Abstract
The concept of emergence is a major theme of this volume. It runs the gamut of literacy education, including early childhood, elementary, secondary, teacher education, and community contexts. Collectively, these studies aim to reveal constraining boundaries related to age, language, ability, or discipline. While the notion of emergence signals the initial revelation of a process or phenomena, these studies go beyond. They show practical ways to not only negotiate and exist within these boundaries, but rather how to transcend them in order to generate a more expansive literacy ecologies. Despite different demographics and different focal points of learning and literacy education, each article reveals new insights about how humans build literacy practices, whether it is deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students or their teachers, the intersection of literacy and science education or novice teachers finding their way among conflicting demands, or families of mixed status who bridge communities while navigating public-sector systems across borders.
Schachter, Yeomans-Maldonado, and Piasta's “Early Childhood Teachers’ Emergent Literacy Data Practices” opens the volume. It explores data practices among teachers who work in early childhood education. The interrogation of teachers’ gathering and use of data in literacy teaching reveals both positive and negative outcomes for young children's emergent literacy skills. At the same time, teachers’ own learning—in the form of what they gained from the data knowledge they gathered—is layered onto the literacy outcomes for preschoolers in this study so that readers get a nuanced look at both educators and those they educate.
In “Teacher Reports of Secondary Writing Instruction with Deaf Students,” Wolbers, Dosta, and Holcomb take as their starting point the finding that quality of instruction directly correlates to students’ writing skills, then delve into the emergence of writing skills for DHH writers in secondary settings while also exploring the writing instruction they receive. The preparedness of teachers to work with DHH students as compared to hearing students was found to affect both writing instruction (for teachers) and writing outcomes (for students). They found that the greatest unmet need reported by teachers is for bilingual ASL/English instruction.
In “Small Moves: New Teachers’ Perceptions of Authoritative Discourse,” Lambert, Myers, Howard, and Adams-Budde shift the focus away from student outcomes and literacy education within that context in order to research novice teachers’ own emergent literacy instruction. Novice teachers must always balance navigating the demands of authorities in the school context with the practical demands they encounter in the classroom. These authors find that novice teachers are well aware of the role of the authority conveyed via structures in place, such as curricula, assessments, and administrators in literacy education. Those same teachers also express a willingness to question authority to the extent of supplementing—and sometimes changing—literacy programs.
Anderson, Wright, and Gotwalls’ study, “Teachers’ Vocabulary Talk in Early-Elementary Science Instruction,” takes place at the intersection of literacy and science education. Their study reveals an emphasis on teacher-centered instruction that does indeed lead to students learning word meanings (vocabulary) for scientific purposes. However, students in these teacher-centered environments develop less awareness of and interest in words and word learning than in word meanings—in other words, those students developed fewer emergent literacy practices and more memorization-style learning.
Gallo and Adams Corral's study, “Transborder Literacies of (In)Visibility” took place in a community setting rather than a school setting. They focused on emergent binational literacy practices that families of mixed status have to develop around passport applications. They found that the two countries—the United States and Mexico—have two separate, mostly mutually exclusive linguistic, cultural, bureaucratic, and governmental systems for acquiring passports. On their own, or with support of their communities, these families had to develop the necessary literacy skills in real time because the passport application process reveals yet another way in which families of mixed status exist at the metaphorical border between the United States and Mexico.