This qualitative practitioner inquiry examines how preservice teachers (PSTs) and a course instructor navigated California's structured literacy mandates, particularly SB 488's emphasis on explicit, systematic foundational reading instruction, within an elementary credential literacy methods course grounded in culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy (CLSP). Drawing on qualitative surveys ( n = 26), pedagogical documentation, focus groups ( n = 8), and instructor analytic memos, the study examines how PSTs made sense of effective literacy instruction within a policy-aligned course and how equity commitments were negotiated alongside compliance expectations. Guided by decolonial theory, culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy, and sociocultural policy analysis, findings indicate that PSTs increasingly adopted structured literacy discourse as markers of instructional competence, while culturally and linguistically sustaining practices remained peripheral unless explicitly embedded through assignments, rubrics, and clinical modeling. Clinical placements emerged as a key mediating space, shaping what PSTs came to recognize as legitimate literacy teaching. Instructor self-study further surfaced the emotional and pedagogical labor involved in sustaining CLSP within compliance-driven preparation contexts. This study contributes to literacy teacher education scholarship by illustrating how policy is enacted through everyday program structures, including coursework, assessment expectations, and clinical practice, shaping PST instructional identities. Implications point to the need for intentional program design that integrates CLSP into foundational literacy instruction, strengthens university–school partnerships, and supports teacher educators in aligning structured literacy practices with students’ cultural and linguistic assets.
Studies of reading comprehension implicitly adopt assumptions about where textual meaning resides. The field typically frames comprehension as either the extraction of meaning encoded in the text or the construction of meaning through transaction with it. Each view secures something the other gives up: extraction enables evaluation against a shared standard but forecloses interpretive possibility. Construction allows for multiple meanings but dissolves any basis for evaluation. Following Moje's concept of “discourse communities,” we argue that the field needs closer portraits of classrooms where constructive reading is bounded by shared evaluative criteria. We offer such a portrait through an instrumental case study of a second-grade biblical literature classroom: how students comprehend biblical texts in biblical Hebrew, a textual language that they do not speak but rather encounter primarily through writing and commentary. Drawing on four months of teacher research data, we identify three observable stances through which students enacted bounded constructive reading: deference versus agency, factual versus interpretive questioning, and text as obstacle versus text as resource. A sustained student-led debate over whether the biblical characters, Rebecca and Isaac, were married demonstrates how this kind of reading became possible when meaning was anchored in the written text rather than speech. We argue that the literacy practices of the Jewish hermeneutic tradition and the features of textual languages reveal how even young readers can read constructively while remaining disciplined by community-shared criteria, with implications for how the larger field of literacy can conceptualize comprehension and its instruction.
This article advances the concept of civil literacies as a framework for engaging difference and enacting unity in diversity in increasingly polarized educational and social contexts. Drawing on sociocultural and critical traditions of literacy, civil literacies extend beyond conventional understandings of reading and writing to emphasize the relational, ethical, and dialogic practices necessary for sustained engagement across difference. Grounded in the philosophical ethic of Ubuntu —“I am because you are”—this framework positions literacy as both an interpretive and relational practice central to democratic life. To operationalize civil literacies, the article introduces Leadership for Broad-Based Excellence, a practitioner-developed framework that integrates intrapersonal awareness, intentional communication, cultural agility, and constructive conflict navigation within a broader system of organizational alignment. Using a conceptual and practitioner-based approach, the article presents illustrative cases from classroom teaching, professional development, and leadership contexts to demonstrate how civil literacies are enacted in practice. The analysis highlights how structured dialogic practices can transform moments of tension into opportunities for learning, deepen engagement across difference, and foster relational conditions necessary for sustained dialogue. The article concludes by outlining implications for research, teaching, and leadership, and calls for a reimagining of literacy as a relational and ethical practice essential to unity in diversity and democratic engagement.
