Abstract
We stated in our inaugural editorial (March 2014, Vol. 46, Issue 1) that our goal is to publish articles representing both new and cutting-edge research and those pieces that “illuminate traditional findings in ways that open up new research areas, pursue novel questions, or promote the development of more sophisticated and promising methodologies.” The articles in this issue address previously well-researched topics (young children’s writing, critical literacy, and vocabulary learning), but they advance the field substantially by providing new depths of understanding with additional implications for alternative approaches in classrooms from preschool through the secondary years, both in the United States and internationally.
For example, Deborah Rowe’s article “The Development of a Descriptive Measure of Early Childhood Writing: Results From the Write Start! Writing Assessment” adds considerable texture to a landscape of previous research in early writing by carefully analyzing preschoolers’ initial writing attempts to develop the first comprehensive, research-based descriptive measure of 2- to 5-year-olds’ writing. Drawing from data collected in response to a standard task used in the Write Start! Writing Assessment, Rowe begins with a set of research-based descriptions of children’s early writing drawn from 15 well-known studies, and then carefully crafts a set of integrated categories across four important features of print—form, directionality, intentionality, and message content—resulting in a tool that provides a basis for comparing group and individual trajectories of change for each writing feature. With this tool, educators should better understand the capabilities of young children through developing a multi-dimensional profile that shows the child’s emergent understandings of different print features.
Another example illuminating young children’s writing is Maria Ghiso’s “Arguing From Experience: Young Children’s Embodied Knowledge and Writing as Inquiry.” She finds that first graders can address a controversial issue such as gun control by taking a position, providing evidence, and considering opposing perspectives. If only a developmental perspective was theorized to explore young children’s capacity to grapple with difficult topics, one might suggest that children are too immature to address such issues at a young age. However, Ghiso finds otherwise as she utilizes feminist epistemologies to understand how first graders enact an alternative rationality by drawing on knowledge from their own personal experiences as central to the arguments they were constructing. Ghiso found that these students were not making a formalist argument about the constitutional right to bear arms, but were conceptualizing their arguments from their own personal experiences of being vulnerable to gun violence. Hence, Ghiso cautions that a curricular focus on providing evidence from the authority of a text rather than from what readers and writers bring to their interactions with texts has the potential to stymie generative lines of inquiry for young children, and to reify a dominant model of rationality that sets up a binary between experience and objective reasoning.
Interpreting texts in different ways characterizes Lasisi Ajayi’s research in “Critical Multimodal Literacy: How Nigerian Female Students Critique Texts and Reconstruct Unequal Social Structures.” More specifically, school policies have required teachers to keep to textbooks and avoid controversial topics. Hence, according to Ajayi, “textual analysis is constrained as students, out of deference and allegiance to the school authority or parents, may consider it inappropriate to question dominant views even when such views may be oppressive to women or other social groups.” Nonetheless, Ajayi builds on existing literature by linking the students’ home literacies to the official literacy curriculum by utilizing critical multimodal literacy with ninth-grade female students to interrogate texts and reconstruct unequal social structures. Findings suggest that the teacher and female students co-constructed possibilities for the learners to critique social production of gender and resist structural practices that diminish their voices and their literacy learning.
The final article by Cervetti, Hiebert, Pearson, and McClung, “Factors That Influence the Difficulty of Science Words,” combines disciplines of science and literacy by studying the multi-dimensional features of words (e.g., word length, frequency, polysemy, domain specificity, and concreteness) that have been found to predict both word knowledge and word learning in science instruction. In their study with second, third, and fourth graders, findings indicated that word length along with polysemy and word frequency predicted the growth score for third-grade students, while polysemy and frequency were predictors of vocabulary growth for second and fourth graders. Strong evidence supported the idea that all students struggled with the polysemy of words and had difficulties in learning the disciplinary meanings of many words particularly because of their known, common everyday meanings.
Two themes emerge from these articles. First, these authors argue that students’ home and community experiences undergird learning. Second, generative and emergent talent is brought forth under the guiding forces of sensitive, knowledgeable teachers and researchers who believe that students of all ages are capable of so much more than they are usually given credit or opportunity.