Editors' Introduction to Volume 73

With our co-editors, we are pleased to share the 73rd volume of Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice (LR:TMP). In the 2023 annual meeting theme, the Literacy Research Association (LRA) community was challenged to interrupt “stubborn hierarchies that persist across social and scientific landscapes despite rigorous research, sophisticated analyses, and a strong methodological and theoretical canvas” (LRA Conference Program, 2023, p. 2). In framing Volume 73, we extend the geographical metaphor of landscapes, viewing these hierarchies of educational and literacy research as terrains that are not only navigated by people and organizations but also potentially disrupted in practice. Such hierarchies include narrow conceptualizations of validity, science, and evidence; monolingual and whitestream (Urrieta, 2010) ideologies; and market forces, to name a few, which often direct flows of both classroom and research practices. As with geographic formations, hierarchies become sedimented or hardened over time, as new practices and policies are layered upon them, adding pressure and further solidifying them as they begin to tower above other features of social and scientific landscapes. At the same time, even the most persistent structures are fluid and open to change. Social movements and critical and innovative practices may erode such hierarchies over both long and short timescales. Moreover, examining structures from different angles or perspectives and even spatial and temporal scales has the potential to illuminate new questions for inquiry and understandings about how they function and how they may be eroded.

Importantly, literacy hierarchies are not neutral; rather, they are tied up with power. Sara Ahmed (2017) argues that such hierarchical structures function as institutional walls: “those hardenings of histories into barriers in the present” (p. 135), emphasizing that not everyone encounters literacy infrastructures in the same ways, if at all: “If walls are how some bodies are stopped, walls are what you do not encounter when you are not stopped; when you pass through” (p. 148). In this way, inequitable sedimented landscapes direct flows of activity, such that both hierarchies and flows are functions of power that orient bodies in particular directions: “Once a flow is directed, it acquires momentum …. Once a momentum is acquired, it is directive. You can be carried along by the force of a direction” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 45). In what ways does the LRA community continue to participate in the construction and sustenance of hierarchies that direct inequitable flows? And how are members of the LRA community chipping away at and attempting to redirect these flows and erode inequitable sedimented hierarchies?

In literacy research, methods, theory, and practice, it is essential to understand not only how dominant structures have been and continue to become sedimented within and through literacy research, but also to engage in mapping out new alternatives in the interest of more equitable and humanizing futures. A starting point may be critically attending to existing maps that center already sedimented hierarchies of the field to get a sense of the walls or hierarchical structures that frame the contours of literacy landscapes. However, maps should not be understood themselves as neutral representations of a field; rather, they are ideological artifacts that often function to reinscribe existing hierarchies. de Certeau (1984) understood maps (in noun form) as static artifacts produced from a totalizing perspective or a “God's eye view” (Denzin, 2001, p. 325), whereby everyday stories and mobilities are omitted or erased and “a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 94) are privileged over everyday practices of navigating and producing social spaces. In short, there are no maps outside of mapping (Corner, 1999; Solnit & Shapiro, 2016). The information (borders and contours) encoded on maps is “bereft (through a gradual process of forgetting) of the visible evidence of its own construction” (de Certeau, 1984, as quoted in Reynolds & Fitzpatrick, 1999, p. 68). However, on the ground, in everyday practice, people may tactically transgress and evade the contours encoded in maps (Hunt et al., 2015).

Attention to everyday on-the-ground practices can highlight how people navigate terrain in ways that are not visible on maps produced outside of practice. In cityscapes, as depicted by de Certeau (1984), these navigations may include jaywalking, using underground passageways, cutting down alleyways, etc. These on-the-ground practices are like Ahmed's (2017) notion of flows, which when altered, potentially yield new structures. Seen in the physical world, Hamraie and Fritsch (2019) invite us to consider “disabled people's access-making as a site of political friction and contestation … disability advocates have taken sledgehammers to sidewalks in acts of protest, using bags of cement to pour curb cuts…” (pp. 10–11). The result reshapes accessibility, in this case for wheelchairs, baby strollers, vehicles, and more, redirecting the flow of new practices and new structures. In addition, as Hamraie and Fritsch contend, such access-making involves taking up noncompliant stances and identities toward inaccessible environments resistant to integration into the mainstream—creating space for further storying, narrativizing, and reconstruction of identities. Such practices are examples of critical mapping (Monreal et al., 2024; Morrison et al., 2017; Rogers & Smith, 2019), which involves centering and collaborating in solidarity with those who have encountered and navigated inequitable walls as well as understanding how people and communities may tactically create alternative pathways, or even reinscribe dominant flows.

