Abstract
Nearly 20 years in the making, this special issue returns to the same research focus on literacy teacher preparation as the 2000 special issue of the Journal of Literacy Research (JLR) (Barr, Watts-Taffe, & Yokota, 2000) under the title of “Rethinking Preservice Literacy Education.” Barr, Watts-Taffe, and Yokota framed the special issue around the growing 21st century concerns in the media and in political circles around the quality of university-based teacher preparation in literacy and the crisis in student literacy achievement in schools. Perhaps poor teacher preparation was to blame? Perhaps better teacher preparation was the solution? The editors lamented the rise in alternative certification of teachers that threatened the future of university-based teacher preparation. Today, these same concerns remain in the area of preservice literacy teacher preparation. In the last 20 years, the JLR has published nine research articles related to preservice teacher preparation in literacy. It might seem that limited research explains the paucity of publications, but in actuality this is not the case. Since 2000, there has been a dramatic rise in research reflected in the scholarship around the world. Preservice teacher education has become the largest proposal area for the Literacy Research Association—the sponsoring organization for JLR. In her 2017 presidential address to the Literacy Research Association, Dr. Rebecca Rogers stressed the need for greater attention to research into preservice teacher preparation (Rogers, 2017). She specifically highlighted the University of Texas’s database, which offers a
Our goal in this special issue is to engage the readers of JLR with the breadth of scholarship related to preservice teacher preparation in literacy through the CITE-ITEL database (https://cite.edb.utexas.edu), which is curated by a team of literacy researchers—including both faculty and doctoral students. The team has identified more than 650 research articles published since 2000 focused on initial literacy teacher preparation. Appendix A in the online supplemental archive has a description of the CITE-ITEL database and website, and how the articles in this special issue were searched, selected, and analyzed. Each of the articles reviews a unique corpus of scholarship from the CITE-ITEL database.
The articles within this special issue report on research syntheses in six areas of preservice literacy teacher education research: sociocultural influences and understandings, secondary English, writing, tutoring, basic processes, and children’s literature. Each of these reviews brings to the fore, in different ways, important research that pushes against traditional notions of literacy instruction and of literacy teacher preparation. In the article “Preparing Teachers With Sociocultural Knowledge in Literacy: A Literature Review,” Mosley-Wetzel and colleagues examine the connections that preservice teachers make as a result of experiences focused on sociocultural knowledge and literacy as well as the barriers they face in building these connections. In “Working Toward a Socially Just Future in the ELA Methods Class,” Fowler-Amato, LeeKeenan, Warrington, Nash, and Brady analyze teacher educators’ support of secondary English language arts (ELA) preservice teachers in developing a sense of social justice and activism as teachers. Next, in their article “Reviewing How Preservice Teachers Are Prepared to Teach Reading Processes: What the Literature Suggests and Overlooks,” Hikida, Tily, Chamberlain, Daly-Lesch, Warner, and Schallert describe the gaps between current concepts of literacy and reading processes and discuss the corpus of research on preservice teachers’ engagement with the component processes of reading. In “Constructs of Teaching Writing in Research about Literacy Teacher Education,” Bomer, Land, Rubin, and VanDike investigate the research on preparing elementary and secondary preservice teachers to teach writing and highlight preservice teachers’ beliefs and attitudes about writing. Flores, Vlach, and Lammert, in “The Role of Children’s Literature in Cultivating Pre-Service Teachers as Transformative Intellectuals: A Literature Review,” offer an examination of the ways in which children’s literature has figured into the literacy education courses for preservice elementary school teachers. Finally, in “A Research Review of Literacy Tutoring and Mentoring in Initial Teacher Preparation: Toward Practices that Can Transform Teaching,” Hoffman and colleagues synthesize the findings from research into literacy tutoring and literacy mentoring in initial teacher preparation and address the challenges and promises of including third and hybrid spaces for mentoring experiences.
Following the reviews of literature, the issue concludes with Insights essays. First, Lysaker and Handsfield focus on the importance of literature reviews in advancing the field of literacy research. In this piece, they propose that research syntheses might be framed and crafted for purposes of disrupting the flows of dominant discourses and power structures in the field of literacy teacher preparation. Second, Bomer and Maloch focus on the challenges for reform inside of university-based literacy teacher preparation. Both of these authors hold administrative positions at their universities (dean and associate dean, respectively), and in their commentary, they bring these perspectives and associated interpretations to this body of research and consider the ways in which this research may inform educational leaders and administrators.
In this themed issue, we align with the JLR editors’ intentions of disrupting “traditional notions of literacy, literacy instruction, and literacy research” (Sailors, Martinez, Davis, Goatley, & Willis, 2017). At a very basic level, this issue brings into view a body of literature that has not previously been visible. Clearly, research has been conducted on literacy teacher preparation and this work has been published across various outlets, although it has mostly been absent from our major literacy research journals. This themed issue is an effort to gather this work, review it critically, and bring it into view for the readers of JLR. Furthermore, in the 650 articles reviewed as a part of the CITE-ITEL project, much of the research is conducted and written from the perspectives of practitioners, of insiders, of teacher educators. This research upends the notions of traditional research in ways that expose more nuanced and socially and culturally specific findings related to preparing teachers. Finally, the authoring teams of each of the reviews in this issue consider how the research, or their critical review of it, challenges the status quo in literacy teacher preparation. We see this issue and the accumulating body of research it reports on both as a way of pushing against dominant narratives and practices that have lived within literacy teacher preparation and within classrooms, and as a generative way forward to new possibilities, reimagining literacy teacher preparation toward a vision of literacy that is transformative in the lives of children.
