“Feeling Like I'm Slow Because I'm in This Class”: Secondary School Contexts and the Identification and Construction of Struggling Readers

摘要

This study investigates the contexts in and across which students read and learn the texts demanded in high school. Despite increasing public concern regarding the number of American youth who experience reading difficulty, little research has examined the extent to which adolescents’ reading skills vary across school spaces or the ways in which changing school contexts mediate literacy learning. To address this gap, I designed a school-year long qualitative study of the relationship between school contexts and reading. I focused my research on students identified as struggling readers and compared their experiences to similar peers who were not labeled as such. I shadowed eight struggling readers across U.S. history, algebra, and reading classes in a large, culturally and linguistically diverse high school. Participants also included 14 comparative peers and eight teachers. Data sources included 425 hours of observations, 62 interviews, achievement and reading assessment data, behavior and attendance records, and classroom artifacts. I used Constant Comparative Analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to identify patterns across data.Analysis showed that students’, teachers’, and administrators’ interactions with particular school contexts not only identified reading difficulty but also constructed ‘struggling readers.’ First, as students moved across classroom spaces, their interactions among social and instructional contexts mediated reading skill. When youths experienced high-quality disciplinary literacy instruction embedded in positive student-teacher relationships, they demonstrated improving or proficient reading and enacted productive literacy identities. In these instances, instruction and relationships reinforced each other to support readers in powerful ways. Second, as students, teachers, and administrators interacted in (and constructed) institutional contexts related to reading intervention and compliance-oriented behavior management, struggling readers tended to be positioned as deficit readers and “behavior problems.” Finally, although teachers and students mutually built contexts and power flowed unpredictably, teachers had authority to follow through on their interactions in ways that could support or compromise youths’ opportunities to learn. Students could resist positioning, but their resistance did not disrupt deficit positioning. Findings have implications for the reorganization of secondary reading interventions, the enactment of disciplinary literacy instruction for youth identified as struggling readers, and the important role of relationships in high-quality instruction.