Literacy Leadership: Power in the Discourse of Learning

The phenomenon of teacher learning, especially within literacy education pedagogy, has rarely been a topic of educational research. The nature of ongoing teacher learning is as challenging to study as student learning in that, learning in and of itself is not widely defined in the educational research literature. Equally challenging is the topic of literacy for which there are numerous and varying definitions, many of which carry political and controversial connotations (Aukerman & Schuldt, 2021). The term science of reading, for example, often carries an intensive focus on assessed reading proficiency as the primary goal of reading instruction, although the term means different things to different people both within and beyond the research community (Shanahan, 2020). On the other hand, a socially just form of literacy education ensures literacy that connects to social contexts and engages student voice within and against texts. This study was designed to examine the lived experiences of teachers and literacy leaders as they attempted to navigate the complex and politically charged literacy and learning landscape within the long-standing managerial norms of education leadership which often relegate learning to acts of compliance. An analysis of discourse informed by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis grounded the findings in this study around the experiences of teams of educators as they attempted to learn together in the process of building a literacy as social justice framework in the school of study. This study attempted to echo and contribute to scholarly voices who contend that a solid foundation for literacy and learning requires much more than scripted lessons on decoding along with a comprehension formula that can be followed in a basal reader teacher’s manual. Moreover, the findings in this study contend that until teacher learning becomes as deeply entrenched in the theories of action as the managerial norms of education leadership, a learning paradigm has little hope of flourishing. Implications for schools, districts, and policy suggest transformational changes that upset the current educational leadership paradigm are long overdue.