The Metatheoretical Assumptions of Literacy Engagement

A Metatheoretical Model for Analyzing Theoretical Frameworks

To code the central or substantive journal articles for their respective theoretical frameworks, we needed a category system that addressed three criteria: parsimony, generalizability, and applicability. Categorical economy required that we group theories into families. We therefore sought a metatheory of theoretical frameworks that was general enough to be inclusive of the multiple disciplinary domains that have influenced literacy theory and thus literacy research (psychology, literary criticism, educational philosophy, linguistics, etc.). At the same time, we needed a metatheory with sufficiently differentiated categories to justify fundamentally different schools of research design, method, and applied theory. Finally, we hoped for a metatheory that was sufficiently nuanced to distinguish individual theorists who putatively shared a similar paradigm, or even to connect parallel strains of theory in adjacent disciplines. Eventually, we decided we would need to devise a unique categorical model for this analysis, but it was clear from our review of available models that we would not lack for high-quality inspiration to guide us.

For instance, in his treatment of education research philosophies, Bredo (2006b) drew from Godfrey-Smith’s (1996) distinction between internal and external epistemologies and categorized theoretical frameworks according to whether they were about external or internal relations, adding a third category for dialectical-transactional relations. He “adopted this typology because it is broader and simpler than the familiar distinction[s] . . . [and] because it is more abstract, making it possible to handle recent developments under these wider labels” (Bredo, 2006b, p. 5). On this basis, Bredo grouped empiricism, classical and logical positivism, and postpositivism as treating external relations, and rationalism, Kantian empiricism, transcendentalism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism as treating interior relations. He further grouped Hegelian dialectics (particularly regarding the tension between materialist and idealist ontologies), critical theory, and pragmatism as treating dialectical and transactional relations. We admired the simplicity of this typology and the central epistemological distinction underscored by it, but we sought more nuance.

We turned to Koltko-Rivera’s (2004) review of the worldview construct in which he critiqued Pepper’s (1948/1972) metatheory of world hypotheses for its singular focus on causation. However, this focus on causes struck us as particularly useful for reviewing research literatures, their designs, choice of method, and theoretical constructs. Although Pepper’s metatheory has been influential elsewhere (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003; Morris, 1997; Overton & Reese, 1981), we attended less to its well-known typological features and construct of root metaphors than to its core claims about causation. We extrapolated the distinguishing causative assumptions from Pepper’s four major world hypotheses, together with their potential implications for the relationship of form and function in human development (Lerner, 1992; Overton & Reese, 1981), and reassembled these as theories of human agency in literate activity and literacy development. We then applied Bredo’s (2006b) external/internal distinction to the loci of cause and of effect and dovetailed his dialectical/transactional category into our four causes.

The resulting construct (see Figure 1) allowed us to categorize theories of agency and change from psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, linguistics, and educational theory within one of four metatheoretical framework categories: intentional (I), respondent (R), constructed (D), and contingent (G). The primary demarcation of each category is the underlying metaphysical assumption about agentive or developmental causation, particularly the relationship of structure and function (respectively, function directs the emergence of structure; structure enacts function; structure and function are developmentally co-causative; causation is complex/historically situated/dynamic). In addition, the locus of cause and the locus of effect may be either typically internal or typically external per framework.

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Figure 1

Schematic of Four Metatheoretical Frameworks Regarding Causation in Development

Our categories of causative assumption grant us the theoretical coordinates necessary for aligning metaphysical assumptions or themes within or across adjoining disciplines (e.g., respondent generally maps to behaviorism in psychology but also to formalism and New Criticism in literary theory, to structuralism in linguistics, to logical positivism in philosophy, and so forth; see Appendix A for more detailed descriptions of the four main frameworks we drafted). Although traditional framework descriptors seem to indicate assumptions about causation, we found copious examples of atypical causative assumption within these traditional labels, which apparently have allowed individual researchers or research groups useful theoretical wiggle room. This should not be criticized as impiety. If taken too literally as an accurate representation of the world, any metatheoretical framework (or assumption set) would lead a scholar into epistemological grief (Bredo, 2006a).

Data Points and Trends

Our initial Google Books Ngram charts required some thoughtful interpretation. It should be remembered that the term literacy was not used to designate a field of education research and practice until the 1990s. (The first use of literacy in any sense dates only to 1883; “Literacy,” n.d.). Even the phrase English language arts emerged in the corpus only in the 1950s (Squire, 2003; see also N. B. Smith, 1952). For this reason, it is not surprising that phrases that include literacy do not appear before the end of the 20th century, and so we searched multiple alternative terms to locate similar ideas. We substituted literary for literacy and searched similar synonyms for reading, writing, motivation, and engagement to identify phrases that yielded the most use. These were (in rank order, 1800–2008): engaged reading, reading motivation, literary engagement, reading engagement, engaged writing, motivated reading, and engaged literacy.

We found that uses of engaged and engagement were far more common in the 1800s than the 1900s, with a marked interest in literary engagement in the 1830s and engaged writing from 1840 through 1900. The use of engagement dampened in the 20th century, apparently displaced to some extent by the construct of motivation, which emerged in the 1900s, with increased use in the 1920s through 1940s (when engagement, too, saw increased use). Motivated reading, engaged reading, and engaged writing were all evident in the 1920s through 1940s, the heyday of progressive education in the United States. Most striking, the use of all seven phrases in aggregate demonstrated a relative depression from the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, the heart of the Cold War and behaviorist instruction. Thereafter, motivation terms resurged, especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s, until the 1990s, when they were superseded by engagement terms, even as both terms ascended in use toward the present. (We invite readers to recreate these Ngram charts at https://books.google.com/ngrams.)

Tracking the uses of motivation and engagement in literacy journals by year generated generally similar results, with motiv- being the most common stem across the years of publication, from the mid-1960s until the 1990s, at which time engag- became the most common stem, particularly in substantive or central uses (see Table 3, Figures 2 and 3). It was also at this time that both stems increased in prevalence in articles where their use was central or substantive, with a clear upward trend for both.

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Table 3

Journal Articles Rated Central and/or Substantive for Motiv* and Engag* for All Journals by Decade

Decade	All Articles Published in Journals	All Articles Rated Central and/or Substantive for Motiv* and Engag*
		N	%
1960–1969	96	3	3
1970–1979	2,413	27	1
1980–1989	2,960	21	0.7
1990–1999	2,945	61	2
2000–2009	2,567	122	5
2010–2015	1,272	91	8

Note. The journals reviewed included English Education, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Journal of Reading Behavior/Journal of Literacy Research, Language Arts, Reading Research Quarterly, Reading Teacher, Research in the Teaching of English, and Scientific Studies of Reading.

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Figure 2

Prevalence of Motiv- and Engag- in Analyzed Literacy Journals, 1969–2013, From ERIC Search With Motiv- (Black) or Engag- (Gray)

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Figure 3

The Number of Occurrences of the Stems Motiv- or Engag- in the Analyzed Journals, Either as Central and Substantive, or as Trivial and Ancillary

Procedure for Fashioning the Historical Narrative

Drawing on framework histories in psychology and educational psychology, North American philosophy and literary criticism, U.S. reading instruction theory, curricula for literature study and language arts, and literacy education theory, we mapped the succession of terms used to describe dominant frameworks in each of these histories over the past 11 decades, noting evidence of causative assumption. We also noted minor schools of thought in these histories. We then aligned these with our literacy journal and handbook analysis and made connections in particular to what was important for literacy education theory and practice. On the basis of these histories, our coded data set, and our typology of causative assumptions, we crafted the following narrative (see Appendix B for more detail on this process).

