Lara J. Handsfield

The Emotional Landscapes of Literacy Coaching Issues of Identity, Power, and Positioning

In this article, the researchers use positioning theory and de Certeau’s theoretical insights into cultural production in everyday life to examine how first-year literacy coaches negotiate issues of power, positioning, and identity during their professional development. Data were collected during a yearlong qualitative study of literacy coaches participating in a district–university partnership to provide professional development to first-year literacy coaches. The researchers used positioning analysis of three small stories drawn from interviews with literacy coaches and one vignette from a professional development session to investigate how the literacy coaches positioned themselves within the moral order of the district’s literacy and professional development model. Findings demonstrate how the literacy coaches both shaped and were shaped by the institutional spaces through which they moved as they tactically negotiated conflicting expectations and discourses about coaching. These negotiations highlight the emotional nature of literacy coaches’ work as they co-constructed their identities and negotiated understandings of how school spaces are used and the purposes of literacy coaching. The researchers argue that it is necessary to move beyond current conceptions of literacy coaching as a series of roles and tasks to recognize the complexities of literacy coaching and to offer more meaningful professional development for literacy coaches.

Cognition and Misrecognition: A Bourdieuian Analysis of Cognitive Strategy Instruction in a Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Classroom

This study reports data from a year-long ethnographic case study of a third-grade teachers literacy instruction for her linguistically and culturally diverse students. Specifically, we use Bourdieus social practice theory (1991, 1998) to examine the teachers linguistic and literate habitus and the discourses of the field converge in her use of cognitive strategy instruction (CSI). In doing so, we spotlight CSI as a site of “struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse” (Bourdieu, 1983, p. 317) of the field of reading instruction and the potential effects for linguistically and culturally diverse students. We adapt Bourdieus theories, however, by situating both habitus and field as performative (Butler, 1993) “as if” spaces (Holland, et al., 1998). Counter to the intentions of many who have developed and advocated the teaching of cognitive reading strategies, we found that CSI was performed in ways that may legitimize narrow conceptions of what “counts” as reading, and even thinking, or cognizing, about texts. At the same time, we identified a small number of instances in which the teachers instruction challenged those conceptualizations. While we argue that CSI can benefit students, particularly those who struggle with reading, we are concerned that it may be implemented in ways that support current standardizing efforts in language and literacy education. We end with a discussion of how CSI might be employed in less prescriptive ways that are more closely attuned to the socially, historically, and politically situated literacy practices students may engage with in their daily lives.

Being and Becoming American: Triangulating Habitus, Field, and Literacy Instruction in a Multilingual Classroom

This case study research documents how one teacher’s personal language and literacy practices and the sociopolitical structures of her profession intersect in her literacy instruction for her multilingual third grade students. Centering my analysis on Graff’s (1987) notion of the “literacy myth,” I discuss how the dialectic between Bourdieu’s habitus and field unfolds in the performative space of the classroom, challenging this discourse in small but significant ways. Complimenting research exploring students’ out-of-school language and literacy practices, this paper addresses how a teacher’s literate life history is performed in the classroom and who stands to benefit from these discursive performances.

Disruptive Comprehension Instruction: Deconstructing, Resituating, and Rewriting Texts

Literacy researchers operating from poststructuralist theoretical perspectives have too often talked past and against issues of concern to teachers and policy-makers (such as reading comprehension) rather than addressing them in productive ways. In response to this concern, the author uses poststructuralist sensibilities to critique and build on traditional approaches to reading comprehension. The author engages in processes of deconstruction, resituating, and rewriting to trouble and reimagine the instructional texts or storylines of comprehension strategy instruction, and draws on examples from her research to illustrate how teachers may engage students in these same processes in their classrooms.

“Do you want an idea of what they’re doing?” Transgressive data generation and analysis within a bilingual writers workshop

We consider how research participants engage alongside researchers as choreographers of data generation and highlight the everyday practices of researchers and participants in motion within and across time and space. Data for this case analysis were generated during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and literacy teacher development. We utilized microethnographic discourse analysis to analyze a video excerpt from a classroom observation during writers workshop in a fourth-grade bilingual classroom. We sought to understand how the teacher’s and students’ discursive moves during the event tactically disrupted the researchers’ agenda in the moment and complicated attempts at data analysis. Our analyses illustrate how the teacher multiply situated herself in ways that trouble dichotomous framings of teachers’ work, such as traditional or nontraditional, as well as dominant conceptualizations of qualitative research, such as data “collection.” We end with implications for interpreting and representing research findings.