Early literacy resource provision represents a significant aspect of public library services for children and their families. However, research in this area of librarianship, although growing, has not kept pace. In this paper, two veteran children’s librarians, who are now both emerging early literacy scholars, collaborate on a reexamination of a small segment of existing data in order to demonstrate the affordances of returning to data with another theoretical lens, and doing what they refer to as an “alternate reading.” By tracing the findings that emerge from both of their theoretical lenses, specifically, Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory and Brandt and Clinton’s literacy-in-action, the authors demonstrate the strengths of such collaborations with their chosen theories. They show that using these two different theoretical lenses on the same data allows for other possible meanings to emerge and reveals other threads to follow. These alternate readings lead to deeper understandings of the data and point to other potential areas of research. In an under-studied field such as early literacy in libraries, the authors believe this dual-lens approach to data analysis may inspire other researchers to draw on disparate theories when studying early literacy in public libraries.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Illinois School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Series/Report Name or Number
Library Trends 70 (2). Fall 2021
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113661
DOI
10.1353/lib.2021.0023
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2021 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Library Trends 70 (2) Fall 2021: Family Matters: Mapping Information Phenomena within the Context of the Family. Edited by Nicole K. Dalmer and Sarah Barriage.
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