Caveats

We must stress that we crafted a historical narrative to determine the utility of our model of metatheoretical frameworks and the validity of common stage theories of theoretical commitment in literacy research. We therefore drew from common scholarly sources for instrumental, not veridical, purposes. We used engaged literacy as an exemplary case, and the metaphysical assumptions we suggest ought to apply equally to other literacy research topics, as well as to related disciplines that have influenced literacy research. Finally, we are describing scholarly, not instructional, practice; we will not parse in detail the debates about models of reading process or “what works” in reading or writing instruction, as current traditions have established.

Intentional Assumptions in Early Literacy Research

By the beginning of the 20th century, reading scholarship was impressively advanced, even as education research was only beginning to take shape. The attention to reading was originally meant not to improve instruction, however, but to fortuitously open a window on what Huey (1908) termed “the most intricate workings of the human mind” (p. 6). Reading was eminently observable, displaying the mind in action. Most of the research had been done in Europe (Huey, 1908), but that would change.

Pedagogical debates in North America about best practice in reading instruction had been ongoing since at least the introduction of Noah Webster’s popular Blue Back Speller in 1783 and his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language in 1806 (Balmuth, 2009; N. B. Smith, 1934/1965; Venezky, 1986). These disagreements ranged variously among advocates of by-the-letter versus whole-word reading instruction, sentence-to-word versus alphabetic instruction, what would become synthetic (letter-to-word) versus analytic (word-to-letter) phonics instruction, and rote oral recitation of texts versus silent reading for meaning and cultural enrichment (Pearson, 2000; Walczyk, Tcholakian, Igou, & Dixon, 2014). Early 20th-century reading researchers began to address these debates with the new experimental methods of functional psychology (Chall, 1967; Monaghan, 2007; Pearson & Hamm, 2005).

Early experimental psychologists produced America’s first standardized literacy tests, including Thorndike’s (1910) handwriting scale and The Gray Standardized Oral Reading Paragraphs (N. B. Smith, 1934/1965). (The founding a year later of the American Educational Research Association was itself a contemporaneous acknowledgment of faith in the promise of education research.) The eventual application of this research was a mixed blessing, however. As Pearson (2010) noted, “when psychologists with their new found scientific lenses were put to work creating cheap and efficient tests for beleaguered schools, the course of reading assessment was set” (p. 283). That course, continuing to the present, would prove surprisingly intransigent to subsequent literacy education research, theory, and models.

Consider, as an example, the debate about oral recitation or word calling from texts versus silent reading for thoughtful interpretation. (We select this debate because we assume that reading for meaning and interpretation is more easily related to motivated student engagement than the practicing of automatic letter decoding of texts to recognizable auditory or visual word forms, as in the primary grades; we do not suggest that the latter is not crucial in reading development.) The new research demonstrated that silent reading produced greater speed and comprehension than did oral reading, prompting Gray (1919) to observe, “The results of practically every investigation of this problem [the widespread use of oral reading] indicate clearly the appropriateness of emphasizing the content of what is read, persistently and consistently [and silently], throughout the grades” (p. 29).

The argument for oral performance may have been complicated by a garbled intuition about the importance of activity in learning and its relation to cognitive development. As noted by Parker (1894), “Many of the grossest errors in teaching reading spring from confounding the two processes of attention and expression” (p. 93). And, as observed by Huey (1908), “The consequent attention to reading as an exercise in speaking, and it has usually been a rather bad exercise at that, has been heavily at the expense of reading as the art of thought getting and thought manipulation” (p. 175). Dewey (1913) observed, “To make the idea of activity effective, we must take it broadly enough to cover all the doings that involve growth of power—especially of power to realize the meaning of what is done” (p. 66). Judd and Buswell (1922) eventually determined that the relative value of oral and silent reading depended on the level of reading development addressed.

Thoughtful interpretation as the preferred goal of reading was not a new idea (Monaghan, 2005; Venezky, 1987; N. B. Smith, 1961). N. B. Smith (1934/1965) distinguished shifting emphases in 18th- and 19th-century American reading instruction, from Protestant religious inculcation (for spiritually meaningful interpretation), to secular/nationalistic values instruction (for moral evaluation), to meaning making for intelligent citizenship (for independent interpretation on behalf of a functioning democracy), to reading as the means to both acquire and evince a higher cultural sensibility (for self-improvement). Each of these objectives required active meaning making by the reader. Even into the 1920s and 1930s, thoughtful reading was privileged by scholars, often even over text decoding in early reading (Monaghan, 2007; N. B. Smith, 1961). By the time of the cognitive revolution, 20 years later, after a mid-century research hiatus, thoughtful reading would transform into reading comprehension (Pearson, 2010).

However, an emphasis on content or meaning might not necessarily include an emphasis on active and thoughtful engagement in its acquisition (Dewey, 1913; Venezky, 1987). As Dewey (1938/1998) would subsequently reflect, active experience may be the basis of learning, but not all experiences are equally educative. Emphasis on content could refer to traditional rote recollection and eloquent recitation of “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (Arnold, 1869, p. viii.) even as use of this popular phrase from the period neglected the remainder of Arnold’s (1869) sentiment: “. . . and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically . . .” (p. viii). Educational pioneers Horace Mann (1796–1859) and Col. Francis Parker (1837–1902) both argued for an emphasis on meaningful reading rather than mere reading for meaning (Barry, 2008). As Huey (1908) noted, “The child does not want to learn reading as a mechanical tool. He must have a ‘personal hunger’ for what is read” (pp. 121–122).

The reason for this concern was clear. Regimentation and rote response were widespread in American schools and had precedents in traditions of neoclassical, religious, and Prussian-inspired schooling in America from the 18th century forward (Mathews, 1966; Monaghan, 2005). In the decades around the turn of the century, these didactic approaches were adapted for the newer urban factory model schools (Callahan, 1962; Cuban, 1990; D. W. Moore, Readence, & Rickelman, 1983; see also Bobbitt, 1918; Münsterberg, 1909; F. W. Taylor, 1919). This was the “traditional” form of instruction that the new science of educational psychology, and what loosely became known as progressive education, attempted to improve on through science (Gray, 1924, 1925; Huey, 1908; Thorndike, 1910, 1917).

To understand the metatheoretical assumptions underlying the theories guiding this educational scholarship—those we here term intentional—we need to broaden our focus. Historians of education generally agree on the influence of early 20th-century psychology and its relationship to American schooling reform. Both were framed by experimental scientific methods, early functionalist psychological theory, and pragmatist philosophy (Boring, 1950; Buxton, 1985; Cremin, 1964; Walberg & Haertel, 1992). The ostensible goal of scientific education research was to contribute to a tightly managed education system to meet the unprecedented challenges of a newly industrialized, urbanized, and immigrant-engorged democracy (Cremin, 1964; Dewey, 1916; Popkewitz, 2008). Given the Hegel-inspired belief that history advances through the functional development of individuals and collectives, and the modernist conceit that history’s course can be made explicit and deliberatively and beneficially directed, it seemed a reasonable and scientific task to redesign American schooling so that children would be prepared to better realize American ideals (Cremin, 1964; Venezky, 1987).

