Editorial: Advancing literacy rights: teachers’ roles in policy advocacy in multilingual settings

The concept of multiliteracies, first articulated by the New London Group (1996), expands literacy beyond traditional print-based models to encompass multimodal and culturally situated practices. It emphasizes the integration of linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and digital modes of meaning-making within educational contexts (Cope and Kalantzis, 2023). At the same time, global discussions surrounding the Science of Reading continue to influence literacy policy by foregrounding phonics-based instruction and cognitive approaches to reading development. While these frameworks offer valuable insights into reading acquisition, they often struggle to account for the realities of multilingual learners whose linguistic repertoires extend across multiple languages and cultural domains. In engaging with these tensions, this Research Topic speaks back to dominant interpretations of the Science of Reading-not in opposition, but in extension-foregrounding the need to situate reading instruction within multilingual, culturally diverse, and policy-sensitive contexts that such frameworks do not always fully account for. The resulting tension between standardized reading frameworks and context-sensitive literacy practices raises critical questions about equity, inclusion, and the role of teachers in advocating for literacy policies that recognize linguistic diversity. This is a provisional file, not the final article