This ethnographic case study examined a community technology center serving a neighborhood in a Northeastern U.S. city. Drawing on activity theory, this article explored how people, material artifacts, and technology platforms in the center interacted to mediate a variety of literacy practices rooted in the participants’ local community. Data included 70 hours of participant observation as a center volunteer; interviews with staff and patrons; and fieldnotes, flyers, documents, and photographs collected during 6 months of fieldwork. Findings show that the center functioned not only as a site for skills-based literacies related to workforce development, but also as a community hub where local knowledge was mediated through dialogue, physical texts and objects, and digital platforms. Implications highlight the tensions between community-based literacy practices and more autonomous, skills-based literacies, as well as the difficulty of sustaining community literacies that meaningfully evade datafication and surveillance in an increasingly platformized digital landscape.
English Language Arts teaching is increasingly defined by a paradox. Contemporary curricula articulate expansive disciplinary aims such as meaning-making, aesthetic engagement, multimodal literacy and critical participation. Yet teachers are simultaneously required to deliver scripted units of work and narrow pedagogies to prepare students for high-stakes standardised assessments. This paper explores how English Language Arts teachers work to realise the disciplinary intentions when the means of enactment are tightly prescribed. I posit that one resolution lies in how teachers mobilise their professional knowledge bases, including their knowledge-of-self, to interpret, adapt and recontextualise curriculum in principled ways. Building on Shulman's influential model of teachers’ professional knowledge bases, this paper extends the framework by foregrounding teachers’ identities, values, histories and ethical commitments as integral to their work. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives and Bernsteinian theories of recontextualisation, and adopting an epistemological stance that understands teaching as interpretive, relational and identity-inflected, I examine how teachers’ knowledge-of-self underpins their capacity for adaptive professionalism. The paper brings together two qualitative studies conducted in diverse Australian contexts. Firstly, I report on a qualitative study that investigates a Teachers-as-Writers initiative that repositions teachers as literary meaning makers, illuminating how teachers’ re-invigorated writerly identities in turn re-shape curriculum interpretation and classroom practice. Secondly, I examine how an experienced early years teacher working with a school-mandated pre-packaged commercial program enacts adaptive professionalism in phonics and spelling teaching. Both studies draw on interviews, classroom observations, artefact analysis and an abductive analytic logic that moves iteratively between empirical material and theory. Across both studies, findings show that teachers draw deeply on their identities, histories and value positions to make principled judgments to adapt content instruction and pedagogy to their students’ needs.
As literacy researchers, we are grappling directly with issues spanning from censorship of literature and research to legislative bills prescribing how to teach to xenophobic immigration policies. This article shares considerations of methodological practices of resistance across three research projects dealing with such issues. We think across our projects to provide methodological insights toward subjectivity and solidarity in the crafting of literacy research commitments, data collection, and positionality. To make our thought processes and deliberations visible to readers, we share stories from three projects illuminating the ways that the researchers have navigated the realities of authoritarianism within our field of literacy education research through processes of study (re)design, data collection, and participant engagement. We aim to help build knowledge and solidarity in trying times, orienting literacy researchers toward care and solidarity at a moment when authoritarian policies seek to weaken collective resistance.
Educational gag policies and restrictive curriculum mandates have limited teachers’ ability to engage students in critical literacy practices. These policies, which suppress discussions of race, power, and systemic inequality, pose challenges to educators committed to fostering critical inquiry and social consciousness. This study examines how teachers navigate, resist, and transcend these restrictions through resistance literacies, pedagogical moves that disrupt oppressive structures. Using a comparative case study methodology, we analyze the instructional approaches of two educators working in distinct educational settings. Findings reveal that teachers enact resistance literacies through three key strategies: connection, resistance, and transcendence.
This study hopes to contribute to a process of storying, listening, and sharing counter-narratives of Adivasi and Denotified Tribal authors at Muskaan in Bhopal, India. Further on, it hopes to highlight the creative and resilient ways in which the authors engage in the process of composing to assert, imagine, and reconstruct their sense of selves in the world. A hegemonic representation marked by narratives of disparagement, hopelessness, and trauma leaves out what composes the complex personhood and wholesomeness of lives led by Adivasi and Denotified Tribal youth in India. However, in my collaborations with the youth, this study provides a witness to the creative and resilient ways in which the youth engage in the process of composing to assert, imagine, and reconstruct their sense of selves in the world. I draw upon sociocultural literacies, critical literacies, and Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies to assert that it is our political commitment as literacies researchers/educators to pursue nuanced narratives of the complex lives of Adivasi and Denotified Tribal youth, narratives which are unfortunately often silenced in school spaces.