The scientific but radical ideas that most informed these assumptions were provided by the newly emergent life sciences, particularly the insights of Darwin (1859, 1871), Spalding (1872), Haeckel (1876/1914), and others. Darwin (1859) had made the case that evolutionary change could be explained through natural selection. Specifically, he argued that replication with variation in species allowed for the possibility that variants better suited than other variants to their species-specific niche (more functional in the face of environmental contingency for purposes of survival and reproduction) would generally be selected for and propagated over time, thereby changing the characteristics of a species. Notably, he argued that this applied equally to the evolution of human beings (Darwin, 1871). The importance of variation and functional adaptation in relation to environmental conditions for understanding change over time through evolution was soon also recognized as applicable to understanding change over time in human development, learning, history, and even society (e.g., Darwin, 1877; Spencer, 1860; Thorndike, 1909).

The functional assumption shared by all these applications was that function is responsible for the emergence of effective structure over time. This is the first element of our intentional category of metatheoretical assumption—we take the term from the twinned sense set forth by Brentano (1874/1973). Function driving structure’s emergence was, and is, a common theme in theories of human development by functional psychologists (e.g., G. S. Hall, 1894). The motif of selection underscored that children, through trial and error (functional variation), developed effective behaviors in response to their physical, social, and symbolic environments. “The method of learning by the selection of successes from among a lot of acts is the most fundamental method of learning,” claimed Thorndike (1901, p. 38; see also Thorndike’s law of effect, 1905, p. 4). Effective physiological, neurological, and behavioral structures were thought to emerge as a result. The debt to Darwin was openly acknowledged (C. D. Green, 2009; Thorndike, 1909). It was not a great leap to apply this idea to the instruction of skills and knowledge in schools (e.g., Dewey, 1913, 1916; cf. Cziko, 2000).

As an evolved attribute, the child’s capacity to be engaged by and to learn from the environment was seen as inherent; that is, the locus of cause was internal to the learner. But the goal or purpose of the learning was effective engagement with the physical or social environment, and so the locus of effect was external to the learner. This orientation even carried through to the Harvard relational behaviorists such as James and Tolman (Wozniak, 1997), who construed behavior as “a course of action which the living body executes or is prepared to execute with regard to some object or fact of its environment” (Holt, 1915, p. 56). As Dewey (1913) wrote regarding the debate about the educative value of interest versus effort (which he characterized as an “educational lawsuit” [p. 1]),

Interests . . . are very varied; every impulse and habit that generates a purpose having sufficient force to move a person to strive for its realization, becomes an interest. But in spite of this diversity, interests are one in principle. They all mark an identification in action, and hence in desire, effort, and thought, of self with objects; with, namely, the objects in which the activity terminates (ends) and with the objects by which it is carried forward to its end (means). Interest, in the emotional sense of the word, is the evidence of the way in which the self is engaged, occupied, taken up with, concerned in, absorbed by, carried away by, this objective subject-matter. (p. 90)

Because of human beings’ evolved sociality and the altricial nature of human childhood (C. D. Green, 2009; James, 1890/1918), children’s inherent facility for engaging with and learning from structured social environments, including from texts, was thought to follow a developmental trajectory with a distinct, increasingly adaptive arc. This developmental trajectory was deemed key to successfully organizing curricula, both for the classroom and for purposes of socialization. Teaching children in developmentally appropriate ways and through engaging activities and environments was stressed. For this reason, reading instruction was not recommended before the age of 6 or 7 (McGill-Franzen, 1993; Teale, 1995).

Relying on the life sciences as an inspirational foundation for psychological theory had limitations. Biology was barely two generations removed from natural philosophy and was still very formative in method and theory. And its implications were generally disturbing to the public at large. Still, thinking of humans as biological kinds allowed direct scientific inquiry and lent weight to animal studies. Moreover, the figurative metaphors that had long been popular among romantic educational naturalists, such as learning as growth, could now be reified with justification. Mental and behavioral change was, in fact, biological change. Finally, the Darwinian stress on variation played well with the romantic and American transcendentalist theme of individualism; differentiated outcomes were to be expected, even encouraged. Progressive education was the result.

Scholars agree that progressivism was not a homogenous social movement but, rather, a combination of overlapping agendas (Labaree, 2005). Historians have variously categorized these as pedagogical and administrative progressivism (Tyack, 1974); social efficiency, child development, and social reconstruction progressivism (Kliebard, 2004); or liberal and conservative progressivism (Church & Sedlak, 1976). Following from Labaree (2005) and others, we believe that what bound these agendas together were adaptive assumptions about child development (e.g., Dewey, 1896; G. S. Hall, 1894; James, 1890/1918). On this, both pedagogical and administrative progressives seemed to agree.

But there the two groups diverged. Pedagogical progressives emphasized the unique developmental needs of the child, arguing for student-centered teaching and classrooms and curricula aligned with the interests of children at given ages, and building on their inborn propensity to be curious and to learn from intriguing phenomena and environments. In this, the pedagogues channeled earlier neoromantic and transcendentalist theorists who had proposed models based on a belief in the inherent goodness of children and their universal predisposition to learn and grow, each in their own but functional way (e.g., Fröbel, 1887; Parker, 1894; Pestalozzi, 1894; Rousseau, 1921; cf. Cuban, 1990; Hirsch, 1999).

Alternatively, administrative progressives arrived at a more institutionally regulated, social utilitarian view of learning informed by assessments of children’s intellectual differences and the provision of leveled and appropriate instruction designed to capitalize on those differences (Cremin, 1964; Johnston, 1984; Popkewitz, 2008). The administrative concern was less with the developmental needs of particular children than with the needs of America’s modernizing society and its school systems. To this end, administrative progressives (“administratives”) channeled social efficiency theorists (e.g., Bobbitt, 1918; Münsterberg, 1909; F. W. Taylor, 1919) and the industrial goal of standardized outcomes, usually combined with a “scientific” notion of genetically determined class, gender, ethnic, and race differences (Fallace, 2015).

The importance of this distinction should not be underemphasized. According to Lagemann (1989), “One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike [administrative inspiration] won and John Dewey [pedagogical inspiration] lost” (p. 185). Or, as Labaree (2005) put it, the pedagogues won the air war (the theoretical campaign), but administratives won the ground war (the institutionalization campaign). Labaree further suggested that the rhetoric of pedagogical progressivism was maintained in the teacher education colleges, if not in classroom practice, because it provided air cover for the social impact of administrative progressivism, which,

when examined closely from the perspective of American traditions of democratic equality and individual opportunity, was not an attractive sight. [Social efficiency education] sorted students into ability groups based in part on social origins, provided them with access only to the knowledge deemed within their ability, and then sent them off to particular positions in the pyramid of jobs based on their academic attainments. As an educational process, it was mechanistic, alienating and dull, with a dumbed-down curriculum and a disengaging pedagogy. This was a coldly utilitarian and socially reproductive vision of schooling, and the offer it made to students—learn a skill and take your place in the workforce—was hard to get excited about and easy to refuse. (p. 287)

It is doubtful, then, that elementary reading teachers working within administrative school systems, with their reliance on matched tests and leveled texts (Pearson & Hamm, 2005), actually “discarded basal readers and used materials prepared by children themselves, a wide variety of reference books, and story books which children [chose] to read as a result of their own interests” (N. B. Smith, 1934/1965, p. 197). Even allowing a lag of about 15 years between the high watermark of functional theory in psychology, in the decades around the turn of the 20th century, and the 1919 founding of the Progressive Education Association and the educational activity movement that followed (Cremin, 1964; N. B. Smith, 1952), there was never a golden era of progressive reading instruction.

