Journal of Literacy Research

Although the call for teachers to address the demographic imperative has existed for decades, recently, there has been an uptake of frameworks of multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogies, critical literacy, and others into literacy teacher preparation. In this study, we examine connections that pre-service teachers make as a result of experiences focused on sociocultural knowledge and literacy and barriers they face in building these connections. Areas of connection include examining one’s past; recognizing students’ lives and resources in literacy teaching; considering race, racism, and students’ racial identity; drawing on multilingualism as a strength of students for literacy learning; and engaging actively and inquiring into literacy.

This review of literature highlights the efforts teacher educators and researchers have made over the past 18 years to work toward social justice in secondary English language arts (ELA) preservice teacher (PT) education. Drawing on Dantley and Green’s framework for social justice leadership, we highlight the work that teacher educators have engaged in to support secondary ELA PTs in developing (a) indignation/anger for justice through exploring beliefs about students and themselves, (b) a prophetic and historical imagination through broadening understandings about teaching and learning, and (c) accountability to students and communities through university-to-classroom transitions. We close this article by drawing on this framework to honor what we, as a field, have accomplished while acknowledging the efforts that still need to be made in working toward justice in secondary ELA PT education and, ultimately, in the schools and communities in which our PTs teach.

Today’s world requires attention to all aspects of initial literacy teacher preparation, including how and what preservice teachers learn about the component processes of reading. To address this imperative, a review was conducted of articles published from 2000 to 2018 identified through the CITE-ITEL database (https://cite.edb.utexas.edu) that reported findings related to reading processes and initial teacher preparation. After an inductive analytic process, the authors organize findings into five focus areas: (a) definitions and delimitations of reading processes, (b) studies of preservice teachers’ beliefs about teaching reading processes, (c) research identifying preservice teachers’ knowledge gaps and misconceptions, (d) intervention studies aimed at increasing preservice teachers’ knowledge, and (e) studies detailing the application of knowledge about reading processes into contexts of pedagogical practice. The discussion considers the current gaps in how reading processes and literacy are conceptualized and possible areas of inquiry related to preservice teacher education and reading processes.

This review of empirical research focused on the preparation of writing teachers synthesizes findings from 82 articles published between 2000 and early 2018. The new understandings generated through this analysis are presented in two sections. First, we provide an overview of how the studies we reviewed draw from and circulate dominant discourses of writing, leading to a call for more transparency and clarity on the part of scholars who study writing and writing pedagogy. Then, we explore experiences in literacy teacher education that may shift the writing identities, beliefs, or teaching practices of prospective writing teachers. We position these shifts as being potentially disruptive to the often uninterrupted circulation of powerful discourses in important and generative ways, since the teaching of writing in the 21st century must break from inherited traditions to best prepare writers to use their voices actively and confidently in the world.

This review of literacy education scholarship examines the ways that children’s literature is used as a resource within literacy methods courses in the preparation of preservice teachers (PTs) as transformative intellectuals. The research indicates that the use of children’s literature in literacy methods courses has served two distinct purposes: (a) to engage PTs in learning literacy instructional practices and (b) to engage PTs in building sociocultural knowledge and learning transformative (e.g., culturally relevant) pedagogies. This review is framed by Giroux’s call for educators to disrupt technocratic approaches to instruction. The findings emphasize the importance of using children’s literature with PTs to broaden PTs’ understandings of their future student’s lives, so they might engage in transformative pedagogies as future K-12 literacy educators.

Our goal through this literature review is to report and synthesize the findings from research into literacy tutoring and literacy mentoring in initial teacher preparation. We identified a total of 62 published articles that met our selection criteria. We identified four conceptual areas of focus to organize and represent our findings: (a) the structural and design features of the one-to-one or small-group experiences, (b) preservice teacher learning and growth within the tutorial/mentoring experience, (c) preservice teacher learning and growth beyond the tutorial/mentoring experience, and (d) mediating factors associated with preservice teacher growth. We discuss the challenges and promises for this line of research for transforming teacher preparation through the attention to third and hybrid spaces for mentoring experiences.

In this Insight article, we look across the syntheses in this issue to consider how they help readers notice dominant flows and identify sites for disruption within the field of literacy teacher preparation. We first consider the meaning of disruption with respect to the metaphor of flow. We then identify and discuss possible sites of disruption authors of research syntheses create, providing examples from the literature. Finally, we suggest how research syntheses might be framed and crafted for purposes of disrupting the flows of dominant discourses and power structures in the field of literacy teacher preparation.

In this commentary, drawing from reviews of research on literacy teacher preparation, the authors discuss points of leverage in preparation of literacy educators for deans and associate deans. Categories that leaders might attend to include: mediated field experiences, faculty development, and external reputation.