Beyond Divides: Theoretical and Methodological Pluralism as a Principled Stance in Literacy Research

Abstract

This integrative research review panel examines how literacy researchers can cultivate more productive scholarship by working across, between, and against the methodological and theoretical boundaries that have traditionally organized our field. Each paper takes up a different dimension of this challenge. Jang introduces Critical Quantitative Research (CritQuant), Quantitative Critical Race Theory (QuantCrit), and Critical Quantitative Literacy (CQL) as reflexive frameworks for reading numerical data with the same critical attention literacy scholars bring to other texts, arguing that quantitative methods can serve justice-oriented aims when researchers interrogate the assumptions, categories, and interpretive frames built into their data. Wickens draws on queer theory and third space to trouble the fixed boundaries of academic disciplines, illustrating through three research projects—spanning postqualitative research and linguistics, physical education and literacy integration, and postpandemic educational theory—how working in disciplinary interstices opens new analytical possibilities that bounded fields foreclose. Townsend navigates the tensions inherent in intervention research with multilingual adolescents, demonstrating through Project SPARK how reflexive tools drawn from QuantCrit and related frameworks can help researchers honor students’ linguistic resources and identities while maintaining the methodological rigor needed to inform scalable instructional practice. Taken together, the three papers make a shared case for methodological pluralism—not as eclecticism or compromise, but as a principled stance that treats the spaces between our methods, theories, and disciplines as generative sites for more equitable and more accountable literacy research.