A 50-Year Journey Through an Expanding Landscape of Literacy Research

Abstract

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.