Progression

TL;DR: The articles in this issue explore various progressions in literacy learning, including literacy assessment, biliteracy graduation, language acquisition, and disciplinary literacy. They highlight the importance of collaboration, inclusivity, and context-based learning.

Abstract: As we write this, we are just past the start of another academic year in the United States, with all the new hopes and dreams that accompany the crisp fall air of Upstate New York. Given our production timelines, though, this issue introduction will appear just after the new year, a time when students and teachers are fully enmeshed in school routines and perhaps feeling a little less hopeful about imagined possibilities. Midway through a long school year, it can sometimes be difficult to note the progress that results from one’s efforts, whether one is a student or teacher. The contents of this issue, however, may reignite hope for marking progress. To kick it off, this issue’s commentary authors, Jennifer Childress, Alysia Cella Backman, and Marjorie Y. Lipson, challenge literacy educators to develop new ways to assess students’ literacy learning in “Reframing Literacy Assessment: Using Scales and Micro-Progressions to Provide Equitable Assessments for All Learners.” This team makes the case that knowledgeable literacy educators collaborate to identify indicators of observable formative literacy progress, coplan literacy instruction that will address these issues, and work with adolescent and adult learners to refine these progressions with consideration for students’ aspirations. Childress and her colleagues also share helpful examples so literacy educators can build scales from their models. The lead feature article for this issue, Soria E. Colomer and Chris K. Chang-Bacon’s “Seal of Biliteracy Graduates Get Critical: Incorporating Critical Biliteracies in DualLanguage Programs and Beyond,” also takes up the idea of learning progressions. These authors studied the impact of a U.S. state-level program intended to affirm students’ development of multilingual competence over time. The findings revealed, however, that benefits of the credential were experienced unevenly, depending on graduates’ racial and socioeconomic background. The next article, “‘It Broadens Our Horizon’: English Learners Learn Through Global Literature and Cultural Discussion” by Yang Wang, also deals with progressions of language acquisition in a cross-cultural initiative between Chinese undergraduates and U.S. teachers reading picture books together to support intercultural communicative competence. In both articles, progress is framed not as isolated skill but, rather, as increasing proficiency in context. Addressing the various progressions involved in acquisition of multiple literacies helps literacy educators and learners work together toward learners’ independence. For instance, in “A Three-Tiered Framework for Proactive Critical Evaluation During Online Inquiry,” Elena Forzani offers a heuristic to help students recognize multiple dimensions during their own assessment of online sources, including content, source, and context. As youth become accustomed to critiquing these dimensions, they will also likely be better able to identify other critiqueable progressions, depending on the area of inquiry. Similarly, a key tenet of scholarship in disciplinary literacy is that teachers can, and should, support their students’ acquisition over time of a progression of linguistic practices within disciplines, an effort addressed by Keri-Anne Croce and Montana K. McCormick’s “Developing Disciplinary Literacy in Mathematics: Learning From Professionals Who Use Mathematics in Their Jobs.” These authors share findings from a study that identified disciplinary literacies deployed by adults who use mathematics at work. In both music and mathematics, the term progression is used to refer to a succession—tones or chords in a melody, quantities in an arithmetic progression—allowing