Issue 55 of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, “Lessons From the Field on the Science of Reading: School and Classroom Stories Across Contexts,” launched today, bringing together eight powerful essays that reflect on the current moment in literacy education. Grounded in the lived experiences of teachers, students, and school communities, the issue opens space for exploration, questioning, and dialogue about what it means to support meaningful, equitable literacy learning.
Guest editors Gail Boldt and Patricia Enciso invite readers to look closely at how current approaches are being interpreted and enacted across diverse educational contexts. In the conversation that follows, they highlight the importance of honoring teachers’ professional knowledge, centering students’ experiences, and sustaining a rich, expansive vision of literacy that extends beyond decoding alone. Together, their responses underscore a shared commitment to ensuring that reading remains a deeply human, relational, and intellectually engaging endeavor for all learners.
Boldt is senior editor of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series and is a distinguished professor in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Enciso is professor of innovative arts, literacy, and literature and Section Head of the Critical and Transformative Education program in the Department of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology at the Ohio State University.
Q: What inspired you to center this issue on the “Science of Reading” at this particular moment? What conversations were you hoping to open up or complicate?
A: As lifelong teachers, teacher educators, and literacy researchers, we—along with many of our literacy colleagues—are gravely concerned with how the “Science of Reading” has been adopted and then put into practice through “Structured Literacy.” Although policies and practices vary from state to state, in many instances they have reduced literacy to reading and reading to a phonics-only approach to decoding. Important classroom practices such as read-aloud, literature discussions, silent reading, and the provision of rich classroom libraries– all well-researched practices for developing fluency and engagement in reading–are being eliminated in many iterations of Structured Literacy. Such approaches not only strip children of important strategies for decoding, but they also reduce meaning-making and opportunities for children to experience reading as a rich and worthwhile undertaking. They also strip teachers and students of opportunities to make use of culturally and linguistically important resources and limit teachers’ professional decision-making about how best to support the diversity of learners in their classrooms. We hope this issue will make it clear how these policies are being enacted and experienced on the ground and will return some critical inquiry and dialogue to future policy-making.
Q: As you engaged with contributors, what stood out to you about how these policies are showing up in classrooms and schools? Were there any common threads or surprising differences?
A: Across the pieces submitted for consideration and those that were accepted into the issue, there were several commonalities. All of the contributors were motivated to write for this issue because they care deeply about how children experience literacy and whether they are supported to become successful not only with decoding but with understanding the rich and creative role that literacy can play in their lives. Contributors acknowledged that phonics instruction plays a role in students’ learning to read, but were concerned that phonics alone is not a complete literacy program. They were discouraged by the distrust and dismissal of their experience and questions. Many contributors also noted that the scripted curriculum ignored or denied linguistic and cultural variance in learning to read and presented a uniform curriculum as if all readers are the same. Pieces that featured the voices of children called for a more story-centered and relational curriculum.
Q: This issue brings together voices from a range of contexts. Were there any stories or perspectives that stayed with you or shifted how you think about teaching reading?
A: It is difficult to choose among the many powerful stories that are presented in this issue. We were very moved by the first-person narratives of Black educators whose years of accumulated insights about children’s capacities and reading along with their cultural-relational knowledge will persist despite the restrictive, scripted curricula they are expected to follow. We also value the concept of ‘moral injury’ as a way to describe the tension between meeting children’s needs (book choices, individualized attention) and following a scripted curriculum. The two pieces that describe SoR practices relative to Spanish-dominant children’s language knowledge made a strong impression about the implicit English-first bias found in their observations. We were encouraged by the drawings and thoughts of the children who were asked to explain how they learned to read and were impressed by the fortitude of children who advocated for a richer, literature-based curriculum. Overall, we were heartened by the determination of teachers to continue to respect their own professional experience and knowledge and to work in the best interests of their students.
Q: There’s a lot of discussion right now about balancing phonics with other dimensions of literacy. How do the pieces in this issue help us think more expansively about what strong reading instruction can look like?
A: The Bank Street School for Children teachers and administrators offer a useful description of a multi-year effort to study and integrate phonics-focused word-level reading education with sustained opportunities for wide reading and deep discussion. Literariness and development are valued as a necessary part of literacy education. The piece on mutual flourishing offers an example of holistically sound practices in the midst of an over-rationalized reading program. In this piece, we can see that reading does not have to be an evaluated product but rather an emergent skill and resource, offered, received, and supported through multiple spaces and relationships.
Q: As readers spend time with this issue, what do you hope they carry with them into their own practice or decision-making?
A: We hope teachers see themselves reflected in these articles and begin to name and initiate conversations about the ways people and stories are at the center of all educational endeavors. Reading has been “scientized” and commodified to a degree that makes actual readers with actual books almost unrecognizable in much of the current SoR vision of reading education. We hope teachers will be encouraged and reinvigorated by the stories in this issue. We would like them to find support to argue that their understanding of students’ needs cannot be overwritten by a scripted curriculum and they will trust themselves as professional decision-makers. We hope they see the power of a wide range of child-centered literacy practices and how they will bring classrooms to life and make reading matter in the lives of children.