Making sense of reading’s forever wars

Abstract

Recent stories raising the alarm about students’ poor reading skills and calling for greater attention to the “science of reading” represent the latest round in the ongoing “reading wars.” Going back at least as far as the 1950s, scholars, pundits and policy makers have debated which teaching strategies are most successful at helping students become proficient readers. However, Leah Durán and Michiko Hikida argue that these debates fail to get at the root issues behind students’ poor reading performance. Even when schools with the lowest reading scores implement science-backed pedagogical approaches, these shifts do not make up for structural inequalities in facilities, resources, and teacher quality. Reading scores reflect problems rooted in class and race inequalities that cannot be resolved through pedagogy alone.

Reimagining LRA in the Spirit of a Transcendent Approach to Literacy

“…How do I serve in ways that unstick us from the continual looping of the past? Right now in literacy teaching and research, one loop we circle is what Leah Durán and I recently called reading's forever wars (Durán & Hikida, 2022), which are taking the form of often harmful, quickly cobbled together "literacy directives, laws and restrictions" (Willis, 2023, p. 132). We have looped back to 2007 when Karen Wohlwend stated in this journal:…”

“…As definitions of what constitutes early literacy continue to narrow in policy, practice, and the research literature (Durán & Hikida, 2022), I ask that, as Dr. Willis suggested, we hold children's full humanity at the forefront of our scholarly and pedagogical endeavors. I ask that we remember that children-so often inadvertently positioned as collections of test scores or other data points-are full, powerful, and brilliant people in this moment and not only in the future.…”

“…How do I serve in ways that unstick us from the continual looping of the past? Right now in literacy teaching and research, one loop we circle is what Leah Durán and I recently called reading's forever wars (Durán & Hikida, 2022), which are taking the form of often harmful, quickly cobbled together “literacy directives, laws and restrictions” (Willis, 2023, p. 132). We have looped back to 2007 when Karen Wohlwend stated in this journal:Ironically, at a time when literacy researchers are calling for expanded research agendas that use critical sociocultural perspectives (Lewis et al, 2007) to reconceptualize early literacy as social practice (Rowe, 2006) and include multimodal ways of knowing (Kress & Jewitt, 2003), governmental policies rely on increasingly constricted definitions of literacy and achievement.…”