Connections

Dear JAAL Readers, We wrote this introduction separately from our homes, communicating by telephone and a shared Google document to reduce internet bandwidth requirements so the other people in our families, who include both teachers and K–12 students, were better able to pursue their own work online. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were four weeks into what our governor, Andrew Cuomo, calls “New York on PAUSE,” a comprehensive plan to flatten the infection curve that closes all nonessential businesses, prohibits in-person gathering, and encourages social distancing. Our university moved all classes and meetings to digital spaces, so we are learning to use new tools for old purposes and old tools in new ways. Like so many others, we are feeling anxious and uncertain, worrying about loved ones’ health, massive unemployment, disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations, and the state of the economy in general. We recognize and are grateful for our own current blessings and privileges, realizing that this could change momentarily. We hope the public health crisis in which we are now immersed has somewhat abated by the time this issue goes to press. Yet, we suspect that we all will continue to be dealing with the fallout from this crisis well into the future. From where we sit, the news isn’t all grim, however. Our social isolation has, ironically enough, allowed many of us to connect with one another in new ways. Some families are gathering for games and for collective exercise, whereas they previously struggled, given busy schedules, to be in close proximity. People are figuring out creative mechanisms to mark milestones, celebrate birthdays, and drink cocktails together without putting one another at risk. When we looked at this issue’s content, most of which was completed before the pandemic, we saw evidence of connections that reflect the same kinds of creativity, hybridity, and linkages that we’re seeing all around us today. For this reason, we decided on Connections as the theme for this issue. Our timely commentary for this issue, “Digital Citizenship During a Global Pandemic: Moving Beyond Digital Literacy” by Beth A. Buchholz, Jason DeHart, and Gary Moorman, raises important new questions about supporting all literacy learners’ ability to forge new connections as global citizens. In their piece, these authors make instructional recommendations linked to a framework proposed by the International Society for Technology in Education and examine long-standing inequities that are amplified in current times. They challenge us as literacy educators to “re-create and reimagine a more expansive and experiential view of the critical literacy practices necessitated for digital citizenship in the post-COVID-19 world.” The first of the feature articles in this issue takes up themes of connection related to college readiness and the transition from secondary schools to college. Juliet Michelsen Wahleithner’s interview findings in “The High School–College Disconnect: Examining First-Generation College Students’ Perceptions of Their Literacy Preparation” reveal students’ desire for more guidance from their high school teachers around reading, writing, and research. As we see in “Reading Motivation in High School: Instructional Shifts in Student Choice and Class Time,” Johnny B. Allred and Michael E. Cena also elicited students’ perspectives on the instructional approaches they were experiencing, yielding helpful survey data to guide adjustments to literature instruction. Both articles encourage teachers to connect their decision making directly to student responses, rather than relying too heavily on their own views and experiences. The next two feature articles focus on connections associated with writing for learners and learning. “Ocean Swimmer, Woodchopper, Road Tripper: Using Metaphor to Develop Students’ Identities as Writers” was coauthored by university faculty member Margaret Perrow and two of her undergraduate students, Mary (Lauren) Feldstein and Arlene Sieler. Drawing on snippets from essays by all three collaborators, the team argues that constructing metaphors about writing is valuable in promoting metacognition and reflection. In “Becoming an Author: Engaging High School Students in Disciplinary Practices,” Lorvic García-Verdugo and Guadalupe López-Bonilla demonstrate how one high school physics student’s construction of a research article helped connect him to the science community’s ways of knowing. The last three feature articles in this issue have in common an emphasis on connecting the known to the new. These articles are “Literacy Coaching With Teachers of Adolescent English Learners: Agency, Sustainability, and Transformation for Equity” by Jennifer Sharples Reichenberg, “Making Space: Complicating a Canonical Text Through Critical, Multimodal Work in a Secondary Language Arts Classroom” by Ashley K. Dallacqua and Annmarie Sheahan, and “Adolescent Learning of Academic Vocabulary in Iceland” by Sigríður Ólafsdóttir, Barbara Laster, and Kristján K. Stefánsson. Each considers new contexts and puts a fresh twist on existing bodies of scholarship about literacy coaching, literature study, and vocabulary that have served practitioners well. We’ve recently been able to forge new connections with a slate of incoming department editors for this, our last volume year as editors. Our new collaborators include Chauncey Monte-Sano, faculty at the University of Michigan, who heads up a department named Culturally Sustaining Disciplinary Literacies. This issue’s contribution is “Expanding Conceptions of Modeling Writing to Leverage Student Voices” by Chandra L. Alston. Kimberly N. Parker, an educator who works with both preservice teachers and K–8 students, offers a new department called Students and Teachers: Inquiring Together, along with a first article that shares its title with the department. Adult literacy education gets the spotlight in a new department, We’re All Adults Here, edited by Kristen H. Perry from the University of Kentucky. This issue’s column is entitled “Graphic Novel Text Sets and Social Justice Inquiry Projects,” by Erik Jacobson. All educators will be able to learn new lessons from “What Constitutes Community? Ethnographic Perspectives on Adolescent and Adult Literacy Practice,” authored by Boston College colleagues Jon M. Wargo and Gabrielle Oliveira for their coedited department, Community Literacies: Anthropological Perspectives in Practice. David Slomp, from the University of Lethbridge, offers his first column, “Sex, Finance, and Literacy Assessment,” in Literacy Assessment for Learning, a new department that takes on issues and applications associated with current approaches to literacy assessment for adolescents and adults. Our last volume year also includes two new editors for the Text & Resource Review Forum. E. Sybil Durand, faculty at Arizona State University, orchestrates reviews of adolescent and adult literature for classroom use in the Global Texts and Contexts department. In this issue, she offers “Revisiting Homelands: Immigrant Youth in Transnational Contexts.” Professional Resources forum reviews are orchestrated by Cynthia H. Brock at the University of Wyoming and Vassiliki (Vicky) I. Zygouris-Coe at Central Florida University. Their department features a review that they authored with colleagues Kate Welch, Kate Kniss, and Andrea Hayden entitled “Engaging in Disciplinary Literacy Instruction: A Review of Read, Write, Inquire: Disciplinary Literacy in Grades 6–12.” We hope this first issue of our last volume year provides you with some connections that add to your pedagogical practices even in these challenging times. We wish the following for all of you: that your health be robust, your communities strong, and your internet and interpersonal connections steady and supportive. Additionally, may literacy, including the contents of this issue, be a source of inspiration and comfort. Best, Note. © Lightspring/Shutterstock.com. The color figure can be viewed in the online version of this article at http://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/.

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