Image by Gordon Johnson via Pixabay
By The Educator Collaborative 2023-2025 Associate Member Janet N. Y. Zarchen
As an educational consultant and instructional coach, I’ve observed many reading and writing lessons. I’ve witnessed effective and ineffective lessons, engaging and boring lessons, as well as scripted lessons and lessons that build on the strengths and needs of students. In addition, I’ve spoken to many teachers about their teaching practices. There are teachers who are enthusiastic about teaching reading and writing, teachers who feel that it’s enough to follow the teacher’s manual, and teachers who are eager to try new strategies and share new books with students. In all of these conversations, the one that’s stayed with me for over fifteen years came from a teacher who said she didn’t really like to read and didn’t choose to read except when necessary. This teacher, a newly certified reading teacher, did not demonstrate any awareness that some of us in the room might find her comment troubling–perhaps even appalling.
Ever since that conversation, I’ve wondered how a teacher’s personal literacy practices and beliefs influence their professional practice. Can a literacy teacher be effective when they don’t value or enjoy what they are teaching? Why might they choose to teach literacy (and become certified to teach reading) if they didn’t like to read and write? Can “professional learning” nudge these teachers to become engaged readers and writers? If so, what type of professional learning might be needed?
As these questions and others ping-ponged inside my brain, another thought rose alongside them: We teach who we are. I’m not sure when or where I first heard this phrase, but it is often attributed to writer, speaker, and advocate Parker J. Palmer.
The more I thought about this phrase, the more I wondered, Who is this teacher who doesn’t like to read? Who am I as a teacher who does? How did we become who we are? Are there patterns that emerge when people describe their identities as readers and writers? How can we discover who we are as readers and writers?
Taking inspiration from the racial autobiography I wrote through Courageous Conversation® training, I created a literacy autobiography survey with the intention of answering some of these questions.
Though the survey questions have varied at times, these are the standard questions I ask:
- What are your earliest memories of reading and writing?
- What are some recent memories of reading and writing?
- What experiences connect your earliest memories with more recent memories?
- Who are you as a reader and writer?
Through this ongoing, informal project, I am hoping to find ways to help educators discover who they are, how their identities can support student learning, and what type of professional learning would be helpful. I’m hoping that we can use student literacy autobiographies as well as teacher autobiographies to more fully engage our students and help them become confident and empowered readers and writers. In The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching, Palmer writes,
[G]ood teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. In every class I teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood–and am willing to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning.
If we do, in fact, teach who we are, then we need to know who we are.
If you’d like to complete the survey, here is the link.
