Fifty Volumes of Research: Literacy Teacher Education

Abstract

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.