Critical Literacy and Teacher Identities: A Discursive Site of Struggle

Abstract

As literacy researchers, we are challenged to consider whether our instructional practices are sufficient to help students engage in literacy practices in our current and future society, such as reading from critical literacy perspectives. Teacher identities can be discursively constructed in different ways, given the contexts in which they work. Contemporary discourses of compliance, testing, and mandated curriculum used in relation to the No Child Left Behind Act in the United States run counter to constituting an identity of teachers-as-professionals, who interrogate their own knowledge about discourses surrounding current practices and question the social context in which these issues are embedded. Instead, these discourses promote teachers-as-technicians, with the use of packaged curriculum or scripted instruction. Findings reflect how critical literacy discourses became a site of struggle over these competing teacher identities.