Search

A literacy researcher and teacher educator advocates for teaching transnational and racial literacies in the English language arts classroom., Schooling has always positioned the discipline of English as an educational first responder to changing or troubled times (Applebee, 1974; Elbow, 1990). As well, across history, young people have typically [...]

At the final session of the 2022 Literacy Research Association Conference, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Marcus Croom, Mary McVee, and Allison Skerrett presented critical work related to equity, representation, and race in literacy scholarship. Panelists shared concerns and pursued a shared goal. Specifically, as literacy scholars, they recognized that like the empirical research conducted in classrooms and communities, review scholarship--scholarship that aspires to make sense of large bodies of available research--is always subject to systemic biases, privileging, and racism. In this panel session, we intentionally sought to dismantle biases through four review-oriented projects that--each in its own way--attempts to counter the systemic whitewashing that has characterized review scholarship in literacy.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading aims to measure reading comprehension for students in the United States and to monitor progress in our education system. NAEP Reading is developed based on an assessment framework document that is periodically revised to reflect the latest understandings about reading comprehension and its assessment. A key goal of the Visioning Panel (VP) and the Development Panel (DP) charged with updating the NAEP Reading Assessment Framework for 2026 was to lay the foundation for an assessment that made progress toward greater fairness, equity, and validity. In this essay, we discuss how the Framework development process unfolded and its results. We document the unusual ways the National Assessment Governing Board ("the Board") shaped the development process. We provide evidence that a small group of Board members aimed to preserve the status quo in reading assessment by downplaying reliance on expertise and authoritative sources of research on reading, learning, and assessment and by removing attention to equity in NAEP Reading. We also discuss both successful (i.e., approved by the Board) and unsuccessful (i.e., rejected by the Board) recommendations for changes to the 2026 Framework that initially were proposed by the DP. We end by considering how, despite the efforts of the small group of Board members, we as a literacy field can improve the nature and impact of our large-scale reading assessments, and NAEP in particular.

This article undertakes a textual analysis of an autobiographically informed novel, "American Street," to analyze the process of identity formation of a Black Haitian immigrant youth in the United States. Black immigrant youth remain an understudied demographic in literacy research compared with their Latinx and Asian immigrant counterparts. The goal of this analysis is to provide insights into the role of languages and literacies for Black immigrant youth in (re)constructing their identities in nations like the United States. Analysis revealed the significance of one youth's resistance to raciolinguistic ideologies, reliance on her Haitian faith literacies, and deployment of multiliteracy practices in (re)constructing her identity. We call for increased research that illuminates the complexity of the language and literacy processes involved in Black immigrant youth's negotiations with identity in new homelands, and offer textual analysis as an underutilized but promising inquiry method for generating such knowledge. The article also offers pedagogical implications.

Reading teachers and teacher educators are the latest to blame in public discourse for reading failure in the United States. In March 2019, Pearson Education released the draft of the Science of Teaching Reading Examination Framework for Texas, and the state's teachers and teacher educators were called on to revise courses and programs in alignment. In this article, the authors provide an overview of the narratives drawn on to position teachers and teacher educators as struggling and the partiality of these narratives from our perspective as both professionally responsible and anti-racist educators. The authors present three counterstories that exhibit how teachers and teacher educators are exceeding the expectations of the framework by foregrounding more complex, social justice-focused perspectives on readers and reading. The authors argue for the inclusion of professionals using anti-oppressive and contextualized professional knowledge and practices to move the field forward.

This article discusses some educational issues introduced by the uprise of transnational students in global educational systems. It demonstrates the relevance of these issues for the field of educational change, in particular, topics of diversity and globalization that are in need of greater attention in the Journal of Educational Change. The article presents a recent conceptual and empirically-based framework--a transnationally-inclusive approach to literacy education. This framework provides a model through which educational systems and those who inhabit them can equitably and innovatively respond to the opportunities and challenges that transnational students present to education. The article concludes with some considerations of how the field of educational change is uniquely poised to generate research, theory, and practice that can promote productive change pertaining to transnational students and education.

