Reading (through) bodies: students’ embodied performances of poetry and testing

Abstract

This article highlights the complexity of becoming a reader in public school classrooms, by describing the ways students’ reading bodies constituted the sites and discursive means for the performance of diverse reader identities. Drawing on sociocultural literacy and post-structural performance theories to suggest the notion of embodied performances of literate/reader identities, the article combines the presentation of meanings of reading in established curricula and assessment practices with the examination of the particular ways in which those inscribed students’ bodies. Data for this analysis were drawn from a yearlong ethnographic study of third-grade students’ performances across literacy events, and thematically analysed for the identification of patterns and divergences in their embodied performances. Events from students’ reading of standardized tests and of poetry are discussed in detail as instantiations of the reading body: the former of the docile body and the latter of the subversive body that is ultimately legitimized through the workings of school literacy. This study thus holds significance for deconstructing reader identities as inherently diverse and for unveiling both the visible and mundane ways in which discursive power inscribes students’ reading bodies.

Keywords:

• reading
• literacy
• identity performance
• embodiment
• poetry
• testing

Notes

1. All names of people, groups, and locations are pseudonyms.

2. Pseudonym.

3. Documents published by the local department of education or provided to the classroom teachers to guide literacy instruction are not directly cited for confidentiality purposes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stavroula Kontovourki

Stavroula Kontovourki is a lecturer in Literacy and Language Arts Education at the Department of Education, University of Cyprus. Her research interests cover literacy and language arts education, while she employs sociocultural and post-structural theoretical approaches and qualitative research methodology for the examination of literacy practices, the performance of literate identities in and out of school, multimodality (textual and embodied), and the enactment of literacy curricula in elementary classrooms.