Diverse Learners, Diverse Texts: Fostering Inclusivity and Engagement in Literacy Education

Dear Colleagues,

More than thirty years have transpired since Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) called for more multicultural literature to serve as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors for students from diverse backgrounds. Integration of diverse texts remains a hallmark of different asset-based pedagogies, e.g., culturally relevant (Ladson Billings, 1995)/responsive (Gay, 2018), culturally sustaining (Paris, 2012), funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 2005), and queer (Britzman, 2014). Such pedagogical practices seek to foster critical thinking and social change (Hinton and Berry, 2004). Furthermore, educators and researchers have since used this framework to engage with race/ethnicity, citizenship status, gender/gender identity, and sexual orientation, among other important socio-cultural identity markers. As such, “diverse” is defined broadly, to encompass multiple, intersecting social identities.

Demands for increased, diverse representation in children’s and young adult literature have also prompted social movements, most notably #weneeddiversebooks. Such movements, Sciurba (2022) notes, help propel the “very necessary fight for children’s [and young adult] literature that speaks to the vast array of actual… children’s lives and experiences” (p. 26). These movements have been spurred and reignited young adult readers through multiple social platforms and especially “BookTok,” a subcommunity on the app TikTok focused on sharing and commenting about books (Martens et al., 2022).

Operating from a critical youth studies perspective (e.g., Quijada Cerecer et al., 2013), young people are recognized as active and engaged participants in their own literate lives. They are neither simply vessels of literacy education, nor pawns of adult political maneuverings attempting to shape young people into particular molds framed through white heterosexist colonialist perspectives.

Considering, then, inclusivity and engagement, such terms typically emphasize specific practices (or not) within classroom spaces. However, from a critical youth studies perspective, inclusivity and engagement denote youth agency and resistance, in which young people seek to redefine who is included and who is erased from their own diverse contexts. Take, for example, youth protesters in China, Thailand, and Myanmar who used the three-finger salute based in Suzanne Collins’ dystopian Hunger Games trilogy and made widely popular in the films (McGannon, 2021). Although the novels themselves would not typically be construed as “diverse,” young people from widely diverse social settings have embraced the resistance and its symbol, the three-finger salute. In this way, youth themselves are (re)defining inclusivity and engagement with and through literacy frameworks and texts. Moreover, these young people are reconstructing what it means to read the word and the world (Freire, 1985).

This Special Issue welcomes articles that highlight the challenges and resistance taken by teachers and administrators, but most especially students themselves to restrictive literacy education and practices. Applying the question by Sciurba (2022), “How do texts help them (re)imagine their own lives?” (p. 26), authors are encouraged to address how concerns of inclusivity and engagement in literacy education might serve and amplify youth resistance and educational transformation. Sample foci articles might address include:

• How can diverse texts more powerfully serve diverse students globally?
• How do teachers and administrators support young people’s agentive capacities through use of diverse texts?
• How do students themselves use and apply diverse texts to understand, imagine, and construct inclusivity and engagement in educational settings and their broader socio-political worlds?

References

Bishop, R. S. (1990, March). Windows and mirrors: Children’s books and parallel cultures. In M. Atwell & A. Klein (Eds.), California State University reading conference: 14th annual conference proceedings (pp. 3-12). CSUSB Reading Conference.

Britzman, D. P. (2014). Is there a Queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.) Curriculum (pp. 211-231). Routledge.

Freire, P. (1985). Reading the world and reading the word: An interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts, 62(1), 15-21.

Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press.

Hinton, K., & Berry, T. (2004). Literacy, literature and diversity. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48(4), 284-288.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.

Martens, M., Balling, G., & Higgason, K. A. (2022). # BookTokMadeMeReadIt: young adult reading communities across an international, sociotechnical landscape. Information and Learning Sciences, 123(11/12), 705-722.

McGannon, Q. (2021, March 5.) Asia: How the ‘Hunger Games’ salute became a symbol of solidarity across recent protests. Asia Media International. https://asiamedia.lmu.edu/2021/03/05/asia-how-the-hunger-games-salute-became-a-symbol-of-solidarity-across-recent-protests/.

Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (2005). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. In N. González, L. C. Moll, & C. Amanti (Eds.) Funds of knowledge (pp. 71-87). Routledge.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93-97.

Quijada Cerecer, D. A., Cahill, C., & Bradley, M. (2013). Toward a critical youth policy praxis: Critical youth studies and participatory action research. Theory Into Practice, 52(3), 216-223.

Sciurba, K. (2022). Textual relevance, ten years later: Young Black men reflect on a decade of reading experiences. Research in the Teaching of English, 57(1), 23-42.

Prof. Dr. Corrine Wickens
Guest Editor

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• diverse texts
• youth studies
• literacy education
• identity
• critical literacy