At the desk and on the nightstand: Reading as a mediating artifact in teachers' professional and personal lives

This dissertation examines teaching reading in relation to the personal resources that English teachers bring to the classroom. To date, there has been limited research on how the "personal" interacts with the "pedagogical" for teachers, though this has been a fruitful line of inquiry for better understanding student learning. To this end, I designed a mixed-method study that took an ecological perspective on English teachers' reading lives. I examined teachers' personal orientations to literature, how these orientations were manifested in reading instruction, and the impact of these orientations on students. Data included extensive teacher interviews and surveys, yearlong observations of teachers' classrooms, and surveys of students' personal and academic reading orientations. My analysis revealed a typology of personal reading orientations, and uncovered relationships between types of readers and types of classroom instruction, as well as mediating factors that can contribute to dissonance between a personal reading stance and a pedagogical one. Statistical analysis showed that students' orientations to reading shifted towards their teachers' orientations in several areas. Finally, both qualitative and quantitative analysis revealed that teachers with similar personal reading orientations tend to cluster together at the same schools.