The Science of Reading on Social Media: <scp>TikTok</scp> Content Creators' Discourse Patterns and Bodies of Knowledge

ABSTRACT The Science of Reading (SOR) has become a public discourse with educational stakeholders, impacting legislative policy, reading content, curricula, and pedagogy across schools. Public engagement in this movement has transpired on social media, including TikTok, where viral content often promotes narrow or binary viewpoints through an authoritative discourse. Using a digital ethnography and walkthrough method, we collected and examined 156 TikTok videos on #ScienceofReading to address the following research questions: (1) What categories of SOR content are present on TikTok? (2) What are the common narrative trends and bodies of knowledge used to promote the SOR conversation on TikTok? Analyses found that SOR‐related TikToks fell into four categories: (1) professional content knowledge, (2) direct demonstration, (3) resources and materials, and (4) identity formation. Furthermore, close analysis of all videos related to professional content knowledge gave insight into the narrative trends used by content creators to convey claims (plain speak, stop/start, brain research, rhetorical question, I used to… now I…), as well as the bodies of knowledge content creators drew on to make these claims (research, SOR, theory or scholar, deep personal experience, no source). Finally, implications are discussed for how this public discourse can shape policies that will ultimately impact schools, classrooms, and literacy instruction.