Instruction as Collage: An Affective Analysis of Reading Policy and Praxis

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research in Progress Roundtable Session Three
  In Roundtable Session: Literacy Policy and Practice (Table 10)

Abstract

Using affect theory as a theoretical framework, this research-in-progress aims to investigate how teachers navigate policy pressure in their reading instruction. By theorizing the policy/practice divide, we provide insight into the ways policy informs classroom spaces and its affective impacts. Seidman's (2013) three-part process for phenomenological interviewing serves as the framework for semi-structured interviews in which we ask teachers to think about how their reading instruction puzzles into or bumps up against current conversations about the science of reading, reading policy implications, and influences on their praxis. While our data analysis is still underway, preliminary insights position teachers as professionally capable of agentically engaging with these policies so as to teach toward their teacher visions, resist neoliberalism, and navigate policy pressures in creative ways. As such, we understand this navigation and the resulting instruction to be an assemblage of affective dimensions and teachers' choices.

Author

• Adrienne Vitullo, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author