But clearly, in the years after World War I, university-based teacher education became home for the ideals of pedagogical progressivism and its emphasis on active, meaningful, and educative engagement (Cremin, 1964; N. B. Smith, 1961). Even as behaviorism and operationism were sweeping psychology (see the next subsection, “Flipping the Causative Arrow”), teacher education faculty held that “learning best took place when the child was permitted to carry out his own purposes, meeting and solving attendant problems within the context of his own experiences and needs and through the medium of his own activities” (N. B. Smith, 1934/1965, p. 197). This view was espoused for elementary-grades reading in the 1920s (Monaghan, 2007; N. B. Smith, 1952) and made its way into the secondary English curriculum by the 1930s with An Experience Curriculum in English (W. W. Hatfield, 1935), which called for student experience in and through language and literature for “intelligent reading” (Strang & Rose, 1938, p. 28; cf. Rosenblatt, 1938)—an echo of the reading-as-thought-process motif (e.g., Huey, 1908). English educators “began to talk about the project method, about integrating the language arts in ‘meaningful’ classroom activities, about ‘functional teaching’ of English” (Squire, 2003, p. 5).

Though not a widespread instructional phenomenon, this approach must have had a tangible impact on educational thinking in the interwar years, as evidenced by the membership and conference attendance numbers of the Progressive Education Association (approximately 25,000 at its height, with conference attendances over 10,000, of whom roughly a third were classroom teachers; Cremin, 1964) and the numerous subsequent critiques of progressive education that followed (Adler, 1940; B. I. Bell, 1949; H. M. Bell, 1938; Bestor, 1953; Dewey, 1938/1998; Flesch, 1955/1986; Hutchins, 1953; Lynd, 1953; Neatby, 1953; M. B. Smith, 1949, 1954; Woodring, 1953). There was also evidence of positive popular culture references from the period (e.g., see “Progressive Education in the 1940s” [n.d.] and Auntie Mame [Dennis, 1955], a best-selling comic novel of the 1950s, whose eccentric 1920s title character was introduced as a partisan in the debate between experimental and traditional approaches to education).

We close this section noting that functional psychology and pragmatist philosophy shared an emphasis on intention, adaptation, and functionality (James and Dewey were major figures in both disciplines). We observe related motifs in the naturalist and realist literary theories of the period, wherein characters’ insurmountable propensities were set against social constraints and expectations, leading to comic, tragic, or romantic consequences beyond their full control or understanding (e.g., Cather, 1918/1994; Dreiser, 1900/1994; James, 1888/1911; Pater, 1889; Wharton, 1911/1922). The careless use of this theme—of literary protagonists struggling to overpower environmental or social circumstances—in literary critiques of regional and minority authors whose works were often dismissed as merely indicative of their regional or minority provenance may have contributed to the New Critical backlash on behalf of “the work itself.” Many of the writers who would eventually champion New Criticism (e.g., Davidson, Ransom, Warren; see next subsection) first “took a stand” as regional naturalists who resisted the dehumanizing mechanism and conformity of administrative modernism (Twelve Southerners, 1930).

Flipping the Causative Arrow: Respondent Assumptions

Experimental psychologists became ambivalent about functional psychology’s theoretical assumptions, mostly due to their often nonscientific cast, the reliance on 19th-century philosophical conceits, and persistent mentalism, vitalism, and dualism (e.g., Bergson, 1907/1911; Berliner, 1993; Glassman, 2004; Kimble, 1994; Manicas, 2002). The resistance on cultural and religious grounds to Darwinian theory, including in the classroom (e.g., the Scopes trial, 1925), and the unfavorable logical-positivist critiques of Pragmatism, such as by Russell (1910, cited in Duran, 1994), may also have contributed to the wane of functional psychology’s influence and, more broadly, to the prevalence of what we term intentionalist causative assumptions. A more precise mechanistic view of psychological processes emerged as a counterpoint, precociously at first with Watson’s (1913) “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” and Behaviorism (1925), and more comprehensively with the adoption of operationism in the 1930s (J. Moore, 2010).

In terms of metatheoretical assumptions, the early radical behaviorists (e.g., Watson, 1925) externalized the locus of cause from the learner to the environment as stimulus (S), which was studied purely in terms of the learner’s external response (R); both cause and effect were external to the learner (S → R). Subsequent neobehaviorism, with the adoption of operationism (C. D. Green, 1992) and with support from logical positivism (J. Moore, 2010), internalized the locus of effect as drives (C. L. Hull, 1940) or maps (Tolman, 1932), thereby fully inverting the functionalist paradigm. Instead of internal causes resulting in external effects, external causes created internal organismic effects responsible for behavior (S → O → R; for a review, see J. Moore, 2010; for application to educational psychology, see Berliner, 1993; cf. Leahey, 1992; Pearson & Hamm, 2005).

In addition, behaviorists displaced function-over-time as the cause of effective structure, with the temporally closed and mechanistic view of structure as being responsible for function. We identify this alternative set of causative and developmental assumptions as the respondent metatheoretical framework. (In this framework, structure is to function as cause is to effect. The framework posits an exterior locus of cause and an interior locus of effect; see Figure 1.) These assumptions are also evident in logical positivist philosophy (e.g., C. L. Hull, 1940; Skinner, 1957; although cf. G. Hatfield, 2002; J. Moore, 1985) and New Criticism literary theory (C. Brooks, 1947; Richards, 1930; Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946) and so played some role in literacy education theory (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956; Hilgard, Irvine, & Whipple, 1953; Skinner, 1958; Wellek & Warren, 1956; cf. Catterson & Pearson, in press; Pearson & Cervetti, 2015).

Behaviorism’s impact on education and literacy instruction has certainly been acknowledged (e.g., Alexander & Fox, 2013; Pearson, 2000; Pearson & Hamm, 2005), yet this paradigm contributed little to engaged or motivated literacy instruction as it is understood today. Internal states, such as motivation, desire, or meaning, were not amenable to direct measurement and so were of little scientific interest to behaviorists (Walberg & Haertel, 1992). Insofar as these phenomena could be said to exist, they were attributable to the sequence of experiences that conditioned habits of behavior or drives (e.g., C. L. Hull, 1940; Skinner, 1957; Spence, 1958). In a review of how motivation research was described in handbooks of educational psychology, Weiner (1990) notes that from 1930 to 1960, such motivation research as occurred “had little connection with or relevance for educational psychologists” (p. 618); he cites the use of “the machine metaphor of motivation” (p. 618) as the reason. It may well have been the nadir of educational psychology, as noted by McDonald (1964, cited in Berliner, 1993). In terms of reading research output, Venezky (1984/2002) concurred. No doubt the economic conditions of the Depression and World War II also played a role.

