Editors’ Introduction to Volume 74

For the 74^th Annual Meeting, the Literacy Research Association (LRA) membership was invited to respond to the current moment characterized by “consistent systemic legislative and political efforts to thwart achievements in literacy research, pedagogical practices, curricula, diversity, equity, and cultural inclusions” (LRA, 2024, Conference Program, p. 2). Drawing on Congressman John Lewis's invocation to “Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble” (Discover UMES, 2014), LRA President Elect and 2024 Conference Chair, Fenice Boyd, called on the membership to consider what actions literacy scholars are best suited to take by considering,

What research questions, design, and methodologies build capacity, agency, and sustainable literacy development for our participants and our scholarship? …[H]ow might literacy research—and researchers—empower teachers, students, parents/guardians, administrators, and community members to make “good trouble” and assert our right to engage, appraise, and critique oppressive literacy practices that emerge from politics? (LRA, 2024, p. 2).

As we consider the collective message of the articles presented in this volume which responded to this call, we believe it is important to unpack what it means for researchers, educators, and other stakeholders to make trouble, particularly in a current political environment that actively and aggressively seeks to limit definitions of literacy, constrict literacy instruction, and halt initiatives that value diversity, seek equity, advocate for inclusion, and ensure accessibility—an environment in which many researchers and teachers are facing actual and feared consequences for championing multilingual, humanizing, inclusive, and socially just literacy education.

Trouble can simultaneously be understood as action and consequence. In his calls to make good and necessary trouble, Lewis encouraged people to “speak up, speak out, get in the way” (Lewis, 2020, as cited in Cole, 2020) in order to push for changes to society, even in the face of intense consequences, such as going to jail or being labeled a troublemaker (Ray, 2020). While conceptualizing troubling as a form of critical inquiry, Flint and Toledo (2022) observed that “trouble for Lewis, was about both the actions of getting into trouble as well as the process and critical analysis of disturbing the order of things” (p. 730). In this way, getting into trouble was an orientation to life—a way of living that required sustained engagement across time, generations, and borders (Arsenault, 2024).

Similarly, feminist scholars encourage us to think about trouble as entanglements of embodied, lived injustices—as a way of being in the world that is closely related to our identities and positions of marginality and privilege (Butler, 1990; Haraway, 2016). Ahmed (2015) defines trouble as “something we can claim to be…something we do… what we are willing to be in” (p. 180). Within such ontological framings, trouble sets the borders of how society wishes to demarcate social acceptability and difference (Ahmed, 2015). Thus, we learn who we are and what is possible from being in trouble (Ahmed, 2015). Moreover, trouble is not something to be avoided; rather, “staying in trouble” allows us to “make space for more ways to be” (Haraway, 2016, p. 4). For literacy teachers and researchers, such lived experiences of trouble invite expansive views of literacy that enable multilingual, pluralist, humanizing schooling.

Despite its potential, the act of troubling is not always positive or pleasant, and the costs are not the same for everyone. As sites of social reproduction, Lesko (2000) reminds us that “schools are key social arenas for the normalization, surveillance, and control…” (p. xviii). Groenke et al. (2015) further contend that school discourses of normalization, “get unevenly distributed for youth of color. As an example, when youth of color ‘resist’ or ‘rebel against’ the status quo in or outside of school, they become criminals—‘public enemies,’ ‘menaces to society’” (p. 36). We join Flint and Toledo (2022) in asking, “for whom is trouble necessary and for whom is it good?” (p. 737), and we call upon the work of Black feminists to consider how literacy research and education has perpetuated and continues to perpetuate harm in the name of “good trouble” (Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010; Kendall, 2020).

These considerations highlight the necessity of making trouble in community and across differences in thick solidarity (Liu & Shange, 2018). Encouraging a similar, relational view of trouble, Flint and Toledo (2022) assert, “troubling is about how we relate as we live and become together in the world” (p. 728). Similarly, Lewis often referred to such work as acting within “the beloved community” (Discover UMES, 2014), emphasizing the need for unity, respect, persistence, and optimism in the journey toward social justice and equality. Trouble, when taken up with care, can move us closer to equity—but it must be carried with intention, not impulse. Getting into trouble is not merely about disrupting the status quo. The goal is a continued commitment toward a shared responsibility for fostering a pluralistic, multilingual, culturally sustaining, and deeply humanizing view of literacy. It is through this lens that good trouble finds its footing, and through which transformation becomes not only possible, but also inevitable. In this spirit, we encourage readers to consider how the articles in this volume speak to one another and to engage in continued critical conversations in response to the problems highlighted and the possibilities for making good and necessary trouble proposed in these pages.

