Abstract
One of the great challenges in literacy research has been moving away from autonomous, individualist, and decontextualized views of language, literacy, and learning toward more situated, social, and ideological approaches to literacy research. A common theme across all the studies presented in this volume is how reductive ideas about literacy still persist, impacting equity, and how they are challenged by teachers and students in a variety of national and international spaces. Overall, the studies presented in this volume are a reminder of how the social and political context of learners affects literacy education across the world.
In this issue, we explore multiple contexts in which the autonomous boundaries between language, literacy, and learning remain dominant and resisted. First, Usree Bhattacharya in “‘I Am a Parrot’: Literacy Ideologies and Rote Learning” examines the dominance of rote learning practices in India. Drawing on longitudinal data from a study of language socialization in an orphanage in New Delhi, Bhattacharya shows how reductive literacy ideologies are discursively resisted in everyday practice. This study sheds light not only on how inequality is reproduced but also on how active learner subjectivities could be fostered in rural and suburban India.
Another autonomous boundary, the line between public and private literacy practices, is challenged in Margaret Mackey's study, “Private Readerly Experiences of Presence and Implications for Practices and Policies.” Drawing on Philip Barnard's interactive model of theory and practice, this study examines the paradox of reading as simultaneously public and private, yet intensely individual and unique. It challenges narrow assumptions of what should count as reading, especially as it relates to what is easily measured. It further considers methodological, pedagogical, and policy implications for literacy education.
Autonomous literacy ideologies can be seen at the national level in the growing popularity of Seals of Biliteracy. In “Biliteracy as Property: Promises and Perils of the Seal of Biliteracy,” Chris Chang-Bacon and Soria Colomer offer a critical analysis of this growing trend. They draw on policy and visual discourse analysis to show how the Seals of Biliteracy in 23 states have mimicked discourses of whiteness as property to commodify language and position biliteracy as property. This study is a cautionary tale of the perils of allowing state authority to assess, award, and authenticate biliteracy as a form of property. It is a reminder that literacy is inherently ideological, and the field of literacy research cannot afford to be silent on such a consequential issue.
In “Apprenticing for Equity Literacy Teaching: A Needed Change in Teacher Education,” Althier Lazar draws on critical race theory and landscapes of practice perspectives to examine teacher preparation in literacy education. The analysis shows how a range of white, female teacher candidates responded when asked to use an equity lens to describe students’ literacy learning opportunities in their practicum sites. The teacher candidates’ writings revealed a wide variation in participation, from candidates who became keenly aware of equitable and inequitable literacy teaching practices and structures, to those who tended toward more status quo, autonomous literacy stances. This study has implications for how to reconceptualize the literacy practica experience to help teacher candidates identify and challenge autonomous literacy practices that sustain inequity.
Autonomous ideologies of literacy minimize the role of context, especially the social and political nature of literacy. This issue concludes with an Insights essay by Daniel E. Ferguson and Amélie Lemieux, “Éclosions in Literacy Research: Rereading Brandt and Clinton's ‘Limits of the Local,’” which is a rereading of Brandt and Clinton's classic piece, “The Limits of the Local.” It argues for an even greater expansion of our understanding of context by invoking the metaphor of éclosion. It seeks to extend Brandt and Clinton's “transcontextualizing” metaphor for literacy studies through an affirmative ontology of éclosion. Ferguson and Lemieux urge the literacy research community to consider an extension of transcontextualizing methods as a way to better understand our tumultuous times amidst a global pandemic, constant rumor of wars, and large-scale invasions, such as the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, creating millions of refugees.