Overview of the Volume

The articles in this volume include work that involves (re)mapping sedimented and shifting terrains and offer glimpses into how students, teachers, teacher candidates, teacher educators, and researchers navigate landscapes of practice. The acceptance rate for papers submitted to Volume 73 was 20.8%: 48 manuscripts were submitted and sent out for peer review, and 10 advanced toward publication. Additionally, four articles, extending from invited sessions and awards at the annual conference, including a Conference Summary, Presidential Address, Integrated Review Panel, and the Student Outstanding Research Award, appear in this volume. We encourage readers to begin with Alfred Tatum's conference summary. Tatum presents the conference's theme in relation to the previous year's conference and the challenges ahead for LRA members to place the children, families, and communities we serve as literacy researchers and educators in the highest regard while disrupting hierarchies that function to erode and erase some communities’ literacy practices and lived experiences. He then offers overviews of conference events, including invited addresses and award presentations.

The peer-reviewed articles in this volume begin with research by Giunco, Smith, and Wargo, who examine how five inservice teachers positioned themselves, their sociopolitical context, and others while reading “risky” children's and middle-grade literature in a year-long book club. In noting their participants’ hesitancy to challenge dominant storylines, the authors turn their critique onto their own positionalities, calling on literacy researchers to wield their positions of power to partner with teachers in the use of risky texts to confront and rewrite the storylines that constrict teachers’ curricular choices within their contexts of practice. Shifting the lens toward multilingual family book clubs, Hao illustrates the ways in which six Chinese American parents shape their children's cultural knowledge and reading experiences in the context of an online family book club. Hao offers insights regarding parents’ negotiation of the texts, language practices, and what cultural knowledge to share (or not share) with their children.

Meanwhile, Wagner turns readers’ attention toward research methodologies, specifically the construct of validity, highlighting the limitations of dominant and monolingual ways of understanding validity in language and literacy research, and exploring alternative conceptualizations of validity that are responsive to multilingual research landscapes. Lammert, Tondreau, Chen, Hylton, O’Brien, and Yang also offer key methodological insights. They employ a multi-duo autoethnography as an approach to collectively unpack how teacher educators built racial literacies in their teacher preparation courses. Working in cross-racial pairs to unpack critical incidents that arose while teaching racial literacy to their students, the authors were able to discover the nuances of trauma, harm, and pain inflicted in the process of teaching racial literacy. In turn, the authors demonstrate how a multi-duo autoethnography can function as a reflective exercise to identify how teachers and teacher educators bring racial literacy into their work.

Turning toward teachers and teacher learning, Xu and Valdez draw on frames of critical consciousness and raciolinguistics to understand Chinese dual language bilingual education teachers’ self-reported classroom language and literacy practices. In doing so, they complicate monolithic portrayals of teachers’ ways of thinking about race, language, and teaching, highlighting how their perspectives are impacted by their lived experiences. Also focusing on teachers’ understandings of their own positioning, Dunham, Alexander, and McDonald analyze the discourse used by 34 preservice teachers to unpack experiences related to reading, writing, and early memories with literacy events. The authors illustrate how such demonstrations of meta-awareness can prepare preservice teachers to be agentic literacy teachers by informing their ability to identify metalinguistic terms, literacy content vocabulary, and instructional moves that may support young learners in future classrooms.

