Centering Learners: Literate Identities and Literacy Education

Abstract

Literate identities are central to the articles presented in this volume, in which contributors interrogate traditional and historical approaches to literacy education. Deficit models inevitably racialize literacies while centering (male) whiteness and decentering learners and their experiences. As the pieces herein illustrate, nearly every aspect of literacy education is affected by deficit perspectives: Testing and assessment, teacher education, student engagement, and classroom practice can all perpetuate deficit views of students and their families. The authors whose work is included in this volume use empirical research to propose practical pedagogical tools that move literacy educators away from deficit and debt models of education and instruction. In so doing, literate identities are not racially marginalized, and nonwhite students are centered rather than othered. Across this volume, we begin to answer the question, What can and should anti-racist, anti-deficit literacy education look like? In “Gateway Moments to Literate Identities,” Enright, Wong, and Sanchez examine literate identities among minoritized high school students. While deficit models racially marginalize the literate identities of Students of color, authoritative literate identities center learners and their identities, languages, and linguistic repertoires. These authors assert that teachers must make instructional choices that reject the former and promote the latter. In their article, “Always at the Bottom: Ideologies in Assessment of Emergent Bilinguals,” Ascenzi-Moreno and Seltzer use translanguaging and raciolinguistic lenses to explore the role of multilingual resources in assessing the reading achievement of emergent bilingual students. While assessment can be problematic for emergent bilinguals in general, they are particularly fraught for Language Learners of color. The authors therefore conclude that existing reading assessments are racialized and call for the development of unbiased assessment tools. In “How Feeling Supports Students’ Classroom Discussions of Literature,” Levine, Trepper, Chung, and Coehlo take on affective evaluation—a form of self-assessment in which readers reflect on their own responses to texts. When deployed in high school classrooms, affective discussions and self-evaluation move students beyond “one right answer” to engage with broader interpretations and more thoughtful discussions that center learners over institutions. Sciurba’s “Black Youth Poetry of 2020 and Reimagined Literacies” applies a critical literacy lens to a discourse analysis of student-written poetry. In this study, the poetry of a Black youth serves as a means to process anti-Blackness in general and in relation to policing practices specifically. Sciurba concludes by offering best Editorial