01/16/2025
SUNY Cortland’s Literacy Department has assumed leadership of an influential, peer-reviewed journal read by practicing teachers and literacy experts across New York state.
Department chair Katarina Silvestri, an associate professor, and Nance Wilson, a professor in the Literacy and Jewish Studies departments, have taken on the top editorial roles for The Language and Literacy Spectrum.
The annual, online journal is published by the New York State Reading Association (NYSRA), and is focused on Most articles focus on classroom practice, research and theory in literacy.
For years, Keli A. Garas-York, a professor at Buffalo State, served as lead editor, but the nonpaid, volunteer position added a lot to her workload. She thought it was time for others to take on this important role, which offers an opportunity to impact the field of literacy education. The change was announced in June.
“We knew that we have a strong department team and that it wouldn’t be an overwhelming task,” Wilson said. “So, we saw a way to collaborate with a colleague at Buffalo State and help them to relieve a responsibility that they had been dedicated to for years, while at the same time providing an opportunity for SUNY Cortland’s Literacy Department.”
Silvestri and Wilson said that the exceptional reputation of their department helped lead to the editorship. Additionally, the fact that the Literacy Department has their own resources as a full department at Cortland rather than just a program in another department, added to the ability to take on the role.
“Our (the Literacy Department’s) expertise as scholars and academics was definitely a part,” Wilson said.
Other department members will support the work reviewing, organizing and providing mentored feedback for potential authors.
“We work well together, and I think that on top of that we can consider our colleagues as well as they’re able to support in reviewing and being a second set of eyes on something,” Silvestri said. “We’re making a decision editorially to also provide our department the opportunity to maybe coauthor the opening of the journal.”
The latest edition of The Language and Literacy Spectrum is accepting potential articles until Feb. 1. Content from K-12 practitioners, literacy researchers and presenters from the annual New York State Reading Association conference is all encouraged.
“I hope that we can provide a good, robust experience for anyone new to publishing so that they can get mentored into that,” Silvestri said. “I think it’s important to contribute that kind of mentorship to the field and it doesn’t necessarily happen in a lot of places. My hope and dream for this is that we can create the structures that we want to see in publishing. Hopefully (we) talk about it and write about it and maybe other publishers will follow.”
That the journal is readily available to any interested readers makes Wilson see it as an opportunity to encourage discussion on an important topic in education. She said that one of their goals is to emphasize a wider depth of literacy that includes reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing and creating in different modes, and for different purposes.
“Because it’s an open access journal that anyone can download and get from the web, I hope to contribute to the actual research-based considerations about what is literacy,” Wilson said. “Because right now across the field there are a lot of people talking about what literacy is but they’re not in the schools and they are defining a very narrow nature of literacy. I hope as an open access journal we can have some impact.”
The NYSRA describes itself as an all-inclusive volunteer organization of members who are passionate about literacy, with a goal to share and support efforts to improve literacy education for people of all ages on local, state and global levels