Abstract
The articles in this issue push us as a field to question what we typically take as given, how we name the world of literacy around us, and how we might revise our understandings with the benefit of time and experience.
In the age of digital literacies, the phrase “online community” has proliferated to describe the new sorts of spaces that evolve around individuals interacting online. In the article, “What Is an Online Community?: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations,” Grace MyHyun Kim and Brady L. Nash push the field to define with precision what is meant when the phrase “online community” is used, exploring existing definitions and describing three key constructs that should be considered when doing literacy research—spatiality, reliability, and temporality.
Continuing the thread focused on temporality, Mary L. Neville asks an important question about how young people think about time in her article “‘Today Is the Tomorrow You Worried About Yesterday’: Time in Secondary Writing Instruction.” In the context of a writing assignment in which adolescents were invited specifically to attend to their feelings and notice the world around them, adolescents noticed a thread around time and how time passed as they scrolled online or felt time stress related to standardized writing tasks or other pressures.
In the article “Dialogism in Preservice Teachers’ Rationale of Diverse Texts,” Ambyr Rios and Michelle Kwok use the theory of dialogism to explore the rationales preservice teachers provide to caregivers for selecting multicultural children's literature featuring culturally diverse characters. The letters reveal a range of dialogic tensions related to how the preservice teachers described their text selection; they often elected not to explicitly state terms connected to race or oppression, and the authors view these choices as a form of self-censorship related to the preservice teachers’ worries about authoritarian pressures surrounding schools and curricula, adding to our understandings of the current moment and how teachers communicate across school and home spaces.
Finally, Peter Smagorinsky takes on an interesting project also connected to time in “Play, Imagination, Emotion, and Art in Literary Interpretation: Revisiting Old Work Through a New Lens,” in which he revisits a study he and coauthor John Coppock published in 1995 in the Journal of Literacy Research (which was then called the Journal of Reading Behavior) with the benefit of all he has learned in the subsequent years. The original article analyzed the experience of two adolescent girls using interpretive dance to understand a short story, a unique contribution to our understanding of adolescents and Vygotskian concepts at the time. Smagorinsky revisits this work, with the knowledge he has gained over 30 years of experience, to try to better understand the students’ emotions as they worked on their choreography, using tools he has accumulated over time. The old piece is also linked on the article page for the current article. This new work is not a retraction of the prior work but rather a new reflection, a refraction through a new lens, and an addition to what we originally learned from those two girls and their literacy practice.
Taken together, these studies push us to consider the passage of time and how we slow down to understand the world in any particular moment in time. From a social practice perspective, literacy and temporality have always been intertwined. Using these theoretical and methodological prompts, the articles in this issue can support literacy researchers in being more precise and mindful in our work to understand literacy more deeply and broadly across time.