Overview of the Volume

With our co-editors, we are pleased to share the 74th volume of Literacy Research: Theory, Method and Practice (LR:TMP). The acceptance rate for papers submitted to Volume 74 was 22.9%. Sixty-one articles were submitted and sent out for peer review, with 14 articles advancing toward publication. Six articles, extending from three invited conference sessions and three awards, also appear in this volume. These include the Presidential Address, a Plenary Address, and the Integrative Research Review Panel, as well as the Distinguished Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award, J. Michael Parker Award, and Student Outstanding Research Award. We recommend readers begin reading this volume with Fenice Boyd's Conference Summary. In addition to providing overviews of conference events, including invited addresses and award presentations, and introducing new members of the leadership team, Boyd illuminates the conference theme, highlighting the necessity of liberating literacy policies, practices, and implementations.

The peer-reviewed articles in this volume begin with research that highlights how literacy researchers, teachers, and parents are responding to specific political and legislative efforts to define and control literacy research and instruction. First, Schieble, Hikida, Taylor, Vetter, Hodnett, and Sugarman employ reconstructive discourse analysis to understand public media writing as an impactful form of resistance to oppressive political actions. Learning from one school district leader who used op-ed writing as a tactic to oppose “divisive concepts” legislation, the authors suggest that literacy researchers can support educators and school leaders in sustaining racial justice work through similar reconstructive analyses that make visible the positional and discursive moves that can be employed in resistant public media writing.

Turning toward resistance of specific policies and restrictions in classroom contexts, Murdter-Atkinson, Ranschaert, Ashcraft, and Redding provide an instructive example of how current moves toward censorship and book banning influence preservice teachers’ text selection and literacy instruction in elementary clinical settings. They highlight the complexity and risk preservice teachers face within increasingly politicized and surveilled school contexts, and offer suggestions for equipping preservice teachers to respond to discourses of censorship in ways that foster inclusive and meaningful literacy instruction.

Beauchemin, Somerville-Braun, and Rowe illustrate how two elementary teachers enacted and adapted their literacy instruction for multilingual learners in relation to the Science of Reading (SoR) movement. Drawing on a social literacies perspective, the authors highlight how the teachers were able to resist autonomous perspectives of literacy within SoR curricula. The teachers drew on their professional expertise and agency to effectively make curricular adaptations that centered the assets, needs, and experiences of their multilingual students. Next, Monsivais Diers draws focus to the languaging choices, uses, beliefs, ideologies, and literacy strategies of parents of Latinx bilingual youth in Illinois through the lens of family language policy. The study amplifies these parents’ desires for bilingualism and biliteracy for their children, and criticisms of school-based English language transitional programming, policies, and legislation.

Other research in this volume highlights how literacy teachers and researchers implement culturally sustaining, justice-oriented, critical literacy instruction daily and over time. In a literature review of culturally sustaining literacy pedagogies in elementary classrooms, Dunham, Oti, and Lawton explore how culturally sustaining literacy pedagogies support elementary students’ development of critical consciousness. They identify three dimensions of critical consciousness highlighted in 18 of the 32 reviewed studies: critical self-reflection, questioning dominant norms, and taking critical action. They argue that culturally sustaining literacy pedagogies must evolve to include these dimensions.

Responding to restrictive curriculum mandates and legislative gag policies, which have constrained teachers’ ability to engage students in critical literacy, Salazar and Schroeder use a comparative case study approach to examine how two educators situated in distinct education settings demonstrate resilience and adaptability. They find that through sustained, intentional relationship building, and a range of everyday subtle to overt tactics and practices of resistance, these teachers’ responses to restrictive educational environments exemplify resistance literacies—adapting policy constraints to support students’ critical learning. Next, drawing on critical translingual and posthumanist lenses, Enriquez and Simon offer a vision for multimodal, multigenre, and multilingual reader response to social justice texts. They argue that recognizing the “entanglement of human-nonhuman-beyond-human forces and materials” allows literacy researchers and teachers to understand reader response not as merely an interaction between an individual reader and text, but as dynamic, vibrant intra-action that holds the potential to disrupt deficit conceptions and to challenge reductive literacy education methods and policies.

Restrictive views, policies, and political actions regarding literacy affect people across the lifespan, including in the material conditions of their lives, and in their sense of self as part of communities and across contexts. Taking this up, articles in this volume also consider how individuals author senses of self, assert counternarratives, and resist limited and limiting positioning through multimodal composing. Thakurta and Msurshima draw on DesiCrit and sociocultural literacy perspectives to share how seven South Asian international students engaged in multiple literacies to assert multidimensional identities and to resist ascribed, reductive, racialized identities within a U.S. higher education context. Through participation in an out-of-institution inquiry community, the students dexterously negotiated their on-campus identities and creatively (re)authored selves and institutions. Collaborating with young people in a community organization dedicated to education and advocacy for historically stigmatized, criminalized, and silenced Adivasi (Indigenous) and Denotified Tribal youth in India, Sinha provides a witness to the creativity, resilience, and situated agencies of two young people through their authorial trajectories and counternarratives. Sinha argues that literacy educators and researchers are compelled to seek nuanced narratives for the complex lives of Adivasi, Denotified Tribal, and otherwise historically marginalized youth.

