Teaching about reader identities. Stories from a reading project

Abstract

This article reports on findings from a reading project about reader identities carried out in collaboration with a teacher in the school subject Swedish in two classes in traditionally male dominated vocational programmes at an upper secondary school in Sweden. The study is based on the narrative research tradition where narratives and narration are important resources in the work of developing teaching, and on ecological literacy theories that emphasize the mutual interaction between the individual, the context, and reading as a social practice. Life story interviews have been conducted with four students in each class where the focus has been on rural boys’ narrated experiences of the reading instruction provided in the context of their vocational education. The study shows that the reading instruction has initiated a process among the boys of reevaluating what reading can be and themselves as readers. Further, some of the boys position themselves against the dominant discourse about boys and their problematic relationship to reading that they have encountered in various contexts. Through these counter-narratives, the boys also construct alternative narratives about themselves and other boys as readers where they are given space to talk about themselves as readers of different types of texts. The study shows that it is possible to set into play a reading instruction with quite limited efforts through which a group of students who are often described as reluctant readers show agency in their storytelling and both reconstruct and reclaim their reader identities.