Allowing for our noted 15-year time lag, respondent assumptions from psychology, philosophy, and literary criticism from the 1920s to the 1950s became prevalent in literacy education and English language arts research from the 1940s to the 1970s (e.g., Artley, 1977; Beaven, 1972; LaRocque, 1976). Consider Purves and Rippere (1968), who organized 139 elements of students’ written responses to literature into 5 categories and 24 subcategories. Notably, their category engagement-involvement (p. 10) consisted of the subcategories 1A reaction to literature, 1B reaction to form, 1C reaction to content, along with 1A1 reaction to author, 1A2 assent to the work, 1A3 moral taste, and so on. In other words, student engagement was defined as an external text cueing a personal reaction (internal to the student). Notably, the authors justified their schematic by reference to the work of New Critics: C. Brooks and Warren (1960), Richards (1930), and Wellek and Warren (1956). Like the behavioral conditioning models of stimulus-operation-response mechanisms, the New Critics emphasized the text, exterior to the reader, as the proper cause of meaning, the making of which they described, as did the behaviorists, as response or reaction (in the reader). Good reading was a matter of close and careful attention to the text for well-informed response. A simplified and highly structuralist approach to New Criticism was brought into the schools, promulgating what Pearson and Cervetti (2015) described as a “text-centric” (p. 2) view of reading.

Purves and Beach (1972) followed up with an impressively comprehensive annotated review of studies on response to literature, students’ reading interests, and teaching of literature. Reading interests were parsed as responses to text (students’ preferred subject matter, or their preferred genre/stylistic attributes). In other words, the interests of readers were categorized by text characteristics, rather than texts being categorized by readers’ characteristics. None of the categories suggested active student engagement. Applebee (1977) questioned the validity and reliability of this taxonomy, but the larger concern for scholars of post–New Critical language arts was the presumption of a hierarchical, factorial model of response (Beach & Hynds, 1996; Cooper & Michalak, 1981; J. D. Williams & Alden, 1983). Nonetheless, it was an impressively ambitious meta-analysis of language arts scholarship, given the constraints of a respondent metatheoretical framework.

Other instructional innovations that emerged during this period included standardized assessments, outcome-based learning systems, linear and branched programmatic instruction, learning hierarchies, systematized skill instruction, worksheet-based exercises, and scripted teaching modules (e.g., Bloom et al., 1956; Bruner, 1960; Dibiasio, 1973; Donlan, 1979; Farley & Truog, 1970–1971; Gagné, 1965; Skinner, 1958; see Pearson & Hamm, 2005, for extended review). Many of these mid-century innovations continue in modified form today.

As noted, a systematic, often regimented, approach to instruction had already been evident in reading education during the first decade of the 20th century. Behaviorism, New Criticism, logical positivism, industrial management theory, and modernist structuralism merely gave these traditional forms of didactic instruction renewed intellectual legitimacy (Callahan, 1962; Serafini, 2002). The reasons that similarly didactic instructional preferences persist today are complex (Brown, 1994; Reeve, 2009; Resnick, 1982).

From Respondent to Constructed Assumptions

If respondent assumptions, inspired by mechanistic motifs and British empiricist and associationist traditions, dominated North American psychology in the second quarter of the 20th century (Berliner, 2006; Bredo, 2006a; Walberg & Haertel, 1992), a very different set of assumptions was in play in Europe, where psychoanalytic, developmental, ethological, Gestalt, and sociohistorical psychologies were founded on Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist assumptions. But the work of Freud, Bühler, Piaget, Bartlett, Koffka, Lorenz, and Vygotsky would eventually prove influential in diverse schools of North American psychology after World War II, with subsequent implications for literacy education theory and research.

Indeed, during the era of behaviorist schooling in the United States (1950s–1970s), Freudian, Piagetian, and Gestalt influences began to appear in what was beginning to be called English language arts education and in the teaching of reading (Athey, 1976; C. K. Brooks, 1979; Chall, 1967; J. E. Hartman, 1979; Meade, 1973; Small, 1972; N. B. Smith, 1952), and to a lesser extent in school psychology (Reschly, 1976; Weiner, 1990). For instance, the work of Cofer and Appley (1964) and Young (1961) were of central importance to Mathewson’s (1976) reappraisal of motivation in reading. And there seems to have been some theoretical reconsideration of what were still publicly familiar and thus culturally comfortable (if “academically discredited”) assumptions about meaningful learning, as suggested by activity-based learning models and humanist psychology (e.g., Maslow, 1943; Mehaffie, Gee, & Larmer, 1978; Rogers, 1951; F. Smith, 1971; Stauffer, 1970).

But the most striking disruption of the North American behaviorist tradition in literacy education research after mid-century was due to the emergence of cognitive psychology (Neisser, 1967) and the putative cognitive revolution (Leahey, 1992). In this new theoretical framework, experimental psychologists, who were finding ways to test the mind’s structural constraints (e.g., G. A. Miller, 1956), collaborated with psycholinguists, who were studying the deep structure and transformative nature of grammar (e.g., Chomsky, 1957), and information scientists, who had been designing artificial intelligence programs (e.g., Newell & Simon, 1956). The combined result was the view that the mind had a definitive structure, akin to an intelligent data-processing program, which generated behavior and conscious phenomena, and that the structure and processes of this deep program could be back-propagated with carefully constructed experimental (hypothetico-deductive) designs. G. A. Miller (1979) actually gave a precise time and place for this collective inspiration: September 11, 1956, at the Symposium on Information Theory at MIT.

This turn had two major implications. First, thought was treated as representational even beneath the level of language, narrative, gesture, and patterns of multisensory memory, encoded in a type of mental programming language or mentalese (Pinker, 1997; cf. Fodor, 2001); the deep syntax of this language restricted what program designs were feasible, thus recasting outcomes as internal program design attributes. Second, the developmental evidence suggested that deep structures were operationalized too quickly by children to be accounted for solely by their environmental experience (Chomsky, 1965); therefore, the deep structures that facilitated the development of cognitive modules (Fodor, 1983) for language and literacy were archetypal, evolved adaptations shared by all members of the human family, as Kant (1781/2008) had argued.

The first of these orientations tied the new cognitive psychology to the logical positivist tradition in analytical philosophy (as behaviorist psychology had been). But the second, with its claim for evolved modules in cognitive architecture, tied the new psychology to the causative assumptions of the functionalists who had preceded the behaviorists. In short, the cognitivists held on to the behaviorist assumption of internal locus of effect but internalized the locus of cause as well. The resulting emphasis on skills and prior knowledge was profound.

We identify this hybridized theoretical frame as the assumption set constructed, which posits an internal locus of cause and an internal locus of effect; structure and function are co-causative over time and reciprocally interrelated. The constructed assumptions of cognitive psychology and literacy education research can also be found in the postpositivist linguistic turn in North American philosophy (Quine, 1951; Wittgenstein, 1953/2009) and in Chicago School and related literary critique (Booth, 1961; Burke, 1966; Frye, 1957/2015).

The resulting literacy paradigm was epistemologically rationalist, and often ontologically idealist, and allowed earlier European constructivist idioms already grounded in these assumptions to be readily assimilated (e.g., Bartlett, 1932; Koffka, 1935; Piaget, 1947/2003). This assimilation enriched the cognitive movement’s theory base and gave its research program a propitious start. It also allowed for the emergence of cognitive constructivist learning theory, including schema theory and radical constructivist views that argued for coherence over correspondence as the basis for truth (Anderson, 1984; Davis & Sumara, 1997; Goodman, 1965; Handsfield, 2016; Otto, 1977; Paris, Lipson, & Wixson, 1983; Von Glasersfeld, 1989).

