The purpose of this study is to understand how preservice teachers (PTs) describe their attitudes and behaviors regarding reading and writing within the context of literacy teacher education coursework. This study uses critical discourse analysis to explore how preservice teachers articulate these attitudes and behaviors through their spoken and written discourse.
In this qualitative case study, the authors draw on Rosenblatt’s (1978, 2018) transactional theory of reading and writing and efferent-aesthetic continuum to analyze PTs’ discourse around their literacy practices. Specifically, the authors use critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2012, 2014) to examine how PTs express their beliefs and attitudes about reading and writing through their written reflections.
The analysis reveals that PTs’ discourse demonstrated a binary of in-school and out-of-school literacy practices through storylines of challenge and struggle, the perceived labor of creating and maintaining reading habits and the contradictions of freedom and control. These reflections on past and present literacy experiences prompt critical reflections and implications for future classroom approaches.
Implications for teacher educators include offering opportunities for PTs to articulate their literacy beliefs and practices, while modeling how to navigate multiple purposes and stances of literacy to disrupt dominant discourses that reify binaries.
