In 2018, teacher education programs are innovative, but they also face challenges. Opportunities for innovations include areas such as critical literacies, reading foundations, disciplinary literacies, and digital literacies. Challenges include increasing the diversity of teacher candidates, offering more and higher quality literacy courses to meet the increasing definitions of literacy, and reduced enrollment. Although something seismic happened to the field when teacher education found its way into the National Reading Conference/Literacy Research Association (Dixey Massey, personal communication, December 21, 2017), it remains a topic that is grossly underrepresented in editorial statements and in literacy research across the life span of the Journal of Literacy Research (JLR, previously known as the Journal of Reading Behavior, or JRB). Because of our commitment to the topic, we focus this editorial statement on the topic of teacher education. As we have done in our preceding statements in this volume, we reviewed the editorial statements of our predecessors, looking specifically to see if and how they addressed notions of teacher education. Out of the JRB/JLR previous editorial statements we reviewed, only 11 statements included attention to teacher education (inclusive of pre-and in-service teacher education). In the spirit of representing the work of earlier editors, we have organized this statement around three areas addressed by our predecessors: the contexts for teacher preparation programs, features of literacy coursework, and policy influences on teacher education.
In the picture book Last Stop on Market Street (de la Peña, 2015), the protagonist, CJ, is upset that he and his grandmother must take their regular Sunday bus ride through the city. Along the way, though, CJ sees friends, meets new people, and interrogates the world around him, under the guidance of his grandmother, who helps him become a "better witness for what's beautiful" in his world (de la Peña, 2015). In many ways, not only does CJ's world expand in the book, but the book itself also expands beyond traditional boundaries. It is a notable example of children's literature that portrays experiences beyond majoritarian narratives of Whiteness and class privilege. It also received the Caldecott Honor (for best illustrations) and the Newbery Medal (an award given almost exclusively to chapter books). There are many ways to interpret this book, but for us, it is a journey through a sociospatial landscape. CJ's landscape is not just a backdrop for his experiences. It is a dynamic part of his meaning making, "an arena of possibility for creating something new" (Mills & Comber, 2015, p. 94). In his Newbery acceptance speech, author Matt de la Peña (2016) reflected on his ongoing reinterpretation of his own literacy journey. He explained, Growing up, I never could've imagined anything like this. Me and books? Reading? Nah, man, I was a working class kid. A half-Mexican hoop head. .. Turns out I was wrong. Turns out I've been a reader all along. Maybe I didn't have my nose in a novel, but I read my old man's long silences when the two of us sat in freeway traffic in his beat-up old VW bug. I read the way he pulled himself out of bed at 3:30 every morning to get ready for work. How he never took a sick day. I read my mom's endless worry about the bills. About the empty fridge. But I also read the way she looked at me and my two sisters. Like we were special. Like we could make something of our lives. CJ's expanding way of reading the sights and sounds of his geography parallels the expansions of our field's understanding of literacy/ies over the 50-year history of the Journal of Literacy Research (JLR). Both CJ's journey and de la Peña's acceptance speech remind us of the expanding notions of what it means to be literate and to study literacies. With this theme of "expanding landscapes," we return (see our editorial statement in Volume 50, Number 1) and examine editorial statements written by our predecessors to help us understand how literacy has been defined and conceptualized since the inception of our journal in 1969. A Few Stops Along the Journey Below we highlight several of the "stops" the field of literacy research has made along the 50-volume history of JLR. The "stops" that we describe here show the expanding 767744J LRXXX10.
Moving Forward With Literacy ResearchAs we publish the last issue in our anniversary volume, we pause to reflect on the vast amount of knowledge about literacy, literacy education, and literacy research that is represented across the 200 issues that are the Journal of Literacy Research (JLR). As we read (and reread) the statements written by earlier editors and editorial teams, we remained humble to serve as the current editorial team. We have worked hard this year to make sure JLR readers have access to literacy research that moves our field forward. We thank our authors, our current editorial review board, and ad hoc reviewers for supporting us in our efforts with JLR.We would also like to take this opportunity to welcome the newest members on our editorial team. Dr. Fenice Boyd is now serving as a coeditor. Dr. Boyd is a professor and department chair at the University of South Carolina. She brings to our team expertise in literacy learning opportunities for adolescents who struggle with reading, writing, and traditional schooling practices; responses and reactions to multiethnic and multicultural literature; and principled practices of literacy instruction. We also welcome Dr. Pelusa Orellana. Dr. Orellana is a professor and associate dean for research at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile. Her expertise in early literacy, motivation, and literacy assessment (in both English and Spanish) completes our team. We are excited both agreed to work with us as coeditors of JLR.We are equally excited about the studies that appear in this issue. Individually and collectively, they contribute important findings that can inform the field of literacy, literacy education, and literacy research. Take, for example, Tierney's anniversary article. In this interdisciplinary essay, Tierney proposes a model of cross-cultural meaning-making as a foundation for what he terms "global epistemological eclecticism" in our scholarly pursuits, including our research and teaching. He calls for scholarly pursuits that are cooperative, collaborative, contrastive, and always respectful and reciprocal. It is through his work that we can see beyond policies and practices that propagate insularity and divisiveness.Mirra, Coffey, and Englander used a sociocritical approach to explore the ways in which two high school English teachers leveraged disciplinary literacy practices in a high school classroom. Using a figured worlds framework, the team documented the ways in which teachers engaged youth in what the authors call "civic literacy learning." This study has implications for how our field considers the intersection of race, literacy, and citizenship in order to disrupt social inequities.In their study, Frankel, Fields, Kimball, and Murphy applied positioning theory in their collaboration with 12th-grade literacy mentors to reimagine literacy teaching and learning with their 10th-grade mentees. Using social design methodologies, the team documented the various ways the positioning of mentors as collaborators was taken up, sometime...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.