Alexander and Fox (2013) suggested that the subsequent impact of this cognitive turn on literacy education came in two stages: (a) the era of natural learning (1966–1975), which emphasized the psycholinguistic contribution of children’s natural propensity for language and literacy due to archetypal (evolved and hereditary) mental structures (or, as we might say, the assumption of interior cause), and (b) the era of information processing (1976–1985), emphasizing the computational contribution of mental processes as software-like programs for generating output, casting learning as programming (or, as we might say, the assumption of interior effect).

These two orientations were in fact contemporaneous in literacy education. Both Goodman’s (1967) “psycholinguistic guessing game” and G. A. Miller’s (1956; G. A. Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960) earlier “chunking theory” can be found in a draft typescript of the first edition of Singer and Ruddell’s (1970) Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (University of Georgia Library), although the Miller paper was excised from the final print edition. Entwining the two cognitive emphases further, these two views provided the theoretical warrants for the reading wars of the late 20th century—initiating yet another debate on early reading instruction, between advocates of whole language for meaning construction with texts and advocates of systemic training in synthetic phonics skills (Pearson, 2004).

It is during this era of cognitive reading research and constructivist practice that we find a reemergence of motivation and engagement as topics in literacy research. There were early calls to include affective, attitudinal, and personal aspects of reading in models of literacy in the English language arts (Adkins, Payne, & Ballif, 1972; Small, 1972), and in reading education, as well (Athey, 1970, 1976; Stauffer, 1970). Cultural memory of progressive instructional traditions from earlier English language arts curricula (e.g., W. W. Hatfield, 1935; N. B. Smith, 1952) is indicated in some subtle counterpoint on behalf of student choice and interests (e.g., Boze, 1968; Emig, 1967, 1972; Farrell, 1978). Athey (1970) made a case for affective variables within prevailing cognitive models of reading (e.g., substrata-factor model; Holmes, 1965). Athey (1976) followed on this quest to define affective factors, contrasting it to the questionable adoption of Piaget’s cognitive theories, which, she felt, had obscured the role of motivation by making it “an inherent and inseparable dimension of thought” (p. 739). She questioned this easy adoption, contending that a more nuanced model would require examination of nonintellectual factors and the taking into account of changes in motivation over time, according to age, culture, and social class.

However, most early framings posited student interests and self-perceptions as variables or characteristics of the student (Castenell, 1983; Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998; Wigfield & Asher, 1984). Subsequent work sought to determine the impact of these attributes on student achievement (e.g., Ehrlich, Kurtz-Costes, & Loridant, 1993; Pintrich & Schunk, 1996; Renninger, Hidi, & Krapp, 1992; Schunk & Meece, 1992). Other researchers argued for the inherent social dimensions of these attributes and of their development, demonstrating how social interactions in learning activities actually improved learning (Bergin & LaFave, 1998; Guthrie et al., 1996; Roehler & Duffy, 1996; Ruddell, 1994; Taboada, Tonks, Wigfield, & Guthrie, 2013). Wigfield, Eccles, and Rodriguez (1998) provided a comprehensive review of the motivation research of this period and concluded with a call for fuller study of classroom effects and the need for an integrated account of how all these aspects worked together.

As if reflecting the constructed assumption of cognition for organizational coherence, a series of impressive research syntheses were released during this period, beginning with Becoming a Nation of Readers (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1984), Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print (Adams, 1990), Comprehension (Kintsch, 1998), Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (National Reading Panel, 2000), and Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). The Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, reorganized its website to provide research-based syntheses. Handbooks also began to proliferate (e.g., Barr, Kamil, Mosenthal, & Pearson, 1996; Ruddell et al., 1994), including chapters on motivation and engagement (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000).

The apparent need to put Humpty Dumpty together again—that is, the need to reintegrate the factors, elements, and processes that had been disambiguated in the earlier mechanistic view of literacy and agency into a more holistic or organic account—became manifest for literacy engagement research in the latter 1990s. Initially, engagement had referred to observable actions by students indicating self-regulation and metacognitive strategies (Meece, Blumenfeld, & Hoyle, 1988), or to how students followed classroom procedures or to when their discussions suggested substantive involvement in the issues and content of a text or literary work (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991; Reed & Schallert, 1993; Wigfield & Asher, 1984). The turn in the literacy education literature from reading outcomes to the readers themselves was clearly evident (Guzzetti et al., 1999; D. K. Hartman, 1995). But sociality itself was perhaps underarticulated; a richer theory of self was required (Weiner, 1990).

To support the turn to the reader, more comprehensive theories of literacy were devised. Two shifts in metatheoretical assumptions occurred in the literature to allow this. First, although the machine metaphor of behaviorist theory (Weiner, 1990) had been carried into the early cognitive turn with the metaphor of mind as software program—linear flow charts and all—this view was soon displaced by a more recursive and co-causative view of structure and function in development (cf. Alexander, 2005; Kintsch, 1998; Lerner, Hershberg, Hilliard, & Johnson, 2015; RAND Study Group, 2002). Early examples can be found in connectionist neural network models of reading processes (e.g., Adams, 1990; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1981, 1985), in precognitive ecological response models (e.g., Zajonc, 1980), in recursive engagement development models (e.g., Stanovich, 1980, 1986), and in the emergence of psycholinguistic-based whole language pedagogy (Bergin & LaFave, 1998; Goodman, 1967, 1969; F. Smith, 1971), reader response literary theory (Rosenblatt, 1978), and sociocognitive models of literacy instruction (Guthrie et al., 1996; Oldfather & Dahl, 1994).

Second, there was a heightened focus on the self as the central object of psychology, particularly in studies of motivation. Self-efficacy beliefs and self-concept beliefs became highly productive areas of investigation (Wigfield et al., 1998). According to Graham and Weiner (1996, cited in Pajares & Schunk, 2002, p. 4), “It is evident that the self is on the verge of dominating the field of motivation.” As Pajares and Schunk (2002) approvingly explained, “The assumption that children’s self beliefs are inextricably tied to their thinking and functioning seems so sound, so obvious, so commonsensical” (p. 3). Given the constructed metatheoretical assumptions of this period, wherein the loci of both cause and effect were now internal to the learner, it could hardly have seemed otherwise. But as we (and Pajares & Schunk, 2002) have noted, the commonsensical is an alert that metaphysical assumptions are in play. The seemingly obvious would soon be contested.

It was at this point that engagement began to supersede motivation as the preferred term and focus in research on students’ active literacy learning (Alexander & Fox, 2013). Engagement quickly branches into two views, an internal view and an external view. The literacy education research that addressed the internal view was termed sociocognitive and emphasized the social dimensions of learning as fostered through educative environments (Almasi & McKeown, 1996; Guthrie et al., 1996; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). But this research could include a wide range of theoretical models, including study of the social effects on internalized factors (e.g., self-efficacy, motivation), or of the motivation produced in social participation as a necessary component of effective teaching (Allington & Johnston, 2000; Pressley & Allington, 2015), or of how teachers’ need for control could undermine it (Alvermann, O’Brien, & Dillon, 1990). This theme could even be extended into the newer veins of cognitive research (e.g., Spiro, Vispoel, Schmitz, Samaarapungavan, & Boertger, 1987; Spiro & Jehng, 1990).