Background/Context: Immigrants are described as somewhat fixed in their geographical locations and activities in the world, having made a permanent move from their nation of origin to a new homeland. In contrast, transnational people are defined as those who live their lives across two or more nations and hold strong, multiple attachments to their nation-states. Frameworks of race are often centered in studies of the language and literacy practices of immigrant youth while transnational theories are typically prioritized in studies of transnational youths' language and literacy practices. Research Questions/Participants: This article explores extant research on the language and literacy practices and experiences of Black immigrant and Black transnational youth of Caribbean origin for whom the U.S. is a home. The purpose is to uncover similarities, differences, and nuances that may exist between the language and literacy practices and experiences of these populations. Research Design: The extant research was analyzed through theoretical concepts such as micro-cultures, ethnoracial assignment and ethnoracial identity, raciolinguistics, and language and literacy as social practices. Findings: Literacies prominent for both Black immigrant and Black transnational youth include reading, writing, the performing arts, and digital literacies. Analysis found that Black immigrant and Black transnational youth, through their language and literacy practices, undertake significant work in deconstructing Blackness as a monolithic racial category. The youths' motivations for language and literacy use and transformation are conceptualized as efforts to make visible multiple ethnoracial identities and micro-cultural practices within an overarching racial category of Blackness. Analysis further found that Black immigrant and Black transnational youths' experiences with racial, cultural, and linguistic discrimination lead many to subsume their original linguistic and literacy practices beneath the language and literacy practices of dominant ethnoracial groups in their new nations. In the case of Black transnationals, analysis found that they hold thick bonds to their countries of origin and new nations. Further, some transnationals have opportunities to spend extended time and employ their culturally influenced languages and literacies to a fuller degree in nations that hold appreciative perspectives on these repertoires. Such circumstances appear to promote Black transnationals' abilities to continue developing and valuing their unique ethnoracial identities and ethnoculturally diverse language and literacy practices. Analysis further found that the multiple language and literacy practices of many Black immigrant youth are motivated by their longings to belong to diverse communities and connect to multicultural groups. However, these desires of youths' were not oriented solely toward their new nation-states. Rather many Black immigrant youth actively seek out connection and consolidation of their homelands of origin and their new nations through language, literacy, and cultural practices. Analysis confirmed that this is a primary motivation for language and literacy development and use in transnational youth. Conclusion: This article challenges the binary categories of immigrant and transnational using the cases of Black youth of Caribbean origin and their language and literacy practices. Its findings call for a more dynamic reconceptualization of the relationships among racial, immigrant, and transnational youth identities, literacies, and languages. Given the similarity of goals in the identity, language, and literacy practices of Black immigrant and Black transnational youth, this analysis argues that literacy research knowledge about Black immigrant youth can be enhanced by applying transnational as well as racial frameworks. Likewise, the article proposes that given the similarities of language and literacy goals, practices, and experiences, including racial and ethnic discrimination, shared by Black immigrant and Black transnational youth, future literacy research can undertake more explicit investigations of transnational youth's experiences through racial frameworks. The article suggests that knowledge of this kind can support scholars and educators in theorizing and designing educational spaces and curricula that enable all youth, notwithstanding their self- or other-assigned racial or sociopolitical categorization as native-born, immigrant, or transnational, to actualize while critically analyzing, the full range and diversity of their identities, languages, and literacies.

This article draws from an ongoing longitudinal qualitative inquiry into the preparation and development of social justice-oriented urban English teachers. It examines the cases of three graduates of an urban education-focused teacher preparation program who claim different intersectional identities and have completed their fourth year as urban educators. The article explores two research questions. First, how do these teachers understand and enact critical education practices within their curriculum and instruction, socially situated relationships, and institutional structures? Second, how do they experience and understand their sociocultural identities as contributors to their practices as critical educators and the associated outcomes? Two findings are discussed. First, the teachers felt greatest agency and success within their classrooms (in comparison to other institutional spaces) to enact social justice-oriented curricula, instruction, and other educational practices, using relationship-building with students as the foundation of their work. Second, identity constructs of gender, age, and race significantly mediated the teachers' relationship-building efforts with colleagues and administrators, the teachers' feelings of agency, and their activities and outcomes related to justice-oriented change at institutional levels beyond the classroom. This study contributes a rare longitudinal example of how in-service critical educators' sociocultural identities impact their literacy pedagogies and institutional efforts to advance educational justice.

