Theorizing Early Literacy in the Public Library

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 understudied 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.