Abstract
In the Insights Column that concludes this issue, Song argues for the need to attend to “interwoven and sometimes invisible” connections across methodological tools, participants, and relationships among researchers. Specifically, Song points to inevitable entanglements that are often dismissed or ignored as we consider our work and roles as literacy educators and researchers. While we concur with this critique, we also invite our readers to consider how each piece in this volume attends to intersections across particular social aspects of literacy, teaching, and learning. While Song explores the complexity of documenting literacy in out-of-school settings, researchers whose work is included here present a vast range of research agendas, communities, methods, and researcher positionalities, as they examine some of the social and methodological aspects of what it means to be a literacy scholar.
Kleekamp argues for an expansion of how literacy is defined for significantly dis/abled children. She uses inclusive picture books to move beyond limited definitions of literacy that focus only on decoding print. The questions she raises point to significant intersections with multimodality, critical literacy, and literacy practices occurring in general education classrooms. Her findings consider insights across participants, classroom practices, and assumptions that challenge deficit orientations that too often limit special education literacy instruction.
Emanating from a very different perspective, Benko, Hodge, and Salloum address social aspects of literacy, by foregrounding how structural and ideational epistemologies override attention to social practices. They focus particularly on the confluence of resources, educators, and the visions of writing that operate through the resources that are made available by state departments of education in the United States. These scholars reveal how the resources provided by states contribute to particular visions of writing instruction—what it is and how it is implemented. In this entanglement, resources act as actors by imposing ways of writing on teachers and children while proposing parallel roles for researchers and literacy educators.
Deroo and Watson examine socially situated meaning-making about loss in an after-school songwriting space. Focusing on two Black adolescent girls, they explore the multiliteracy practices of Noriah Rose and Koral. Both girls use literacy to negotiate loss as they grapple with complicated meanings and share their songwriting practices. Deroo and Watson theorize these literary practices of remembrance and highlight the power of public sharing. In their work, the participants and the stances brought by researchers conjoin to reveal new understandings about the power and purpose of literacy.
In yet another context and in relation to a different set of literacy questions, Kibler, Paulick, Palacios, and Hill describe the book reading practices occurring in three multilingual immigrant families. They highlight considerations related to context, culture, and participants. Emphasizing book reading as entailing multidirectional language socialization practices across languages, they situate decoding as a dominant literacy practice and the accompanying need for literacy educators and scholars to recognize and reconceptualize decoding practices as complex and nuanced. Entanglements operating in this study implicate participants, the spaces they inhabit, and the responsibilities and roles of researchers and educators to fully honor the work occurring in multilingual immigrant families.
Finally, Adams explores the meaning-making experiences of one undergraduate student as the student engages with a young adult novel. This study treats interactions around text as social and as occurring within social spaces. This study brought together research about critical literacy and young adult literature to better understand the emergence of critical literacy practices related to rape culture. Adams provides literacy educators with a rich description of what happens as a student develops a critical literacy stance. This study reveals the potential of young adult literature for helping young adults to confront and negotiate complex social issues through an assemblage of text, participants, and classroom opportunities.
While no single study can reflect the full assemblage of relevant considerations that Song proposes, we argue that each of these studies contribute important readings of what contributes to literacy learning and practices. Underlying all of these articles is a strong commitment to social aspects of literacy. Participants, researchers, and social contexts operate across these studies—in different ways and with different effects. We are excited to present this range of theoretical and methodological possibilities and trust that our readers will find these articles both informative and inspiring.