In this article, I use the process of self-reflection to examine how my biography influenced my teaching experiences in a particular school context. Drawing on these experiences and the work of scholars in this area, I contend that such self-knowledge is critical for teachers' successful socialization and retention in diverse schooling environments. I conclude by offering suggestions for reconstructing teachers' preparation and socialization to foster a stance of critical self-reflection on teaching and learning that includes reflecting on how biography shapes the teaching experience in given schooling contexts.

This article explores how racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity are addressed in secondary English curriculum policy in Massachusetts, U.S.A. Data are analyzed through theories of the sociology of knowledge and the myth of the United States melting pot. Analysis revealed that curriculum policy privileged Eurocentric literature and the English language and adhered to a melting pot ideology. The article considers how the international educational policy movement toward post-standardization may afford greater responsiveness to diversity. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)

This article examines an adolescent's music literacy education across Caribbean and U.S. schools using qualitative research methods and theories of multimodality, transnationalism, and global cultural flows. Findings include that the youth's music literacy practices continuously shifted in response to the cultural practices and values of the physical geographies in which he alternatively lived; however, transnational movements combined with extended physical sojourning contributed to the youth's development of progressively generative perspectives about the potential of U.S. contexts for building his music literacies and a correspondent constraining view on Caribbean geographies for his music literacy development. Amid an abundance of research on the significance of online worlds to transnational youths' identity and literacy development, this article contributes insights into how formal literacy education physically experienced within and across nations shapes the nature of literacy learning.

This article explores the processes of religious identity development in a Caribbean-Chinese adolescent who is from a multifaith, multilingual home. Findings include (1) the youth developed a Christian religious identity through his multiple situatedness within home and school worlds that privileged that faith and the dominant language of English with which it was associated and (2) the youth's limited knowledge of his mother's Chinese languages was associated with his limited exploration of an additional religious faith within his home. While previous links have been established between youths' religious and cultural identities, this analysis submits the significance of language in religious identity development.

This article discusses the evolving perspectives on literacy in the field of education, particularly in relation to student narratives. While there has been progress in recognizing the importance of student agency and authenticity in writing, the article highlights that reductive views of literacy still persist, especially when it comes to racially minoritized and neurodivergent populations. The studies presented in the article demonstrate the negative consequences of narrow views of writing and emphasize the need for teachers to expand their understanding of literacy by incorporating testimonial genres and digital literacy practices. The article also calls for curricular and instructional resources that support writing instruction aligned with Common Core standards. Additionally, the article explores the empowering effects of testimonial and narrative genres on student writers, particularly in terms of centering community narratives and challenging dominant narratives. The studies also shed light on the potential harm caused by deficit views of dyslexia and the importance of critical perspectives on neurodivergent learners. Finally, the article highlights the role of digital literacies in empowering immigrant youth to resist dominant raciolinguistic perspectives and develop affirming narratives of self. Overall, the studies presented in the article emphasize the importance of expanding teachers' views of literacy and embracing diverse literacy practices to promote meaningful storytelling and challenge hegemonic narratives. [Extracted from the article]

This article uses case study methods and theories of literacy as social practice to explore how an adolescent developed her religious identity and religious literacies in relationship with more secular identities and literacy practices across multiple social contexts. It further examines how the youth engaged her religious identity and religious literacies concomitantly with other identities and literacy practices for developing and displaying academic identity and academic literacies in school. In so doing, the article offers important theoretical understandings and pedagogical implications relative to the potential of religious identity and religious literacies in the education of increasingly diverse urban school populations.

In this commentary, the author examines some contributions of the New London Group's theory of a pedagogy of multiliteracies, as well as recent critiques of how this framework has been applied in literacy research and instructional practice. She draws on her research with transnational youths--young people who claim multiple national affiliations and maintain significant ties to two or more countries--to facilitate this analysis. The author's goal is to offer some possibilities for redesigning uses of a pedagogy of multiliteracies to better illuminate dimensions of literate activity, such as pleasure, that are sometimes obscured in classroom life. Redesigned instruction would prioritize building authentic and caring human relationships across difference and affinity, stretching out time for enjoyment of learning processes and activities, and pursuing literacy objectives that students and teachers agree on as valuable.

