Literacy at a Crossroads: Apocalypse and/or Opportunity?

Abstract

The global pandemic has dramatically flipped the script on many aspects of our lives. We are now in an environment with increased rates of anxiety, depression, and substance use disorder. We are encountering unprecedented challenges to mental health (National Institutes of Health, 2023). The rapid normalization of remote learning has many educators lagging behind, while the “learning loss” experienced by students over the last three years has been consequential at every level of education. Primary and secondary teachers are leaving the profession at unprecedented rates. Global warming and racial inequities continue to push our apparent social order to the brink of devastation. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, four out of 10 Americans believe that humanity is living in “apocalyptic” times (Diamant, 2022), and the Doomsday Clock by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now the closest it has ever been to midnight (Mecklin, 2023). What does all this mean for literacy research? In this special issue, we tackle this apocalyptic moment not necessarily in the sense of destruction on a catastrophic scale, but in the deeper sense of the term. The Greek root for “apocalypse” (αποκαλυπτω | αποκαλυψισ) is a verb meaning “to uncover, reveal, lay bare, or make transparent what has been hidden.” It is in this sense that we see an opportunity for literacy researchers to play a pivotal role in fostering greater authenticity, transparency, and ultimately transformative action that will lead to repairing and healing our broken world. The articles in this special issue are a modest step in this direction. In “These Tellings: Explosive Love as Literacy Research,” Vaughn W. M. Watson and Joanne E. Marciano move us toward a new vision of literacy at a crossroads. They explore the potential for a different, intense, and possible love in literacy research, teaching, and learning: a cosmic, explosive love. Through the exploration of selected narrative vignettes during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Watson and Marciano name “these tellings” as a means for researchers to assert the possibilities across two interconnected approaches: these tellings as beginnings and our lives as entangled in our work. Despite the challenges of our tumultuous times, Watson and Marciano point to opportunities for (re)conceptualizing prisms through which to engage in literacy research and practice as we recognize, respond to, and build from both joy and heartache urgently present, across times past, current, and to come. In “‘Our Voice and Dreams Matter’: Supporting Youths’ Racial Literacy,” Joanne E. Marciano, Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson, and Alecia Beymer’s qualitative study examines how youth participants in an ongoing community-based literacy initiative sought to increase awareness of racial justice among residents of their subsidized housing community in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 and throughout the 2020–2021 academic year. Drawing on theories of Editorial