Reading and Equity in Teacher Education: An Exploratory Study

Reading is central to higher education, but requires increased pedagogical and research attention. Practice and knowledge gaps have created threats to equity, though the precise nature of the reading/equity nexus in higher education is unknown. The Reading Pedagogies of Equity Project, a professional learning program and study designed with teacher educators, sought to produce insights into equity and reading in higher education. Oriented through critical posthumanism and a speculative pedagogies of qualitative inquiry methodology, the research team generated data with nine teacher educator participants. Data sources included the program pedagogies, discussions, and artifacts, plus pre- and post-program interviews. Data were analyzed through a thinking with theory approach focused on entanglement, diffractive reading, and enacted agency. The study identified textual, contextual, pedagogical, and readerly (im)materialities in academic reading that (dis)able opportunities for equity and the processes for producing this knowledge. Findings are significant for educators wanting to promote equity in/through reading.