People in pressure cookers: enactment of literacy identities of struggling first grade readers across reading contexts in a high stakes testing culture

Abstract

Assessing and teaching early literacy in the wake of the Response to Intervention (RtI) model’s tiered instruction and the trend toward greater accountability for schools has lead to the reduction of literacy to mere skills based instruction for many students. At the same time, increased pressure has been applied to teachers and administrators to improve assessment scores. This has led to the labeling of students by schools and the channeling of so called “at risk” students into narrow skills based interventions. This dissertation centers on student enactment of literacy identities in contrast to institutional identities imposed on students under the RtI model. In framing this study, the national and local contexts that created pressure around literacy assessment and instruction are considered. However, most of the data for this study centers around three first grade students as they enacted their literacy identities across several instructional contexts. By observing students as they enacted their identities this study demonstrates the need to challenge narrow skills based assessments which impart identities on to students and funnels them into instruction focused on the aforementioned narrow skills. Further, this project examines the agency of teachers and administrators in the local context as they at times resisted and at times embraced the ideology embedded in RtI. Ultimately, this study advocates for the acceptance of a space to consider students’ literacies and identities from a sociocultural perspective that goes beyond the confines of deficit views and allows student to draw on the literacies they bring to school to build bridges to other literacies.