This article is a revised and expanded version of my presidential address delivered during the 74th Annual Conference of the Literacy Research Association. Part biography and autoethnography, I discuss the need to ‘trouble five dark spaces’ that affect the literacy development of black male children and teenagers: (1) bounded research orientations and studies, (2) state and national achievement authorizations in the United States, (3) peculiar dispositions and curriculum orientations, (4) absence of textual lineages and foundational texts, and (5) acquiescence to unnatural literacy hierarchies. Focusing on the challenges and delimits of being bounded, I offer conceptual guidance for exalting the literacy development of black male students in the United States.
In conversation with the abolitionist scholarship of Bettina Love and concepts of freedom dreaming within the work of Robin Kelley, this article explores how literacy educators envisioned new educational worlds through writing and the arts. This study was grounded in the methodologies of practitioner inquiry and a/r/tography. Data sources include artwork, interviews, and artist statements by 14 participants. Our analysis revealed literacy educators envisioned new educational worlds characterized by (1) transcending constraints, (2) sustaining and protecting identities, and (3) offering possibility. We also found participants valued opportunities for professional learning that fostered their identities as artists and allowed them to engage in multigenerational learning. We offer implications for envisioning literacy teacher preparation and professional learning focused on futurity through a freedom dreaming lens, attuned to the arts and to the promise of multigenerational learning.
As teacher educators, we integrated the Family Learning Observation and Analysis (FLOA) project into elementary and early childhood literacy courses to better prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) for the diverse educational landscape of a Southern State. This initiative connects traditional monolingual teacher preparation to the multilingual realities of today's classrooms. The gap underscores the critical need to educate teachers in asset-based approaches and eradicate raciolinguistic bias in their teaching. Collaborating with local museums, the FLOA project enabled PSTs to research the language and literacy practices of multilingual children in their communities. After documenting and analyzing family learning, PSTs were asked to incorporate these insights into lesson planning. Analysis using in vivo and axial coding revealed that while PSTs improved their understanding of family learning and cultural literacy, their lesson plans continued to reflect dominant deficit perspectives and perpetuate raciolinguistic ideologies. These findings highlight the necessity of teacher preparation programs to better prepare PSTs to address ingrained raciolinguistic ideologies and promote inclusive practices. This incorporates critical reflection practices and professional development centered on asset-based and multilingual teaching methods.
Culturally Sustaining Literacy Pedagogies (CSLP) have gained attention for affirming students’ identities and linguistic resources in elementary classrooms. While research has examined CSLP's role in promoting cultural competence and academic success, less is known about how it supports critical consciousness—an essential tool for helping students recognize and challenge social inequities. Given literacy's foundational role in shaping young learners’ perspectives, it is vital to explore how critical consciousness is integrated into CSLP at the elementary level. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic review of 32 studies published between 1995 and 2023. Eighteen engaged with critical consciousness, highlighting three dimensions: critical self-reflection, questioning dominant norms, and taking critical action. These studies demonstrate how classrooms can both affirm identities and develop students’ ability to analyze and resist systemic inequities. As education becomes increasingly politicized, CSLP must evolve to help young learners navigate, question, and transform the world around them.
This manuscript includes abbreviated remarks from the Integrative Research Review panelists at the 74th Annual Conference of the Literacy Research Association.