In seeking to support educators in developing critical curriculum cultivation practices, Mertens and Adams explore early-career teachers’ perspectives and practices in the online curriculum marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers. They illustrate how teachers navigated multiple tensions between teaching practice, institutional mistrust, and perceptions of platform authority and altruism. The recognition of how contextual complexities impact teacher decision-making is echoed by Marek and Godfrey, who examine how preservice teachers attempted to engage in culturally sustaining and historically responsive literacy instruction as well as code-based instruction with early and emergent readers. The preservice teachers’ negotiations occurred within a state context requiring code-based instruction grounded in more narrow conceptualizations reflecting the science of reading movement.

For so many, the COVID-19 pandemic generated a seismic shift that required (and continues to require) new ways of navigating and mapping literacy landscapes. Outlaw and Grifenhagen consider how nine primary-grade teachers in a rural context conceptualized and reconstructed dialogic comprehension pedagogy during online, remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to better understand how teachers cultivate and negotiate dialogic literacy practices in locally and culturally responsive ways. The volume concludes with Goode, MacGillivray, Curwen, Ardell, and Bailey-Tarbett's article, which focuses on a professional development effort to support teachers’ system thinking through mapping. They found the literacy practice of systems thinking mapping contributed to teachers’ pedagogical reflection on humanizing curricula, and fostered collective understandings of systemic forces and hierarchies at play in society and education, as well as collaborative learning relations among teachers.

Across the articles in this volume, readers will find those that push the literacy field to critically examine existing hierarchies, as well as those that turn readers’ attention to how individuals and communities on the ground navigate and disrupt dominant flows within literacy landscapes. We encourage readers to attend to such flows and counter-flows and to continue building new pathways in the interest of constructing “a more humanitarian research architecture that binds” (LRA Conference Program, 2023, p. 4).

Updates and Acknowledgments

Given the success of the Friendly Review Program in the previous years, as editors, we continued this initiative for Volume 73. The Friendly Review Program seeks to strengthen submissions to the volume by pairing first-time LR:TMP authors with scholars who have previously published in the journal, have published broadly in the field, and/or have key expertise in the area of the submitting author(s). We circulated a call for prospective authors and friendly reviewers and were pleased by the response. Fifteen scholars volunteered to serve as mentors and we matched them with 13 authors or author teams. We are grateful to all the authors and mentors who participated in the Friendly Review process.

We also thank the 219 scholars who volunteered, and 141 who contributed their time and expertise to reviewing manuscript submissions. In many ways, reviewers form the backbone of peer-reviewed journals such as LR:TMP, and we appreciate their commitment to this work. We also especially want to highlight the exemplary work of Lead Editorial Assistant, Viraj V. Patel, whose impressive and proactive attention to detail, professionalism, collegiality, and critical care were indispensable as he collaborated and communicated with co-editors, authors, reviewers, SAGE, and LRA.

We additionally thank our co-editors whose careful reading, dedication, and scholarly insights made this volume possible: Christie Angleton, Evelyn Baca, Becky Beucher, Carolyn Hunt, Andrea Jamison, Sara Jones, Sonia Kline, Deborah MacPhee, Erin Quast, Sarah D. Reid, Irenea Walker, and Autumn West. We also wish to recognize our institution, Illinois State University, for the material support to make our editorship for this journal possible. Thanks also to Melody Zoch and the Publications Committee, for their support of the journal. We are also grateful to Lauren Bauman and Asha Askoolam of SAGE Publications for guidance and problem-solving as we transitioned into our editorship, and Nishanth Uthirakumar and team for their collaboration in the final production and distribution of this work. Lastly, special appreciation goes to LRA leadership, including President Doris Walker-Dalhouse and President-Elect Alfred Tatum for their important contributions to the conference and this publication.

It has been our honor to serve the Literacy Research Association as coeditors of LR:TMP, Volume 73. We look forward to continuing to serve LRA and the wider field of literacy research and practice. We are proud to share the excellent scholarship included in Volume 73 and invite readers to consider how the ensuing articles support novel perspectives and innovative practices as we continue to seek ways to disrupt hierarchies, break down walls, and build new research architectures.