‘I don’t think I’ve ever had discussions about reading’: a case study of FE literacy teachers’ conceptualisations of literacy

Abstract

Research on reading in the lifelong-learning sector has tended to focus on the attitudes, habits and practices of the recipients of further education (FE), or the practices of literacy within the cultural and contextual environments of the subjects and spaces of further education. Although teachers’ conceptualisations of literacy are often acknowledged in this work to be central to the making and shaping of pedagogical practice, little research in the sector has attended specifically to teachers’ meaning-making about literacy. This approach is well developed in other phases where relationships between teachers’ classroom practices and their attitudes and values in relation to textual experience are seen as significant. In this paper we start this work for the post-compulsory sector. The FE Literacy Teachers as Readers Project aimed to explore teachers’ discursive understandings of reading through a qualitative study of their own accounts of their reading habits and preferences, their definitions of reading and the role of reading in their classrooms. Our discussion analyses our participants’ descriptions (figured worlds) of their own and their students’ reading identities to describe the positions they take up in relation to (‘big D’) discourses about readers and reading, and to consider how this might begin to pattern and frame their classroom practice. Coming a decade after the introduction of subject-specialist qualifications for literacy teachers in the FE sector, this study offers a timely insight in to teachers’ conceptualisation of reading in the context of well-embedded professional training, and one that is particularly pertinent at a time when the statutory training model for FE is under review.

Keywords:

• literacy
• teacher education
• policy
• FE policy
• FE workforce development