This paper explores how a preservice teacher defined, experienced, and transacted with multiple professional communities in becoming a social justice-minded urban English teacher. It extends research on urban teachers and professional communities by arguing that professional community in relation to urban teachers must be informed by sociopolitical understandings of community. The paper undertakes such retheorizing of professional community by drawing upon and combining Wenger's ("Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity," Cambridge University Press, New York, 1998) work on communities of practice and Collins' ("Am Sociol Rev" 75:7-30, 2010) conceptualization of community as sociopolitical terrain. Applying this reconceptualized notion of professional community, the paper describes and analyzes how the preservice teacher became increasingly adept at critically analyzing and engaging, creating and transforming, his professional communities to achieve greater justice in urban education.

In this article, I draw on theories of generativity and multiliteracies pedagogy, as well as research on youths' language and literacy practices and development that are framed by a multiliteracies lens, to outline approaches to literacy education that draw upon, as well as strengthen, students' existing language, literacy, and cultural repertoires while assisting youths' development of new knowledge and capabilities that are advantageous to living and learning in diverse societies. These approaches involve students and teachers investigating the language and literacy practices in students' lives; and reading, composing, and analyzing multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal texts.

This article examines how a literacy teacher and her students engaged students' Christian religious literacies in a secular classroom and the outcomes of those transactions. Case study methods; scholarship offering historical, cultural, and social perspectives on Christian religious literacies; and the New London Group's theory of a pedagogy of multiliteracies assisted this investigation. Three findings are discussed: First, the teacher's pedagogy of multiliteracies, in recruiting students' entire cultural, linguistic, and multiliterate repertoires for academic learning, also drew on students' religious literacies for teaching and learning in school. Second, students, with their teacher's support, recruited their religious literacies for analyzing and understanding secular literature and for producing academic writing. Third, religious literacies in the classroom produced tensions, which the students and teacher navigated by emphasizing a shared value of human empathy and their shared commitment to classroom community, pursuing understanding of one another's perspectives, and seeking underlying commonalities of different, or differently articulated, religious beliefs. This research contributes more robust understandings of the role of religious literacies in the lives of an increasing demographic of culturally and linguistically diverse youths.

This article describes an adolescent's development of multiliterate and multilingual writing practices and identities. It further explores how a literacy teacher enacted a writing pedagogy of multiliteracies that assisted the youth in building writing practices and identities. Data include interviews of the young woman and her teacher, classroom observations, and literacy artifacts produced and used by the adolescent. These data are analyzed using theories of identity, positioning, communities of practice, and multiliteracies. Findings include that the youth developed her writing practices and identities over time and across multiple contexts of multiliterate and multilingual practices. Within and across these communities, the dimensions of apprenticeship, positioning, and recruitment of multiliterate and multilingual repertoires were essential to the youth's development of writing practices and identities. These dimensions were also central to the literacy teacher's enactment of a writing pedagogy of multiliteracies. The article asserts that attending to the processes through which young people develop their multiliterate and multilingual repertoires and identities can assist educators in creating supportive literacy environments for youth. It offers recommendations for literacy scholars and educators in this regard. (Contains 2 figures.)

In this article, we show how two transnational youth, with the instructional support of their teacher, recruited their languages and lifeworlds, particularly their border-crossing experiences, as tools for engaging with school-based literacy practices. We analyze literary texts that the students composed, showing how the students' uses of their linguistic repertoires and experiences of border-crossing enhanced their compositions. Through our study, we seek to contribute a more thorough understanding of the combinations of student agency and teacher support that permit secondary school literacy learning to become a bridge from students' past experience, existing knowledge, and everyday lifeworlds into work that is visible and valued in the world of school. More particularly, we offer border zones as an analytic framework for several dimensions of school literacy work for our focal students, and also as a potentially useful framework for curriculum and instruction. (Contains 2 figures.)