By contrast, the external view was informed by sociocultural insights (see next subsection), demonstrating how knowledge could be constructed in social collaborations for subsequent possible internalization by students but whose enactment as practice was decidedly external and between social agents (Gavelek & Bresnahan, 2009; New London Group, 1996; Vygotsky, 1978). Some literacy theorists of the late 1990s tapped into the 1970s’ ecological turn in psychology (e.g., Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Gibson, 1979/2015; cf. Heft, 2001). Metatheoretically, the locus of cause began to shift back out of the mind into the social surround, that is, respondent regarding causal loci but constructed in the co-constructive relationship of structure and function, with a much broader and more ecologically rich sense of the external than the behaviorists had considered, and with a much more nuanced set of implications for mental processes (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Perry, 2012; Purcell-Gates, Jacobsen, & Degener, 2004; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002; Weaver-Hightower, 2008).

Contingent Assumptions and the Sociocultural Turn

Beginning in the late 1980s and 1990s, pioneering authors in cultural anthropology and ethnography, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, social and cultural-historical psychology, and semiotics were woven together by education researchers into what became known as the sociocultural turn (a bit of bricolage—unlike previous borrowings—with no direct disciplinary inspiration but multiple sources). These authors—including Bleich (1988), Cazden (1988, 1993), Engeström (1987/2015), Fairclough (1989), Gee (2012), Halliday and Hasan (1989), Heath (1983, 1996), Ladson-Billings (1995), Lave and Wegner (1991), Rogoff, Baker-Sennett, Lacasa, and Goldsmith (1995), Scribner and Cole (1981), Street (1984), the New London Group (1996), Vygotsky (1978), and Wertsch (1985), among others—had a profound impact on what was just beginning to be described as literacy (which included reading, writing, oral communication, sign systems use, discourses, multimodalities use, enacted identities, and social practices). These scholars rejected the traditions of North American structuralist psychology as a frame of reference, choosing instead to take their theoretical orientations and scholarly insights from work in other fields and other cultural traditions (chiefly continental European). For a concise introduction to sociocultural theory in literacy research, see Enciso and Ryan (2011); for more detailed descriptions of several of the constructs in this domain, see Unrau and Alvermann (2013) or individual chapters in Alvermann, Unrau, and Ruddell (2013).

Although still holding to a coherence (rather than correspondence) epistemology, the sociocultural turn centered on social practices instead of cognitive processes. Simple as such a focal shift might seem, it spawned a drastic metatheoretical shift in literacy education research. In the process, positivist and structural assumptions were displaced by postpositivist, phenomenological, and poststructuralist assumptions (Guba & Lincoln, 1994; St. Pierre, 2014); psychology and psycholinguistics were replaced with sociology and sociolinguistics (e.g., Bloome & Green, 1984; Denzin, 2009; Gee, 1991; Luke, 1995); quantitative methods were exchanged for qualitative methods (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; J. Green & Bloome, 2004); and cognitive constructivist epistemological themes were displaced by social constructivist and social constructionist themes (Au, 1998; Engeström, Miettenen, & Punamäki, 1999; Gavelek & Bresnahan, 2009; Hruby, 2001; Vygotsky, 1978). Even Goodman’s (1967) psycholinguistic guessing game metaphor evolved into the sociopsycholinguistic guessing game by the time of publication of the fourth edition of Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (Ruddell et al., 1994; cf. Strauss, Goodman, & Paulson, 2009).

Central to this move were the metatheoretical assumptions that we categorize as contingent—external locus of cause, external locus of effect, with both situated in historical and cultural contexts that determine relative and impermanent meanings. (Readers will note that this is an entirely flipped view in comparison with the assumption set constructed in just about every way imaginable, perhaps contributing to the acrimony of some of the paradigmatic debate of the turn; Donmoyer, 1996.) Similar assumptions were at work in post-structuralist philosophy, postmodernist literary critique, and cultural-historical psychology, and each had an impact on literacy theory. To draw again from Pearson and Cervetti (2015), literacy was moving from a “reader-centric” to an “activity-centric” perspective (Clark, Chow-Hoy, Herter, & Moss, 2001; Smagorinsky, 1998, 2001; Smagorinsky & O’Donnell-Allen, 1998).

In reviewing self-described sociocultural scholarship in American literacy education journals, we found an apparent distinction between scholars who defined the prefix socio- as primarily indicating sociality (i.e., interpersonal relationship, interaction, and collaboration—typical in sociocognitive or social constructivist theory), those who defined socio- as primarily indicating societal (i.e., institutional, procedural, employing cultural artifacts—typical in social constructionist, Soviet activity theory), and those who defined socio- as signifying both at the same time, with varying degrees of clarity as to the relationship of one to the other (if any). Although all three groups avowed a sociocultural lens and asserted that learning is culturally and historically situated, the writings of the first group implied either contingent or respondent causative assumptions, while those of the second group implied more emphatic contingent assumptions, and the third often retained constructed assumptions.

The methodological diversity of this work is similarly impossible to ignore. Sociocognitivist motivation studies were still being done at this time, though often under the sociocultural mantle, and focused on choice or reading preference to describe engaged literacy (e.g., Beck, 2009; Fisher & Frey, 2012; Moje, Overby, Tysvaer, & Morris, 2008; Wilhelm & Smith, 2015; F. Williams, 2013; Worthy, Moorman, & Turner, 1999). Other studies arrived at conciliatory results using alternative methodologies such as constant-comparison analysis and ethnography (e.g., Bailey, 2009; Perry & Moses, 2011), neo-Marxist Critical Discourse Analysis (e.g., Caughlan & Kelly, 2004; Thein, Guise, & Sloan, 2015), Critical Pedagogy case studies (e.g., Kinloch, 2005; Morrell 2005), and Aesthetic Analysis (Juzwik & Sherry, 2007).

Some scholars inquired into social constructivist and constructionist notions of literacy learning (e.g., DeStigter, 2001; Harste et al., 1984; Hynds, 1989; Moje, 2006; Skerrett, 2009). In these works, literacy motivation is defined as “a feature of the texts and contexts young people experience both in and out of school,” rather than as a “static or singular feature of an individual” (Moje, 2006, p. 13). Caughlan, Juzwik, Borsheim-Black, Kelly, and Fine (2013) used Bakhtinian dialogic analysis to study the relations between cognitive motivation and social engagement for learning. Researchers continued to extend concepts of literate self-efficacy to literacy motivation and engagement but, as a result, found that successful instruction relied as much on classroom culture and environment as on individual cognitive abilities, psychologies, and social interactions (e.g., Almasi & Garas-York, 2009; Aukerman & Schuldt, 2015).

A common conclusion from work in this domain is that literacy learning in school may not be a sufficient or accurate indicator of students’ actual ability, motivation, and engagement (e.g., Alvermann, 2002). For example, “Third Space” approaches (Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez & Stone, 2000; Leander & Rowe, 2006; Moje et al., 2004) combined inquiries on both in- and out-of-school learning to envision and design classrooms as new and fundamentally different spaces for learning. These Third Space classrooms operate differently from traditional top-down classrooms, allowing participants to collaborate, co-construct, explore, and use what they already know and do every day to learn literacy content and practices. As a reported result, these students become far more sophisticated communicators and social agents, making new meanings and knowledge about their worlds (Moje, 2008).

