An Unjust State: Examination of Adolescents Still Developing Foundational Skills

Session Submission Type: Alternative Format Session

Abstract

Reading performance of secondary students remains a persistent challenge (Baye et al.,
2019). As of 2019, the most recent NAEP testing for high school students, thirty-seven percent of
twelfth graders performed at or above proficient with little statistically significant change since
1994 (NCES, 2019). As noted by researchers over the last fifty years, a myriad of educational
considerations factor into this data: lack of strategic instruction in secondary education
(Hinchman & O’Brien, 2019); interrelated affective challenges associated with academic reading
including student self-efficacy (Schunk & Miller, 2002), student motivation (Guthrie et al., 2013;
Gilson et al., 2018) and identity (Alvermann, 2001; Learned, 2016; Leighton et al., 2024);
limited meaningful and engaging texts (Hopper, 2005; Ivey & Johnston, 2017); limited diversity
of representation in secondary curriculum (Marshall, 2021). Thus, this session derives from the
basic premise that adolescents who demonstrate minimal foundational skills is not simply a
problem of practice, currently framed in the renewed reading wars (MacPhee et al., 2021; Yaden,
et al., 2021). Rather, it is a manifestation of epistemic injustice (Dunne, 2023).
The concept of epistemic injustice refers to the silencing or misrepresentation of
knowledge from groups or individuals (Fricker, 2007). The construct delineates “a distinctive
class of wrongs, namely those in which someone is ingeniously downgraded and/or
disadvantaged in respect of their status as an epistemic subject” (Fricker, 2017, p. 53). In this
case, we recognize social and institutional barriers engendered through limited decoding and
other foundational reading skills as mechanism by which young people—of whom
disproportionate percentage are BIPOC youth—are discredited, their ways of knowing and
understanding denigrated, and their collective bodies derided (Love, 2023).
The purpose of this special interactive session by Area 6 Adolescent, College, and Adult
Literacy Processes is to engage in diverse theoretical stances and approaches around challenges
experienced by adolescent students, educators and scholars when adolescents struggle to
effectively decode. We have invited panelists who represent broad theoretical paradigms of
cognitive psychology, sociocultural, and [] to respond to the overarching question: How can
school systems enact just policies around the unjust reality of adolescents who are still
developing foundational skills?
The following descriptions outline the proposed perspectives from different panelists:
1. While research on foundational skills instruction has sometimes been conducted with
culturally and linguistically diverse adolescents, rarely has such instruction been culturally
and linguistically responsive. Adolescents bring deep funds of linguistic and knowledge
resources to schools, and the panelists called on the field to re-vision foundational skill
instruction with this focus. In a recent special issue for the Journal of Adolescent and Adult
Literacy, the panelists ask multiple scholars to address this gap, and the panelists will share
the themes that emerged in the special issue.
2. Drawing upon sociocultural frameworks around identity, positioning, and activity, Dr.
Frankel will briefly highlight key findings from 20 years of qualitative research of reading
intervention classes in secondary grades. She will trouble traditional typical adult-student
relations within hierarchical school spaces, particularly those of secondary literacy
classrooms. She argues around the persistent framing of adolescent literacy interventions as
remediation as remedy, when what is truly called for involves the activity of re-mediation.
3. As a former high school director of curriculum and literacy coordinator as well as current
professor and researcher of adolescent literacies, Dr. Manderino will raise questions about
how we measure skills and how we scaffold them through practices such as cultural
modeling (Lee, 1995). Rather than focus on deficit orientations to skills, the discussion will
revolve around explicit connections to funds of knowledge (Moll, et. al), cultural data sets
(Lee), and affect (Levine) as well as cognition. Rather than focus on binaries, he will
advocate for an and/both approach to skill development and culturally sustaining practices.

Content Area

• AREA 6. Adolescent, College, and Adult Literacy Processes

Chair

• Corrine M Wickens, Northern Illinois University

Discussant

• Kathleen A Hinchman, Syracuse University

Presenters

• Christina L. Dobbs, Boston University

• Sarah M Lupo, James Madison University

• Dianna Townsend, University of Nevada, Reno

• Katherine Frankel, Boston University

• Michael Manderino, Northern Illinois University