The Metatheoretical Assumptions of Literacy Engagement

Abstract

In this review of literacy education research in North America over the past century, the authors examined the historical succession of theoretical frameworks on students’ active participation in their own literacy learning, and in particular the metatheoretical assumptions that justify those frameworks. The authors used motivation and engagement as focal topics by which to trace this history because of their conceptual proximity to active literacy participation. They mapped the uses of motivation and engagement in the major literacy journals and handbooks over the past century, constructed a grounded typology of theoretical assumptions about literate agency and its development to code those uses, and reviewed similar histories of theoretical frameworks in educational, psychological, philosophical, and literary scholarship to draft a narrative history of the emergence of engaged literacies.