Researchers found that teachers consistently identified some students as motivated and engaged but not others (e.g., L. A. Hall, 2009). On closer analysis, however, such identifications were often inaccurate and based on the teachers’ unexamined assumptions about their students. As Tatum (2014, p. 35) noted, young people’s answers to the question “Who am I?” warranted serious attention because meaningful relationships with texts contributed to intrinsic motivation and prosocial goals, both of which were positively correlated with higher reading achievement. This was seen as a part of identity construction, where identity was framed in schools in terms of advantage and disadvantage relatable to undesirable societal norms (Dutro, 2010; Perry, 2012; Weaver-Hightower, 2008).

One of the unique features of the sociocultural turn was its often outspoken ideological commitment. Stemming mostly from Frankfurt School social critique, many sociocultural theorists held that all research and theory are inherently political. Scholarship that failed to explicitly acknowledge and address its political commitments, from this view, was tacitly accepting the socioeconomic and political status quo. Because the status quo features persistent inequity, injustice, cruelty, and oppression, such acquiescence was said to amount to support and thus culpability for those conditions. This stance was and still is at work in critical education scholarship and much writing on student identities and community (especially regarding marginalization based on race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; L. A. Bell, 2007; DeStigter, 2001; Heath, 1996; Janks, 2000; Kinloch, 2010; Larson & Marsh, 2004; S. Miller & Burns, in press; Tate, 2012). If the polemical tone of this work has softened in the past two decades, the same cannot be said of its ardency.

It is possible, however, that sociocultural criticality provoked unhelpful political reactions, especially in the face of a rightward swing in U.S. political temperament at the turn of the 21st century. The apparent result was a federal research funding embargo against qualitative studies in literacy education (Shannon & Edmondson, 2011). Complaints by quantitative education researchers that sociocultural work was unduly theoretical and lacked scientific merit or evidence should have tempered their critique with historical hindsight: Cognitive reading research, too, had been highly theoretical in its first decade (the 1960s, e.g., Singer & Ruddell, 1970), and it assembled its impressive research base only in the subsequent decades, thanks largely to plentiful federal research funding (National Reading Panel, 2000). Without similar governmental support for large-scale ethnographic and qualitative research to provide an empirical foundation, the sociocultural turn was prevented from growing much beyond broadly theoretical and small-scale descriptive findings, with a limiting impact on implications (e.g., August & Shanahan, 2006). By the second decade of the 21st century, political reaction began to have a similar effect on sociocognitive research funding (e.g., Congressional elimination of funding for Striving Readers research in 2010).

However, there was a less pronounced form of criticality in this literature that took a high moral road, even as it hewed closely to the familiar beliefs of middle-class liberalism. This view assumed that the central goal of education was to liberate students from their ignorance, their false consciousness, their unexamined and faulty assumptions, so they could realize truths, particularly those that could serve, or be about, themselves. But it also assumed that education was about teaching how the world works in order to be functional in it and thereby become conventionally empowered (Harste, 2003). This more traditional view, with its individualistic intuitions, was a progressivist criticality, one long and comfortably enshrined as a form of folk wisdom among America’s professional class (Rorty, 1989).

In any case, the deliberate, quasi-heroic paradigm shattering of the sociocultural turn brought fresh perspectives, methods, and theories to literacy research. Asking similar questions but in different ways, only to arrive at basically similar conclusions on behalf of active, engaged learning, should not be mistaken as a case of wasteful academic turf war or lost opportunity. We believe it should be considered a more thorough confirmation of the value of engagement-oriented literacy instruction.

Engaged Literacies Today

The foregoing review leads us to two presently mainstream but often confluent currents in literacy engagement: one sociocognitive and one sociocultural. The former is grounded in the traditions that emerged out of the cognitive revolution (and the neobehaviorism that preceded it). This view relies on respondent and constructed metatheoretical assumptions and is attentive to improving the schools we have, generally on behalf of traditional goals. The important empirical contributions of scholars in this tradition continue to inform teacher preparation and professional development, as well as policy and products (tests, textbooks, online materials, etc.). Newer scholars in this vein are continuing to extend and enrich this tradition, often by operationalizing the social factors that socioculturalists have placed on the academic map (e.g., Allington et al., 2010; Cantrell et al., 2016; Guthrie, Wigfield, & You, 2012; Hoffman, 2009; Ivey & Johnston, 2015; Taboada et al., 2013; Thompson, Madhuri, & Taylor, 2008). Much like the early experimental psychologists and administrative progressives at the dawn of the 20th century, scholars in this current have been notably elaborative of best practice within the context of today’s policies and programs.

By contrast, the sociocultural current relies on contingent or intentional assumptions and often deliberately challenges the presumed goals, methods, and organization of today’s school systems on behalf of transformational and potentially open-ended objectives. Sociocultural scholarship has been more qualitative and often more theoretical in comparison with sociocognitive work, and thus its effective operationalization is less certain, although clearly possible (e.g., Allington & McGill-Franzen, in press; Ivey & Johnston, 2015; Johnston & Ivey, 2013; Zenkov, Harmon, Bell, Ewaida, & Lynch, 2011). Current sociocultural scholarship transcends earlier sociocultural traditions (e.g., Frankfurt School rhetoric, paradigm wars)—possibly due to radical shifts in the nature of global production and distribution of goods, labor markets, and development of information and communicative technologies—and is seemingly more inspired by current popular movements on behalf of equity and justice (e.g., Black Lives Matter, LGBT and feminist equity, Occupy Wall Street; Kinloch, 2010; Larson & Marsh, 2004; Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007). As with the pedagogical progressives of a century ago, the ideas advocated by these scholars are favored by many teacher educators, but their instructional recommendations are less manifest in the schools.

The two groups share mature and sophisticated views about engagement in literacy development (e.g., Lee, 2012). For both, engaged literacy learning entails making and doing things that learners view as authentic to their lived experiences in terms of relevance, and that learners use to attain their own goals for their own purposes, both individually and collectively, including but not limited to academic success (with the sociocognitivists emphasizing the “including,” and socioculturalists emphasizing the “not limited to”). Successful literacy teaching is thereby understood to engage readers through co-construction of understandings in social interaction, generating identities and agencies in the classroom for potential life use. This approach attends to cultural relevance (from the student vantage) and thereby leads students to motivated learning in ways that they often find more genuine and responsive to their goals. Students taught in these kinds of educative frames are reported as increasingly able and likely to engage in successful literacy learning.

Engagement can be understood in the flow of these twin currents as involving both external and internal dimensions. External dimensions are brought to the fore when engagement is seen as being about the active involvement of students collectively in educative tasks, projects, modalities, and discourses. This is also an important lens for preparing students for success in higher academic institutions, professions, and the modern, often virtual, workplace. Internal dimensions are brought to the fore when engagement is seen as being about a student’s personal interests, persistent attentions, social and cognitive goals, and active pursuit of cognitive and affective gratifications. It is eminently important on behalf of effective individuation and meaningful identity within a capitalist democracy.

We conclude that many of these themes are also to be found with different inflections in previous theoretical frames. Yet causative assumptions about literacy learning and development today are more complex, multidirectional, and adaptive. The most current work on multimodal and engaged literacies suggests causal loci shifting from learner-external to learner-internal and back again, depending on how and by whom the research is framed. The relationship of structure and function in this work is similarly treated as a potentially opportune affordance, not as an obligatory and binding metaphysical constraint. Whether this is the new normal or a briefly indeterminate interlude before a disciplinary shift to a postcontingent theoretical framework is yet to be determined.