Get started
Work

Exchange

Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Dear JAAL Readers, This past year, Kelly observed with interest as U.S.-based friends of hers welcomed Edgar, an exchange student from France, into their home. The family's social media posts documented with amusing detail all of their adventures with Edgar, who appeared to embrace experiences such as eating his first American burger and attending the high school prom with aplomb and good cheer. What struck Kelly as just as fascinating, however, was the fresh take on familiar activities and rituals that Edgar's presence seemed to spark for her friends and their children. The informal photo-essay of his stay that emerged on Facebook demonstrated the reciprocal value of such an exchange for both the hosted and the hosts. Because similar ideas about the value of idea transfer and literacy learning are threaded across the contents of this issue, we chose Exchange as its theme. We hope you will find the issue as engaging and growth producing as Edgar's 10 months in Michigan! Idea exchange among three groups—literacy education professors, classroom teachers, and disciplinary experts—is explored in this issue's commentary, “Intersections of Literacy and Teaching With the Disciplines and Professions: We Asked Some Experts” by Thomas DeVere Wolsey, Diane Lapp, Maria C. Grant, and Ibrahim M. Karkouti. The author team sponsored and analyzed taped conversations that explored constructions of literacy, knowledge, and citizenship in professional communities as disparate as engineering, music, art, and medicine. The dialogues yielded new insights for participants, and now for JAAL readers, about how to support students in leveraging their content knowledge, achieving more communicative precision, and asking better questions. The authors of the first feature article in this issue share Wolsey et al.'s focus on accessing disciplinary expertise from people who typically work outside of schools. In “Digital Storytelling: A District Initiative for Academic Literacy Improvement,” Viet Vu, Mark Warschauer, and Soobin Yim describe an innovative partnership between DIGICOM, a technology-focused nonprofit organization, and an urban school district in southern California. The next article, “Promoting Empathetic Reading With Between Shades of Gray Through a Global Blogging Project” by Melissa Schieble and Lolita Kucinskiene, also demonstrates the value of digital technologies to promote the exchange of perspectives by teachers from the United States and Lithuania who read the same powerful young adult text. The next two articles demonstrate the value of collaborative exchange in supporting teachers’ development of expertise, problem solving, and resilience. KaaVonia Hinton and Yonghee Suh share the results of their carefully conducted critical literature review in “Foregrounding Collaboration in Disciplinary Literacy: Implications From JAAL, 2008–2017.” In “Embracing Wobble: Exploring Novice Teachers’ Efforts to Enact Dialogic Literacy Instruction,” Trevor Thomas Stewart, Dawan Coombs, Bob Fecho, and Todd Hawley document how an oral inquiry process helped early-career teachers navigate snags and complexities while seeking to enact responsive pedagogy in new contexts. Both pieces point to the benefits for literacy teachers of seeking common cause with others. Note. © nito/Shutterstock.com. The color figure can be viewed in the online version of this article at https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/. Our department editors offer invited content that similarly illuminates the generativity of exchange, particularly when teachers and learners work together in new ways or new contexts. In “Earning or Learning, or Not: Reconnecting Young Adults With Learning Through Multiliteracies Pedagogy,” Barbara Comber and Jenni Carter describe a transformational filmmaking program for young school leavers seeking work, for the Critical Perspectives on Literacy Policy and Practice department that Hilary Janks and Barbara curate in alternate issues with George G. Hruby. Danielle Filipiak and Limarys Caraballo write about youths’ participation in an intergenerational research collective in “Growing Together: Literacy and Agency in an Early-College Research Collaborative,” a contribution to the Sustaining Multilingual Literacies department that Limarys edits with Danny C. Martinez. Elyse Eidman-Aadahl contributes a personal and historical retrospective in “Getting Better at Getting Better: Lessons From the National Writing Project” for the Leading Literacy Change department, edited by Cynthia Greenleaf, Mira-Lisa Katz, and Aaron Wilson. Beyond Struggling: Transforming Literacy Teaching, the department edited by Katherine K. Frankel and Maneka Deanna Brooks, features “Humanizing the Practice of Witnessing Trauma Narratives,” Rossina Zamora Liu's reflective narrative of leading a shelter-based writing group for adults. The Text & Resources Review Forum for this issue introduces and interprets materials that we suspect you will want to exchange with colleagues and read closely on your own. In “Protest, Power, and Possibilities: The Need for Agitation Literacies,” a contribution to the Texts and Identities forum edited by Alfred W. Tatum, Gholnecsar E. Muhammad offers a four-part critical framework to help students “read and make sense of texts that ignite social change.” Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey spotlight three compelling studies on “Teacher Credibility in Literacy Learning” for the Research forum they share, in alternating issues, with Josephine Peyton Marsh and Deborah Gonzalez. M. Kristiina Montero's Professional Resources forum features “Transforming Empathy: A Review of Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement” by Cathy Miyata, a timely take on new work by Nicole Mirra. Hosting or being an exchange student like Edgar is still relatively rare. Despite the potential benefits of such interactions, many of us will never experience them directly. We suspect that the majority of JAAL readers have, like us, experienced other meanings of the term exchange: currency transfer, for instance, in anticipation of international travel, or the return of an unwanted or ill-fitting item to a retail establishment to be replaced by a more desirable one. These more common instances of exchange still strike us as relevant to the material assembled in this issue, as well as to literacy teaching and learning more broadly. Such exchanges create a context where individuals are better prepared and more comfortable for whatever scenario they envision, where what they carry aligns more squarely with their personal purposes and goals. We hope that the principles and practices described in this issue help you construct literacy pedagogies that do something similar for the learners you know best. Best, Kelly and Kathy
DOI: 10.1002/jaal.1019
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4243790832
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: 10