ILA’s Literacy Research Panel, chaired by P. David Pearson of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the field’s most distinguished leaders, will offer a comprehensive two-hour session entitled “Priorities for Literacy Policy and Practice” at the International Literacy Association 2015 Conference in St. Louis, MO, Sunday, July 19 from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Panel members will present research perspectives on practice and policy issues, followed by interactive exchanges with members of the audience. A detailed handout with speaker backgrounds, research references, links, and other items is now available for download via the ILA 2015 Conference app.
To enhance audience participation, the session will be presented in four topical segments, with different members of the panel providing commentary and responding to attendee questions in each.
Student Engagement
Student engagement is indispensable to effective literacy instruction, yet many current approaches fall short in this respect. Three panel members will tackle this issue head on:
John T. Guthrie, University of Maryland
“We have a literacy engagement crisis K–12. Instructional focus on skills is not solving the problem. Policymakers should provide guidance, resources, and merit pay for teachers who nourish active readers and writers.”
Gay Ivey, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Children and adolescents do not read and write to get better at it. They do read and write to make sense of themselves, their relationships, and the world. This should be central to what and how we teach.”
Peter H. Johnston, SUNY Albany
“Equity in literacy learning is most likely when students are fully engaged in meaningful literate practices in classroom cultures that consciously and critically attend to matters of equity.”
Diversity, Literacy, and Leadership
Addressing diversity in literacy learning requires strong leadership at many levels in classrooms and schools. A second trio of panel members will take up this critical subject:
Peter P. Afflerbach, University of Maryland
“Students’ reading development and reading achievement: What else matters besides strategies and skills?”
Nell K. Duke, University of Michigan
“Why are we continuing to devote school time to practices that are ineffective?”
William H. Teale, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Raising student literacy achievement—teachers can’t do it alone. Organizational capacity is also needed, so let’s talk about principals as instructional literacy leaders.”
Digital Environments
Digital resources offer enormous potential for rich teaching and learning strategies, but what are the most effective ways of using them? A third trio of panelists will analyze the many challenges involved:
Stuart McNaughton, University of Aukland, New Zealand
“Claims are made about 21st-century skills and new patterns of teaching and learning associated with digital environments. Given fast adoption, there is a need to better understand what these skills are, and research evidence for what the design of effective digital environments looks like.”
Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar, University of Michigan
“Never before has there been such a burgeoning variety of sources of information and text forms with which students, of all ages, can learn and act on the world. These features call for teachers who are designers of learning environments, teachers who are free to use their creative intelligence to plan and enact instruction that avails itself of these resources. However, in the U.S. context, teachers are not experiencing the freedom to exercise creative intelligence.”
Common Core
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) continue to generate controversy and present many challenges for classroom teachers. A final trio of panelists will take a hard look at the current situation.
P. David Pearson, University of California, Berkeley
“Due mainly to its centrality in the CCSS, text complexity has wielded a big policy hammer over the past four years. But complexity is a lot more complex that the version in the CCSS would have us believe. To prevent egregious responses to the demand for increased complexity, we must adopt a more nuanced approach to analyzing how we scale text complexity, text difficulty, and text access.”
Sheila W. Valencia, University of Washington, Seattle
“Although the Common Core State Standards are unique to the U.S., the issues they are intended to address and the associated concerns they raise for students, teachers, administrators, and policymakers are not. Topics such as thoughtful interpretation and implementation of standards, deep/rigorous learning, text complexity, grade-level expectations, and appropriate instruction need open discussion and deliberation to ensure that all students have supportive opportunities to learn.”
The ILA 2015 Conference will be held July 18–20 in St. Louis, MO, with more than 6,000 educators ready to transform their practice. Key topics affecting literacy featured at the conference include content literacy, children’s literature, classroom engagement, and professional development. In addition to conference favorites, including a revamped Teaching Edge series and the Putting Books to Work panels, more than 120 exhibitors will be on hand with new tools and technologies for all manners of literacy education.
Learn more about the conference programs at ilaconference.org or to register.
Dan Mangan is the Director of Public Affairs at the International Literacy Association. Previously, he was ILA’s Strategic Communications Director and Publications Director and launched the original Reading Today magazine and the blog now known as Literacy Daily. He is a veteran of commercial publishing, a former journalist, and an attorney.