Abstract
In this chapter, I consider how research in the field of literacy illuminates convergences of understandings about how people learn culled from the fields of biology, psychology, and neuroscience. I further consider how research in the field of literacy could be enhanced by drawing more deeply on state-of-the-art findings about how human learning unfolds. To support this discussion, I examine emerging understandings about literacy learning and development in the areas of reading and multiliteracies and across transnational contexts. I conclude by suggesting an equity-oriented agenda for literacy research and practice that leverages and advances existing knowledge about how people learn.
In this chapter, I consider how research in the field of literacy illuminates convergences of understandings about how people learn culled from the fields of biology, psychology, and neuroscience. I further consider how research in the field of literacy could be enhanced by drawing more deeply on state-of-the-art findings about how human learning unfolds. To support this discussion, I examine emerging understandings about literacy learning and development in the areas of reading and multiliteracies and across transnational contexts. I conclude by suggesting an equity-oriented agenda for literacy research and practice that leverages and advances existing knowledge about how people learn.
Human beings learn through complex processes that involve dynamic coactions among social, cultural, biological, cognitive, emotional, and environmental systems (Immordino-Yang et al., 2019; Lee et al., 2020; Nasir et al., 2021). Recent research adds new understandings about how human learning is deeply social, beginning in early infancy and extending throughout the life span (Immordino-Yang et al., 2019). To be sure, biological and cognitive processes are simultaneously coacting with social and emotional processes in the course of learning. The human brain develops by generating, strengthening, organizing, reorganizing, and discarding neural connections as a person engages in the social relationships, practices, and experiences that coordinate learning (Immordino-Yang et al., 2019). Findings from research on literacy learning add texture to these understandings of the coactive processes involved in human learning.
Reading
The processes through which children learn to read continue to ignite the interests and passions of literacy researchers, the broader public, and policymakers. Reading researchers over almost 4 decades have offered and refined sociocognitive perspectives on reading and reading comprehension that account for the roles of context, culture, time, cognition (including individual differences), and socioemotional resources in how people learn to read and evolve in their practice as readers across time and contexts (Arya & Maul, 2021; Frankel et al., 2016; Gotlieb et al., 2022; Langer, 1986; Ruddell et al., 2018). Notwithstanding the scientific agreement about the multiple coactive processes involved in reading, there remains an enduring policy and practice debate about effective reading instruction, especially for early readers. These ongoing debates suggest ideological position-taking in the face of empirical knowledge.
The recent revision of the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2026 Reading Framework illustrates such ongoing ideological challenges (Forzani et al., 2022). Forzani et al. (2022), who served on an expert panel commissioned to develop the Revised NAEP 2026 Reading Framework, reflected on a politicized process in which those with policy-wielding power intentionally diminished the contributions of culture, context, and emotional resources in defining what it means to read. With a partial view of reading guiding the assessment design, there are concerns about how this national assessment could accurately capture and explain the achievement of a geographically dispersed and racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse population of U.S. students.
The important roles of context and culture as part of the coactive processes of reading are evident in research in the area of disciplinary literacy (e.g., Dobbs et al., 2016; Lee, 2007; Moje, 2008; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). The concept of disciplinary literacy accounts for a wider range of variables than originally conceptualized within content area literacy for reading successfully in the academic disciplines. Disciplinary literacy attends to the ways of knowing, understanding, doing, and valuing in academic disciplines and so gets at fundamental ideas within the learning and developmental sciences related to culture, context, and identity (e.g., Spencer, 2006, 2008; Spencer et al., 2015)—the cultures of the disciplines, disciplines as communities of practice, and disciplinarian/professional identity (Lave, 1991; Lee & Spratley, 2010; Moje, 2008).
One important recent turn in the field is the attention to critical disciplinary literacy, having to do with questioning the ontological and epistemological bases of disciplinary knowledge (Dyches & Gunderson, 2021; Wilson-Lopez et al., 2017; Wrenn & Gallagher, 2021). This strand encourages questions about who created particular knowledges and for what purposes. One end goal is to center the socioculturally and historically situated knowledges of Indigenous peoples and other racialized groups that are core to their systems of human organization and learning but that have been intentionally marginalized in Eurocentric schools. Although the concept of critical disciplinary literacy is relatively new to the field, work in this area reflects established research that documents how everyday cultural practices around language repertoires and a wider array of texts beyond what is identified as formal disciplinary texts are resources for scaffolding more expansive disciplinary reading (e.g., Lee, 2007).
Multiliteracies, Affect, and the Transnational Context
Multiliteracies
Understandings about literacy learning, including and beyond the domain of reading literacy, have been supported by theoretical expansions of literacy as practice that include multiliteracies theory (New London Group, 1996). The concept of literacy as practice underscores the inherently social and relational nature of all human learning by maintaining that literacy involves all goal-directed acts of meaning-making and communication carried out in social and cultural contexts using an array of available technologies, not limited to electronic media (Barton et al., 2000; Heath, 1983; Street, 1984). Moving beyond a view of literacy as a decontextualized act of reading and writing the printed word, multiliteracies acknowledges the multiple modes (oral, aural, gestural, linguistic, spatial, and multimodal) available for expressing and generating meaning (for more on multimodal theory, see Kress, 2009). Multiliteracies theory has enabled scholars to focus on the relationships between literacies and identities, showing, for example, how literacy is connected to gender, sexuality and sexual orientation, race, and culture (Blackburn, 2003; Leent & Mills, 2018; Player, 2022; Price-Dennis et al., 2017; Reid, 2022), and it has generated a groundswell of research aimed at understanding how literacy learning occurs across dynamic outside-school contexts, both local and global, in which people engage in their self-sponsored literacies and embrace a range of social processes and cultural practices. This area of research, with its heavy focus on school-age youth, has identified important features of learning environments that are inclusive of and further build youth literacies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2005, 2016; de los Ríos, 2018; Nash & Brady, 2022; Skerrett & Bomer, 2011, 2013).
