Openings

Abstract

Dear JAAL Readers, We would like to welcome you to Volume 60 Issue 1. We chose Openings as this issue's theme because it is the inaugural issue under our editorship. The metaphoric value of the word openings also appealed to us as an apt description of the content that we've assembled for this issue. The authors of the commentary, feature articles, departments, and text and resource reviews opened doors for us to fresh ideas about how literacy research and practice inform and enrich each other. Before we share more about the contents of this issue, we would like to introduce ourselves. We are long-time literacy professors at Syracuse University. Between us, we have worked in middle school, high school, and adult education settings. We currently teach literacy education courses to undergraduate and graduate students, conduct research, and collaborate on varied literacy initiatives in our community. We know the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (JAAL) well and see it as essential to our work, to the field, and to the International Literacy Association. Between us, we have reviewed for this journal or its predecessor, Journal of Reading, for 25 years, and we have published 11 articles in its pages. It's our favorite source of practical pieces to share with students and school and community collaborators. We're humbled by the opportunity to steward the journal, especially given our illustrious editorial predecessors. As editors, we hope to open rich and sustained conversations among all of us in the JAAL community. One component of our vision for the journal is to feature literacy research and pedagogy promoting more equitable outcomes for all learners, including traditionally underserved populations. To that end, we are excited about our first invited commentary, “Literacy Education and Disability Studies: Reenvisioning Struggling Students,” in which Kathleen Collins and Beth Ferri challenge standardized representations of students’ literacy and argue, instead, for practices that support all students’ multifaceted literacy learning needs. The feature articles in this issue offer innovative responses to Collins and Ferri's challenge. In “The Reliability and Validity of Peer Review of Writing in High School AP English Classes” and “Digital Curation: A Framework to Enhance Adolescent and Adult Literacy Initiatives,” Christian Schunn, Amanda Godley, and Sara DeMartino, and Sue Ann Sharma and Mark Deschaine, respectively, describe quite different ways to use online tools to support collaborative construction of meaning around classroom texts. Jie Park's “‘He Didn't Add More Evidence’: Using Historical Graphic Novels to Develop Language Learners’ Disciplinary Literacy” and Susan Sandretto and Jane Tilson's “Complicating Understandings of Students’ Multiliterate Practices With Practitioner Inquiry” present compelling cases for expanding the kinds of texts that we invoke in classrooms. Christina Berchini recommends examining how teachers’ (and publishers’) framings of such texts position both teachers and students in “Curriculum Matters: The Common Core, Authors of Color, and Inclusion for Inclusion's Sake.” Daniel Siebert and his large, multidisciplinary team of collaborators suggest a new twist on “Characteristics of Literacy Instruction That Support Reform in Content Area Classrooms.” In “Flipped Professional Development: An Innovation in Response to Teacher Insights,” Brooke Hardin and David Koppenhaver outline a flipped professional development model that could make it easier to do the kind of work that Siebert and colleagues advocate. We selected our department editors because we expected them to open up new ideas for practice in secondary and adult literacy contexts, and they do so in their first contributions. Kristien Zenkov is editing the department that we're calling Partnership Literacies, and this month, he and his coauthors, an array of collaborators who include veteran practicing teachers and preservice teacher candidates, describe the key principles and practices associated with Through Students’ Eyes, his long-time, shared research project. Michael Manderino and Jill Castek are coediting Digital Literacies for Disciplinary Learning with a call to examine the reciprocity of disciplinary and digital literacies. In the department called Unlocking Literacy Learning, Evan Ortlieb and Yolanda Majors offer “Starting Over One Word at a Time: Useful and Dangerous Discourses” to remind us of how our literacy rhetoric can either invite students to participate, or discourage them from doing so. Donna Alvermann and Colin Harrison are managing our Policy and Practice Remix department, contributing insights in alternating issues. In this issue, Alvermann discusses what a remixing perspective offers to help us understand recent policy shifts, such as the passage of the new U.S. Every Student Succeeds Act, reminding us of how educational policy is “blowin’ in the wind.” We continue the JAAL tradition of presenting a Text & Resource Review Forum in each issue. We invited editors for each forum section who would open us up to provocative possible uses of print, graphic, and multimodal texts and resources to share with students and colleagues, and our editors did not disappoint us. In his Challenging Texts column, Antero Garcia explains the three ways that the reviews in his column will consider texts’ content, form, and interpretation, as well as their possible uses by students. Stergios Botzakis, the editor of Visual and Digital Texts, invited Jason DeHart to review three Web-based tools focused on imagery and image manipulation, with implications for English language arts classrooms and beyond. Lalitha Vasudevan and Kristine Rodriguez Kerr, coeditors of the Professional Resources column, review Unflattening, Nick Sousanis's argument about the relationship of words, images, and knowledge, communicated entirely as a graphic novel. We would also like to share some thoughts that we've had since beginning to adjudicate JAAL submissions a few months ago. We are grateful to those who have submitted manuscripts. We have newfound appreciation for submissions that make their significance clear to our readers and are friendly for an audience craving practical insights and critiques to help them stay true to their beliefs about literacy instruction. We realize anew that crafting submissions that are well theorized, research based, novel, and practical can be difficult. This insight has sparked even more of our admiration for the work featured in this and upcoming issues. We look forward to reviewing more of your efforts. We hope that the articles in this issue open your thinking in the same ways that they did ours. Please join the JAAL group on the International Literacy Association’s Facebook page and join us there for ongoing conversations about these authors’ ideas and your ideas for moving the field forward with this journal. Best, Kelly and Kathy