A Critical Examination of Student Labeling Practices in Reading Education and Research

• In Event: Agency and Implicatedness in Postcolonial, Global Contexts of Education: Interrogating Race, Language, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

This theoretical paper critically explores academic labeling practices in reading curricula, pedagogy, and research to argue that labels like “struggling reader” are not only simplistic and reductive, but also harmful to students. Taking up postcolonial and feminist understandings of subjectivity (Davies, 2005; Trinh, 1989) and gaze (Fanon, 1952/2008), I consider how teachers’ and researchers’ uses of language (including my own) act to position adolescent readers in narrow ways. More specifically, I argue that language use and (re)naming practices ­ tools of power historically used by colonizers to control, reorganize, and subjugate colonized peoples (Smith, 2012; Trinh, 1989) ­ have similarly served to control and construct adolescent youth as different kinds of readers in schools. My analysis suggests ways in which working­class and minoritized youth may disproportionately bear the brunt of such practices, as culturally biased standardized reading assessments (e.g., Viruru, 2009) advance institutional impulses to track youth (Oakes, 2005) and perpetuate systemic inequities in a neoliberal, capitalist educational context (Duncan­Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Taubman, 2009). Thus, this paper offers not only a reflection on how reader labeling practices might impede goals for reading education and research, but also an examination of how such practices might work against movements for educational equity and social justice. For example, how do labels like “struggling reader,” when disproportionately applied to youth from lower or working class backgrounds (Triplett, 2007), reify academic stereotypes and sustain educational opportunity gaps and “education debts” (Ladson­Billings, 2006)? This paper takes up this and similar questions to consider how reader labeling practices function within an educational system that is increasingly interested in economic gains and social efficiencies in the context of globalization (Taubman, 2009).
I begin the paper with an overview of prevalent labeling practices in reading educational and research contexts; a brief discussion of existing critiques of such practices; and a discussion of why these critiques are important, but ultimately limited in their effectiveness. Next, I address the historical, social, professional, and economic interests that have encouraged and sustained the use of reader labels, categories, and profiles in reading education. Then, I consider what is at stake when reading educators and researchers label and categorize youth, arguing that such labels position and construct readers and their identities in limiting and harmful ways. Finally, I conclude with suggestions for how teachers and researchers ­ myself included ­ might move beyond the use of reader profiles and labels to advance more equitable and enriching reading education. Through these discussions, I draw on theoretical literature, reading research literature, and classroom experiences in middle, secondary, and postsecondary contexts.

Author

• Christopher Kolb, BASIS San Antonio North