Affect
A recent “affective turn” in literacy research proposes to expand understandings of literacy beyond what multiliteracies and multimodal theory can offer by attending to the body, its feelings, and its emotions (individually and collectively felt) in the course of literacy engagement. This affective turn (A. Ahmed, 2016; Boldt & Leander, 2020; Dutro, 2019; Ehret & Rowsell, 2021; Lenters, 2016) aligns with ideas within the learning sciences of how emotion and feeling are integral to all learning processes (Cantor et al., 2021; Gotlieb et al., 2022; Immordino-Yang et al., 2019; Immordino-Yang et al., this volume; Nasir et al., 2020). Literacy scholars working in this tradition draw from various scholars to define and discuss affect and emotion. For example, the work of Sara Ahmed (2013) and her concept of “stickiness” is becoming common in theorizing how particular emotions come to define a literacy experience for an individual or a collective. Literacy scholars often combine ideas from assemblage theory (drawing frequently on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) with discussions of emotion and affect to move beyond the idea of a rational, goal-directed individual engaging with specific tools for predetermined literacy goals toward understanding the indeterminate nature of literacy practice (e.g., Leander & Boldt, 2013). Lenters (2016), for example, wrote that “in literacy learning, consideration of affect provides a means for exploring those unconscious forces—physical and cognitive intensities—within an individual’s learning assemblage that work to support, motivate, and inspire literate engagements” (p. 286). Although discussions about assemblage, affect, and emotion vary in this research literature, the argument is centered in the idea that the emotions and bodily affects accompanying literacy engagement are significant mediators of how literacy is experienced and learned.
Transnational Context
In addition to increasing attention to all of what the human mind and body bring to literacy learning, literacy scholars are expanding their views about the contexts in and across which literacy learning occurs. Research on border-crossing or transnational students is another area of literacy research that exemplifies understandings of literacy learning as contextual, interactional, and intersectional and constitutes a third critical area of inquiry. “Transnationalism” refers to the phenomenon wherein people live their lives across two or more nation-states to maximize economic, social, educational, political, and other opportunities (Lam & Warriner, 2012; Levitt, 2001). Transnationalism as an area of study has been taken up in diverse academic fields such as anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, global/international studies, media and communication studies, composition, linguistics, and literacy. In the area of literacy, scholarship has focused on the meaning-making and communication practices in which transnational people engage across contexts, for different purposes, and across time (Lam & Warriner, 2012). For example, literacy scholarship has shown the particular purposes of writing in transnational life, such as to establish economic need, acquire citizenship status, maintain intimate partnerships, and reflect on life (de los Ríos, 2018; Gallo & Adams Corral, 2023; Skerrett, 2012; Viera, 2016, 2019). Much of this work has focused on the specific uses of digital media and other technologies in transnational life and on building and sustaining transnational communities and multilingual reading and writing repertoires (Lam, 2014; Lam & Christiansen, 2022; Machado & Hartman, 2021; Martínez-Roldán & Sayer, 2006). In these and other cases, literacy research about transnational learners holds potential for advancing understandings of how people learn, negotiate different social and cultural norms, navigate differences in languages of instruction, and draw on curricular knowledge across different national educational systems, exemplifying the complex factors at play in learning and development (Kwon, 2022; Skerrett, 2015; Zúñiga & Hamann, 2015).
Conclusions
The current knowledge base in the field of literacy today reflects emerging understandings within the sciences of learning and human development about how people learn (e.g., see Immordino-Yang et al., this volume). In terms of an equity agenda, studies of youth literacy learning in contexts beyond school continue to hold great potential for showing the rich literate lives of students, including those historically placed at risk in educational institutions. Such research holds schooling contexts and educational policies and practices accountable for their frequent failure to offer socially, emotionally, culturally, and academically nurturing learning environments for the most vulnerable of students (Lee et al., 2020).
Literacy researchers can advance collaborative research in literacy classrooms in which they partner with teachers and learners to leverage knowledge about how students learn and practice literacy in contexts beyond school. Such inquiries and resulting pedagogical practice would not be solely oriented toward promoting students’ acquisition of the literacies valued by school. Rather, research and practice that value learners’ whole literate lives would seriously consider what the literacies in which young people are invested suggest for the design and foci of school learning environments. Moving forward in this way, literacy scholarship can continue to illuminate and contribute enhanced understandings to the sciences concerned with how people learn.
Footnotes
Author
ALLISON SKERRETT is a professor of language and literacy studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines literacy in the lives of racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse youth, including as these occur across transnational contexts. Her research has been published in Journal of Literacy Research, Reading Research Quarterly, and Teachers College Record, among other outlets.