In-Service Secondary English Teachers' Exploration of Their Reading Identities and How These Identities Manifest Themselves in Their Teaching Practice

Abstract

This participatory action research study (Herr and Anderson, 2015) explored the reading lives, reading histories, reading identities and teaching practices of five in-service English teachers involved in a professional learning network (Trust, Krutka, and Carpenter, 2016) in order to deepen our understanding of the reading and teaching lives of these participants. I utilized purposive sampling (Salkin, 2012) in order to recruit English teachers who were interested in their reading lives and the reading lives of their students. Data included seven bi-weekly online group meetings, two individual semi-structured interviews with each participant (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2015), reading journals (Filetti, 2016), a discussion board (Ajayi, 2010), participant generated artifacts, and other teaching artifacts such as lesson plans, class worksheets, and syllabi. Findings reveal that English teachers (a) value and desire to read but personal reading lives tend to become de-prioritized by professional and personal responsibilities, (b) hold beliefs about reading and text selection that are at times in tension with classroom practice, (c) have reading lives that are shaped by current events, and (d) crave communities in which to discuss their reading lives and teaching lives.