Abstract
This volume of the Journal of Literacy Research draws on a range of contexts, voices, and positionings to consider what counts as evidence and the making of viable arguments. We are living in a time when public health and science related to climate change are routinely challenged and ignored. False claims are also prevalent in literacy education, where policy and practice decisions are often affected by politics and privilege, rather than by research findings. Each article presented in this volume raises important perspectives on what it means for students, practitioners, and scholars to make and support claims about educational practice and the world.
Worthy and her colleagues explore issues related to evidence and argument by considering the information about dyslexia that is available on the internet to parents, educators, and the general public. Their review of websites reveals that the majority of webpages did not meet basic source credibility criteria. Much of the information presented on these sites contradicted or was unsupported by research. Despite these deficiencies, most pages employed authoritative discourses to present flawed information. Building on these findings, Worthy and her colleagues argue for less divisive, more research-based, and more collaborative dialogue among researchers, educators, and stakeholders.
Lawrence and Sherry directly address the use of evidence and the construction of arguments. They analyze screen-capture videos of students’ gameplay, drafts of students’ advocacy letters, and video-stimulated recall interviews to discover how the pedagogical feedback provided by one video game—Quandary—influenced two seventh-grade students as they conceptualized arguments and wrote advocacy letters to their state governor. Researchers conclude that game feedback—in the forms of rewards and penalties—can encourage the development of argumentation strategies. However, they also note that resulting approaches to argumentation often lacked effectiveness when applied to complex rhetorical situations, including letter writing.
Pickard considers what counts as evidence in adult basic education (ABE) programs. Drawing on ethnographic grounded data collected in one publicly funded ABE program, she explores how efforts to comply with federal accountability policies affected the services provided to adults with reading difficulties. Her findings suggest that efforts to comply with accountability policies resulted in instructional practices that limited students’ opportunities for substantive engagement with text and excluded students who did not produce the expected and valued outcomes. This further indicates that accountability pressures not only normalize problematic practices but also marginalize the very students ABE programs were designed to serve.
Kelly and her colleagues raise questions related to evidence and argumentation by studying how researchers approach, describe, and justify culturally relevant, culturally responsive, and culturally sustaining literacy. Their critical, integrative qualitative review examined 56 studies that focused on culturally informed literacy instruction in P–5 classrooms. Specifically, their analysis considered the terms researchers used, the theorists they cited, the methods they used, and the student populations involved. The authors also paid attention to student outcomes, achievement gaps, specific literacy instructional practices, and researcher reflexivity. Their review reveals that most studies involved qualitative methods and occurred with traditionally marginalized students in the United States; many involved students reading texts that researchers deemed to be culturally informed. In some cases, researchers conflated the terms and theoretical frames. Kelly and her colleagues offer some recommendations for teachers and researchers.
González Ybarra and Saavedra present self-studies that excavate their embodied literacies across multiple positionings as Chicana/Latina feminist literacy researchers. Their work reveals important insights about what counts as evidence and about the need for the field to recognize, consider, reveal, and excavate literacies that live on, within, and through bodies. The authors illustrate how Chicana/Latina feminist theory provides spaces for examining literacies, and they describe the process of working through embodied literacies by emphasizing the potential of considering geographies of selves and autohistoria-teoría. They conclude by discussing the pedagogical implications of autohistoria-teoría for classroom teachers and the importance of women of color (WoC) feminist theories for guiding teaching that illuminates and honors the embodied literacies and experiences of students of color.
Finally, Paugh and Wendell describe a collaboration involving a multidisciplinary team of university literacy educators, university engineering educators, and classroom teachers. They explore disciplinary literacy instruction integrated within an engineering unit in an elementary urban classroom. Building on systemic functional linguistics, the authors illustrate how a flexible set of disciplinary language choices functioned to support students’ evolving reasoning as part of engineering design processes. Their findings reveal synergy between language and reasoning and inform calls to align science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) literacy and core disciplinary practices, including those presented in policy documents (i.e., Common Core State Standards for English language arts, Next Generation Science Standards).
We are excited to present this important set of articles, which collectively invite literacy scholars to reconsider what counts as evidence and what defines compelling arguments, especially in the midst of unsettling times.