20 Research Articles for 2020

"Critical Expressionism: Expanding Reader Response in Critical Literacy" by Maureen McLaughlin and Glenn DeVoogd (The Reading Teacher, 2019)

Expanding on their 2004 article, McLaughlin and DeVoogd propose a broader view of critical responses to reading that include new modes of teaching and responding. Under the term critical expressionism, they invite teachers to consider possibilities for student engagement that include digital images, self-authored digital texts, comics, dramatizations, films, songs, podcasts, and art. Allowing for a variety of representations provides students with greater opportunities to express their thinking in our multifaceted, multimodal world. Through vignettes and student artifacts from three elementary classrooms, McLaughlin and DeVoogd discuss challenges that teachers may encounter when implementing critical literacy and critical expressionism. The critical expressions that students created in response to reading from a critical stance demonstrate how expanding response options allows students to play to their strengths, thereby diversifying reasoning, deepening understanding, and motivating and engaging learners.

—Reviewed by Brittany Adams, State University of New York at Cortland

McLaughlin, M., & DeVoogd, G. (2019). Critical expressionism: Expanding reader response in critical literacy. The Reading Teacher, 73(5), 587–595. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1878