Together, these articles paint a vivid picture of the complexities of enacting culturally sustaining, humanizing, justice-oriented literacy practices and instruction within current sociopolitical contexts in the U.S. and internationally. This body of work indicates that meaningful professional learning is crucial to prepare and support teachers to advocate for equitable literacy instruction. Several articles in this volume explore ways to provide such professional learning opportunities in university courses and public school settings. Lucero and Sullivan describe how 22 undergraduate education majors critically analyzed picture books about current and historical challenges surrounding immigration in the United States. They found that although most students were able to critically identify underlying messages related to immigration, their analyses often lacked critical depth, especially for students who did not have personal lived experiences related to immigration. Lucero and Sullivan conclude that preservice teachers need support within and across coursework to apply critical readings of picture books in ways that may lead to societal action and change. Similarly, Choi and Lee describe how preservice teachers, in collaboration with a local museum, researched the language and literacy practices of multilingual children in their communities. While the preservice teachers improved their understandings of family learning and cultural literacy, they had difficulty connecting new understandings to instructional practice and continued to infuse lessons with deficit perspectives and raciolinguistic ideologies.

Next, del Calvo and Guillotte consider the identities early career social studies teachers take up regarding writing and writing instruction in social studies, and find tensions in the teachers’ senses of self as writers and disciplinary expectations from their secondary and college education experiences. Advocating for culturally sustaining, disciplinary-focused writing instruction, del Calvo and Guillotte call on scholars in social studies, writing studies, and literacy studies to work interdisciplinarily to foreground writing in social studies teacher education and to fine-tune approaches to culturally sustaining, disciplinary writing instruction.

Rounding out the volume, two articles take up the role of collective imaginative acts and futurity in troubling recalcitrant expectations for writing and literacy education. MacGillivray and Curwen look closely at the role of imagination and vulnerability as elements of humanizing writing pedagogies in a university composition and service-learning course for education majors in which university students served as writing mentors, writing alter-ego superhero origin stories with fifth-grade students in an after-school writing club. They found that embracing vulnerability for all parties—faculty instructors, university mentors, and fifth-grade mentees—and imagining alternative futures together supported risk-taking and reciprocity in restorying toward more just and hopeful futures. Wissman, Wilkins, and Tyagita share findings from the collaborative inquiry of the Freedom Dreaming for Educational Justice collective, a diverse group of literacy educators, including both practicing and preservice teachers, mental health counselors, university faculty, and graduate students, who convened in seeking postpandemic, new education futures through imaginative acts. The collective found that the agentive and creative elements of worldbuilding through writing and art attuned the literacy educators toward new possibilities for education and for professional learning, which they contend can be seen as a site for cultivating education freedom dreams through multigenerational art-making toward humanizing practice.

Taken together, the articles in Volume 74 authors model how collective and creative orientations can unsettle what no longer serves the liberating purposes of literacy work. They offer an invitation to engage in good, necessary trouble that inspires action, fosters solidarity, and opens space for transformation.

Updates on LR:TMP Initiatives

As in previous years, our editorial team has facilitated the Friendly Review Initiative. The initiative seeks to strengthen submissions to the volume by pairing first-time LR:TMP authors with more experienced scholars who have a strong publishing record and key expertise in the area of the submitting author(s). With the generous support of many LRA volunteers and eager prospective authors, we were able to match 24 prospective authors or author teams with mentors. These mentorship groups met at or around the time of the conference to support the prospective authors in preparing manuscript versions of their presentations to submit for peer review. We are grateful to all the mentors and authors who participated in the Friendly Review process.

In 2024, our editorship team also launched our public scholarship initiative with the author teams from Volume 73. Because we believe the work of LR:TMP should connect with those whose lives are represented and impacted by literacy scholarship, the public scholarship initiative provides authors an opportunity to collaborate to create multimedia companion pieces of their published LR:TMP articles to be distributed broadly within and beyond LRA, including with educators, parents, youth, administrators, and policymakers. This initiative was taken up in partnership with the Education Now Lab, which Anna Smith leads. Together with Smith, Fikayo Olutomiwa, a graduate assistant in the lab, and Viraj V. Patel, LR:TMP's Lead Editorial Assistant, the authors co-created a range of multimedia pieces, including short videos, policy briefs, carousel photo series, and more. The dissemination of the public scholarship pieces across varied digital platforms extended access to the scholarship in LR:TMP, and enhanced visibility of the work of authors, the journal, and LRA. In these ways, the public scholarship initiative broadens engagement with the field of literacy research and makes educational research more legible to varied audiences. Throughout 2025, stay tuned to the LR:TMP social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky for the Volume 74 series of public scholarship.