Growing Together: Literacy and Agency in an Early‐College Research Collaborative

Abstract

This department explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

Pocket Writing: How Adolescents’ Self-Sponsored Writing Circulates in School

“…Despite the challenges of learning and writing within an inequitable educational landscape, youth writers have often pushed back on normative hierarchies and power relations through their writing, engaged in what scholars have called transformative (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) or collective (Campano et al, 2020) agency. Characterized as change-oriented action people engage in with other actors to transform the world and disrupt deficit narratives and unjust systems (Bertrand et al, 2017; Filipiak & Caraballo, 2019; cf. Gutiérrez et al, 2019), transformative agency has provided researchers and practitioners with a generative lens for understanding agency’s collective and distributed dimensions.…”

Adult Literacy Learners are (Mostly) Missing from JAAL: Rethinking Adulthood, Adult Literacy, and doing Antiracist Research

“…And research makes clear that college students may not be the competent and enthusiastic readers that instructors may wish for (Gorzycki et al, 2020;Hogan et al, 2018;Holschuh, 2019). Thus, research on increasing literacy skills among this population is important Additionally, language learners and multi-lingual college students (especially those who are first in their families to attend) have unique strengths and challenges (Aguilera et al, 2020;Alvarez et al, 2018;Filipiak et al, 2019;Wang, 2017) that should be engaged and understood through research. Obviously, researchers should not need to make an either/or choice about study populations.…”

The Future of the Science of Reading

“…The education of students in U.S. public schools will never be fully theorized or understood without recognizing the contribution of scholars and scholarship that falls outside the largely white, Western great debate between constructivism and behaviorism in a psychology of education based on largely white, Western subjects (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Concepts from sociocultural studies of literacy learning conducted in and with classrooms and communities, such as textual lineages (Tatum, 2009), cyphers (Filipiak & Caraballo, 2019), translanguaging (García & Lei, 2014), transnationalism (Skerrett, 2015), cosmopolitan intellectuals (Campano & Ghiso, 2010), and indigenous literacies (Romero‐Little, 2006), cannot be peripheral to a science of reading. They are not merely vague contexts for brain training or outcomes of early development.…”