role it plays in the complex evolution of response to intervention, past and present. I use a critical race theory analytical lens to focus on how the dominant narrative serves as a framework within institutional and political structures in support of the approach. A brief overview of anti-discrimination laws and policies is followed by

Writing development is understood to be a multidimensional task, heavily constrained by spelling in its early stages. However, most available evidence comes from studies with learners of the inconsistent English orthography, so our understanding of the nature of early writing could be highly biased. We explored writing dimensions in each language by assessing a series of text-based features in children’s

Learning to compose texts adequate for different purposes is crucial for becoming literate. We examined developmental changes in the rhetorical structure of written texts produced by Spanish children throughout the early years of elementary school in the light of descriptive writing purposes. Children had also performed tasks to test transcription, reading, cognitive skills, oral vocabulary, and discourse

Writing argumentative texts is a hallmark of literacy attainments with a long and laborious trajectory. The present study explored the incipient stages in argumentative texts written by 293 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second, third, fourth, and fifth grades. The literacy cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading abilities were analyzed, as well the different text structure quality

Planning plays an important role in the production of written texts. Little is known about why children plan and the plans they create when they are not explicitly instructed. This study explores the plans that elementary school children in Years 1, 3, and 5 create before writing a text. We compared performance of children educated in Catalan and in English (the United Kingdom) and examined whether

Mid-adolescence is a period of considerable potential growth in the language for academic writing. Yet, to date, few writing studies explore language development during this period and even fewer focus on longitudinal or diverse samples. In this study, we examined the development of language skills for academic writing in a socio-economically diverse sample followed from sixth to seventh grade (n =

Writing development in early schooling can reveal much about the bigger picture of writing development. As any epoch in life, it presents its own dynamics that intersect with wider social, psychological, and language processes; follows on early epochs; and leads to later accomplishments. In addition, it is particularly strategic to untangle complex relations between technical and communicative abilities

This review of literacy education scholarship examines the ways that children’s literature is used as a resource within literacy methods courses in the preparation of preservice teachers (PTs) as transformative intellectuals. The research indicates that the use of children’s literature in literacy methods courses has served two distinct purposes: (a) to engage PTs in learning literacy instructional

This review of empirical research focused on the preparation of writing teachers synthesizes findings from 82 articles published between 2000 and early 2018. The new understandings generated through this analysis are presented in two sections. First, we provide an overview of how the studies we reviewed draw from and circulate dominant discourses of writing, leading to a call for more transparency

Although the call for teachers to address the demographic imperative has existed for decades, recently, there has been an uptake of frameworks of multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogies, critical literacy, and others into literacy teacher preparation. In this study, we examine connections that pre-service teachers make as a result of experiences focused on sociocultural knowledge

In this commentary, drawing from reviews of research on literacy teacher preparation, the authors discuss points of leverage in preparation of literacy educators for deans and associate deans. Categories that leaders might attend to include: mediated field experiences, faculty development, and external reputation.

Our goal through this literature review is to report and synthesize the findings from research into literacy tutoring and literacy mentoring in initial teacher preparation. We identified a total of 62 published articles that met our selection criteria. We identified four conceptual areas of focus to organize and represent our findings: (a) the structural and design features of the one-to-one or small-group

In this Insight article, we look across the syntheses in this issue to consider how they help readers notice dominant flows and identify sites for disruption within the field of literacy teacher preparation. We first consider the meaning of disruption with respect to the metaphor of flow. We then identify and discuss possible sites of disruption authors of research syntheses create, providing examples

This review of literature highlights the efforts teacher educators and researchers have made over the past 18 years to work toward social justice in secondary English language arts (ELA) preservice teacher (PT) education. Drawing on Dantley and Green’s framework for social justice leadership, we highlight the work that teacher educators have engaged in to support secondary ELA PTs in developing (a)

Today’s world requires attention to all aspects of initial literacy teacher preparation, including how and what preservice teachers learn about the component processes of reading. To address this imperative, a review was conducted of articles published from 2000 to 2018 identified through the CITE-ITEL database (https://cite.edb.utexas.edu) that reported findings related to reading processes and initial

Using data from a 4-year longitudinal ethnography, this study moves from a classroom to the playground to examine a multiage community engaged in a deeply revered playground game with a history stretching back nearly a decade. Mediated discourse analysis is leveraged to examine the game’s historical nexus of practice, rooted in embodied and oral modes of transmission, and to understand how the nexus