Transnational youth represent an increasing demographic in societies around the world. This circumstance has amplified the need to understand how youths' language and literacy repertoires are shaped by transnational life. In response, this article presents a case study of a Mexican adolescent girl who immigrated to the United States and continued to participate in life in Mexico. It examines shifts in her multiple language and literacy practices that she attributed to transnational life and the knowledge she acquired from transnational engagements with languages and literacies. Data include interviews of the young woman, observations of her in a variety of social contexts, and literacy artifacts that she produced. Research on transnational youths' language and literacy practices and theories of multiliteracies and border crossing facilitate analysis. Findings include that language and multiliteracy practices shift in interconnected ways in response to transnational life and engagements with multiple languages and literacies foster transnational understandings. Accordingly, attending to transnational youths' multilingual as well as multiliterate practices can deepen understandings of how people recruit multiple languages, literacies, and lifeworlds for meaning making. Implications of this work are offered concerning the features of a transnational curriculum that can both draw from and build up the language and literacy reservoirs of transnational youth. (Contains 2 figures and 1 note.)

Personal narratives can be powerful venues for understanding human experiences. In this paper, we tell the story of Lutanyani, a Black South African multilingual teacher and author of supplemental reading materials in a marginalized South African language. Through various word images, we convey the role of language, in particular written language, in Lutanyani's life. For Lutanyani, writing serves as "a healing process" in two ways: (1) as a linguistically empowering venue that affirms and shifts his linguistic identity from outsider to insider, and (2) as a backward- and forward-looking means to reconcile his past and reconstruct a message of hope for intermediate-grade students throughout South Africa. This study has implications for classroom practices in the USA as well as development work in international settings. (Contains 2 notes and 2 tables.)

This article examines how a teacher drew on her urban students' outside-school literacies to inform teaching and learning in a reading/language arts classroom. The following findings are discussed: curricular invitations the teacher offered to students; the teacher's curriculum development process; the relationships between the genres of students' outside-school literacies and those of the school; and the subject positionings taken up by the students and the teacher in the classroom. The article demonstrates how teachers may affirm the out-of-school literacies of urban students and connect these literacies to the formal curriculum, thereby enhancing students' in-school literacy engagement and success. (Contains 1 note.)

In this article, I discuss two areas of Andy Hargreaves' scholarship, teachers' identity and biography and the three periods of educational change spanning the 1960s to 1990s, that have influenced my work as a teacher educator and researcher. I describe research projects, including self-studies, in which I have examined the influence of teachers' identities and biographies on their beliefs and practices of responding to student diversity. I also explore how the topic of teachers' identity and biography are integrated into the courses I teach. Additionally, I describe how I have related the three periods of educational change--a period of optimism and innovation, a period of complexity and contradiction, and a period of marketization and standardization, along with the monocultural restoration--to corresponding policies and practices of responding to student diversity in the US and Ontario, Canada. Finally, I discuss a current project in which Andy and I are exploring core issues related to educational leadership and diversity.

This article examines an ESL English language arts teacher's conceptions of linguistic diversity, literacy learning and her role as teacher in a culturally and linguistically complex classroom. It further examines her processes of learning about, and developing curricular and pedagogical innovations to meet, her students' learning needs. The successes and paradoxes of, as well as constraints to, those efforts are explored. The paper uses Ball's theory of generativity and recent research on effective English language arts instruction in culturally and linguistically complex classrooms to facilitate analysis. It offers some implications for teachers' development of generativity for teaching culturally and linguistically diverse students.

This article examines how secondary English teachers in two racially diverse schools--one in Massachusetts, USA, the other in Ontario, Canada--described their knowledge of and practices for teaching about race and racism. The extent and quality of teachers' racial literacy knowledge and practice were considered in light of the literature on racial literacy, racial literacy instruction, and anti-racist education. Three approaches to racial literacy instruction were identified: apprehensive and authorized; incidental and ill-informed; and sustained and strategic. The paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of teachers' knowledge and skills in order to suggest content and structures for professional development in support of racial literacy instruction. (Contains 1 note.)