Crafting imaginative stories can be transformative, offering an alternate view of oneself. When university students wrote alter-ego origin superhero stories and mentored elementary students, they engaged in a range of reflective and authoring practices. These vulnerable acts of being open allowed them to agentively explore their past, present, and imagine a different future. In this qualitative case study, we asked, “What is the nature of vulnerability, agency, and imagination as evidenced in a service-learning composition course?” Undergraduate education majors acted as mentors and wrote alongside fifth graders in an after-school writing club. Rather than tutoring, the mentors focused on recognizing and amplifying the fifth graders’ confidence and talents as writers. During three pre-Writing Club class meetings, three instructors furthered the mentors’ understanding of bias, privilege, and systemic oppression. The instructors’ interactions with university students aligned with a humanist Pedagogy of Vulnerability. Students can continue to learn about systemic inequities through self-reflective and agentive university literacy experiences, including having sustained time and spaces for discussion.
This article explores how “puntos y rayas” (full stops and lines) function as symbolic and structural barriers in education for language-minoritized students. Through autobiographical reflection and classroom cases, the authors show how rigid boundaries around standardized language and raciolinguistic ideologies marginalize students and obscure their rich communicative repertoires. A contrasting example of a translanguaging classroom illustrates how educators can disrupt these boundaries by validating students' full semiotic, linguistic, and multimodal practices. The authors present the case of a teacher who creates translanguaging spaces, enabling students to draw on their full semiotic, linguistic, and multimodal resources to construct knowledge collaboratively. By positioning spontaneous translanguaging as pedagogical, this framework resists deficit views and creates space for sociolinguistic analyses as opportunities for transformation in the classroom. Ultimately, translanguaging offers both a theoretical lens and practical approach for dismantling linguistic barriers and advancing justice in education for minoritized communities.
Censorship and book banning have become contentious but increasingly prevalent issues in the United States. In this study, we examine the tensions preservice literacy teachers encounter when transitioning from a critically oriented teacher preparation program into the complex and frequently politicized environment of public schools. We employed Bakhtinian text mapping to better understand how multiple, and sometimes contradictory, discourses around censorship, book bans, and text selection in schools influenced their instructional decision making. The data illustrate that participants were aware of censorship and book bans at the macrolevel, and this awareness functioned as an influential force in their text selections. Further, the findings highlight participants’ vulnerable status in the overall power structure of schools, influential institutional and social pressures, and lived experiences that are complex and fraught with conflicting messages. Implications point to the need for teacher educators to equip preservice literacy teachers with the skills and strategies needed to navigate this challenging landscape while effectively supporting their students in authentic and meaningful ways.
This study focuses on languaging about nationality in an LGBTQ+-themed literature classroom in a queer-friendly high school in the midwestern region of the United States. It was a blend of ethnography and teacher research in which I constructed and analyzed data that included daily field notes, audio and video recordings of class meetings, audio recordings of interviews with students, documents, and artifacts such as teacher materials and student work. For this article, I asked: How did the high school students in these LGBTQ+-themed Literature courses use language, including written language, to conceptualize nationality, in relation to themselves and the United States? To answer this question, I studied the data that showed us grapple with nationality and nationalism in a context that foregrounded LGBTQ+people. I examined the talk and writing of two students, John and Olivia, who used language, including written language, to conceptualize nationality, in very different, even conflicting, but not wholly incompatible ways. Thus, they did so in ways that left room for change, to varying degrees. Through both wavering and pushing, John and Olivia made space for movement, for change. I argue that it was important to engage in conversations that were, at a particular time and place, more contentious, in a context that foregrounded something less contentious. That we must find the places and times where and when we can be and talk and listen with one another, where and when we can waver, ideologically, and push one another and ourselves.
This case study focused on the bilingual/biliteracy experiences of an adult English as a Second Language (ESL) learner (pseudonym Eric) living in a rural western state in the USA. The purpose of the study was to understand Eric's bilingual/biliteracy knowledge and how it functioned as he developed English language/literacy. The theoretical framework used in the study was student-generated funds of knowledge; this framework informed the methods, analysis, and the findings of the study. The data sources involved a combination of semistructured interviews and artifacts. I used thematic analysis to analyze data from both sources. The findings illustrate how the adult ESL learner generated funds of knowledge through his unique and complex language learning experiences. These findings shed important insights into the potential of student-generated funds of knowledge and how these types of knowledge can be used to develop asset-based pedagogy for adult ESL learners.
