April Newsletter

By Lesley Bartlett & Jonathan Marino, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In the wake of Education for All in the 1990s and the expansion of basic education, development organizations like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have pushed to advance education quality by improving early grade reading and expanding the measurement of learning. To launch this work, USAID and its major implementing partners adapted Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) and rebranded it as the Early Grade Reading Assessment, or EGRA (Hoffman, 2012). By 2011, EGRA had been adapted and applied in 50 countries and 70 languages; the results have been used to lobby Ministries of Education to reform the curriculum, teaching and learning materials, and educator professional development. While the tool has brought welcome and necessary attention to the quality of early grade reading globally, it nonetheless poses challenges that merit consideration, which we explore here.

Background on EGRA

EGRA is rooted in the U.S. reading literature and specifically the National Reading Panel’s (NRP) (2000) influential report, Teaching Children to Read. The National Reading Panel privileged cognitive and psychological studies with experimental designs (Coles, 2000) and based its recommendations on research published in English and conducted primarily on learning to read in English. The National Reading Panel Summary reduced the ...

To read the rest of this month's SSO article, click here.

Originally published in 2009, Elizabeth’s Swaggerty’s piece, “That Just Really Knocks Me Out”: Fourth Grade Students Navigate Postmodern Picture Books, explores a then emerging nontraditional print genre, postmodern picture books, and urges JoLLE readers to think deeply about reader engagement with traditional print texts. Ten years later, Swaggerty revisits her work to reflect on the progression of postmodern picture books and speak to the possibilities associated with the medium’s use in the classroom. This Take 2 ends in a call to both educators and policy makers, as Swaggerty addresses the importance of prioritizing student-led discussions about text and the development of students’ positive reading identities through critical skills and provides ways that postmodern picture books can assist in meeting the evolving needs of our students.

A Second Look from Author Elizabeth Swaggerty
Frank Serafini’s (2005) work, Voices in the Park, Voices in the Classroom: Readers Responding to Postmodern Picture Books” inspired a focus on postmodern picture books for my dissertation research. I was intrigued by the complexities and affordances of this nontraditional picture book genre and Serafini’s success teaching intermediate grade children to read them. I wondered what would happen if successful readers navigated these books without explicit instruction or the guidance of a teacher. I spent six weeks watching eight fourth grade students navigate...

To read more from our Take 2, click here.

William Terrell Wright is a Ph.D. student at The University of Georgia in the Department of Language and Literacy Education and is the current Poetry, Fiction, and Visual Arts Editor for the Journal of Language and Literacy Education (JoLLE). Specializing in English Education, William’s research interests include teacher education, participatory action research, critical media literacy, and community gaming. Before coming to Georgia, William received his Master’s in Secondary English Education from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and spent three years as a high school English teacher in a rural Title-I school. In his spare time, William roller skates, contra dances, and hikes in the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains.

For more information about our editorial board, please click here.