This manuscript is comprised an address made to the Literacy Research Association about future directions for issues we continuously debate. Several important issues for future reading research are identified. First, a single definition of dyslexia that is shared across professions is needed. Currently, at least four distinct definitions are used by different groups of scholars, prompting different frameworks for research studies and for interpreting said research. Second, the development of word decoding is often studied in isolation from other essential skills in learning to read, allowing the debate over the pre-eminence of phonics to continue. Until we develop a better understanding of how decoding abilities work in concert with the other skills needed by beginning readers, we will largely continue debating the wrong issues. Third, more attention is needed on the influence of volume in reading development, although existing evidence suggests that how much children read is a central component in early literacy growth.
This integrative research review panel examines how literacy researchers can cultivate more productive scholarship by working across, between, and against the methodological and theoretical boundaries that have traditionally organized our field. Each paper takes up a different dimension of this challenge. Jang introduces Critical Quantitative Research (CritQuant), Quantitative Critical Race Theory (QuantCrit), and Critical Quantitative Literacy (CQL) as reflexive frameworks for reading numerical data with the same critical attention literacy scholars bring to other texts, arguing that quantitative methods can serve justice-oriented aims when researchers interrogate the assumptions, categories, and interpretive frames built into their data. Wickens draws on queer theory and third space to trouble the fixed boundaries of academic disciplines, illustrating through three research projects—spanning postqualitative research and linguistics, physical education and literacy integration, and postpandemic educational theory—how working in disciplinary interstices opens new analytical possibilities that bounded fields foreclose. Townsend navigates the tensions inherent in intervention research with multilingual adolescents, demonstrating through Project SPARK how reflexive tools drawn from QuantCrit and related frameworks can help researchers honor students’ linguistic resources and identities while maintaining the methodological rigor needed to inform scalable instructional practice. Taken together, the three papers make a shared case for methodological pluralism—not as eclecticism or compromise, but as a principled stance that treats the spaces between our methods, theories, and disciplines as generative sites for more equitable and more accountable literacy research.
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes embedded in everyday literacy practices, pre-service teachers (PSTs) must decide what work remains distinctly human in AI-mediated meaning-making. This qualitative case study investigates how PSTs enact boundary work with generative AI during a semester-long literacy ethnography. Drawing on Nexus Analysis and digital trace data from Google's NotebookLM, I analyze moments of agency, refusal, and ethical judgment within the human–AI evaluative loop. Findings identify two contrasting interaction profiles, the Orchestrator and the Outsourcer. Orchestrators retained epistemic authority by repeatedly constraining, correcting, and re-authoring the AI system's output, while Outsourcers delegated organizational and interpretive work to the system early and accepted its framing with little revision. These differences in how PSTs worked with the AI system were visible only through process-level analysis of interaction traces, as the final artifacts appeared deceptively similar. The study reconceptualizes human-in-the-loop as an interactional literacy practice rather than a technical safeguard. Implications highlight the need for teacher education to design “loops worth living in” that normalize productive friction and professional refusal, ensuring AI amplifies rather than replaces human judgment.
Creating just educational systems requires disrupting how power operates in literacy teacher education programs and attention to preservice teacher (PST) agency. This study is grounded in literature concerned with PST agency, particularly in coaching interactions. Data consist of one empathy conversation, a dialogic coaching tool used to disrupt coaching hierarchies and center participant stories. We draw on positioning theory to ask: (1) How does a PST demonstrate agency in an empathy conversation? (2) How do empathy conversations disrupt traditional coaching norms? Utilizing conversation analysis and an analytic framework of agency, we show agency in a PST's telling of her own schooling history and current experiences. She co-constructs critiques of social structures with the field supervisor (FS), conveys key moments of choice in her story, and names systemic inequities. The structure and invitation of the empathy conversion allowed space for these agentic moves and extends beyond the limitations of lesson-focused coaching to foster dialogue about the dyad's lived experiences and educational systems. Implications include the potential to further explore how PST agency can emerge in coaching conversations.
This qualitative case study examines how a multimodal translanguaging pedagogy shaped emergent bilingual children's biliteracy engagement in a community-based Korean heritage language classroom. Although heritage language classrooms support language maintenance, monolingual expectations can limit children's use of the linguistic and semiotic resources they draw on in their bilingual lives. Responding to this tension, I designed and implemented a 10-module curriculum that integrated Korean language and cultural learning with multimodal meaning-making and flexible bilingual language use. Grounded in a translanguaging perspective on literacies and a sociocultural view of biliteracy, the study draws on classroom videos, children's artifacts, a teacher reflection journal, and parent questionnaire data. Findings show that multimodal task design expanded children's entry points into biliteracy participation by positioning drawing, talk, gesture, material construction, and bilingual text as legitimate literacy resources. Bilingual materials and teacher mediation fostered cross-linguistic awareness by inviting children to notice, compare, and explain relationships across Korean and English. Identity-centered tasks also repositioned the classroom as a translanguaging space where children represented their multilingual, cultural, and transnational lives. The findings contribute to translanguaging and biliteracy scholarship by showing how flexible language practices can be pedagogically organized and how biliteracy engagement can be understood as multimodal and bilingual meaning-making.
