Abstract
Volume 52 represents the start of our editorial leadership of the Journal of Literacy Research (JLR), and we are honored to serve you in this role. In this first issue, phrases taken from the four abstracts—“research-practice partnership,” “community-responsive,” “relational teaching,” and “critical participatory literacy”—reveal the central tenets of the articles. These phrases reflect themes of relationship and community. The articles are distinctly different: a qualitative case study of two adolescent girls, a participatory design research study in an ethnic studies course, a metasynthesis of studies related to literacy coaching in secondary classrooms, and a design-based research study documenting debate practices in a fifth-grade classroom. However, their shared focus on relationship runs through this volume, highlighting the power of community, collaboration, and the co-construction of learning.
This emphasis on relationship and collaboration is consistent with our vision for JLR. As the new editorial team, one of our goals is for the journal to reflect the multiple and nuanced voices of the people who compose the Literacy Research Association, as well as the larger field of literacy learning and education. We hope that JLR can serve as a forum for a broad array of articles that extend our conceptual, pedagogical, and theoretical thinking about literacy. With this in mind, we embrace a vast range of theoretical frameworks and research methodologies. We encourage empirical studies that explore practices and policies, as well as reviews of bodies of research that honor our history or look toward our future. We seek short conceptual essays—Insights columns—that push our collective thinking and encourage us to reconsider what we think we know about literacy. We invite contributions from established scholars and leaders in our field, as well as emerging scholars. We strive to include voices from people and communities that have been historically underserved and welcome the voices and perspectives of colleagues from around the world. When multiple and diverse voices and perspectives are honored, educators are stronger, smarter, and better prepared for the challenges faced by schools and communities as they work to create equitable literacy learning opportunities. This is the power that comes from building community and collaboration while recognizing the co-construction of learning.
In this volume, Woodard, Vaughan, and Coppola bring together theories related to embodiment and writing to explore how two adolescent girls—one Asian Muslim and one White Christian—engaged their bodies as an inspiration for writing, as multimodal components of representation, as sites of counter-narration, and as tools for responses to written words. As the authors report, “this study offers an example of humanizing methods, particularly collaborative analysis procedures, to foreground bodies in collaborative studies with youth over time.” Collaboration through a research practice partnership involving researchers (Woodard and Vaughan) and an educator (Coppola) resulted in rich data that highlighted the various ways that embodiment operated in and through students’ writing.
Community and advocacy are particularly salient in the research presented by de los Ríos and Molina. These scholars explore the revisioning of a traditional Mexican spiritual practice, la posada, which is reinterpreted to reflect current politics and address immigrant rights. Participatory design research is used to consider how literacy can support spaces of social protest and sanctuary. In this study, high school teachers worked with students and community members over a long period of time. The project emerged from this collaboration in ways that were responsive to the students and the challenges faced by their community.
Robertson, Padesky, Ford-Connors, and Paratore place relationships at the center of their analysis of 28 studies that examine literacy coaching in elementary and secondary classrooms. Drawing on notions of relational teaching, this metasynthesis reveals not only various relationships enacted through coaching but also methods for supporting the development of strong coaching relationships and the negotiation of obstacles that hinder those relationships. The authors’ work points to pedagogical practices that can enhance the potential of literacy coaching to strengthen literacy learning for students.
Finally, Malloy, Tracy, Scales, Menickelli, and Scales draw on their research in a fifth-grade social studies classroom to explore how the refinement of instructional practices assists students in becoming agential and engaged in reading and writing about controversial issues. The authors used design-based methods to explore the factors that enhanced and inhibited argument development through reiterative cycles of analysis of classroom data. This retrospective analysis led to the identification of pedagogical practices that demonstrated the potential to positively affect the development of argumentative stances. Design-based research is inherently collaborative as researchers and educators work together to understand what is happening in classrooms.
These pieces are complemented by an Insights column authored by Nelson, Perry, and Rogers. This conceptual piece focuses on notions of onlineness and offlineness, suggesting that this dichotomy is essentially limited since everyday online and offline practices are integrally intertwined. The authors argue that moving beyond and through this binary offers researchers and educators new ways to build upon young people’s experiences, and provides a tool for reenvisioning learning and inquiry spaces in schools. Although their column does not directly address community building or collaboration, the authors provide an important contribution to conceptualizing the co-construction of learning: If we truly want to engage students with learning, it makes sense to allow them to draw on the full set of literacy resources that they bring to classrooms. This means valuing both online and offline practices.
Each of these articles—in different contexts, with different foci, and through different means—explores the potential of collaboration and participatory practices. Together, they remind literacy educators of how co-construction and collaboration contribute to learning. These practices are enacted with a range of purposes: representation, social protest, facilitating relational coaching, developing arguments, and theorizing online/offline practices. These contributions speak to our goal as editors and our vision of JLR as a space that honors the voices and perspectives of a broad variety of literacy scholars. We look forward to providing a forum for additional voices, insights, and experiences across the next 3 years. It is only through collaboration and learning from each other that we will be able to collectively create and sustain equitable literacy learning opportunities for all students.