How a Garden Hoe Changed my Literacy Life: A Story of Teaching, Coaching, and Becoming

In this dissertation, I explore how personal practical experiences teaching reading intervention impacted my own understanding of the role of a secondary literacy coach. Drawing on the concepts of dialogism and adult learning theory, I leveraged learning conversations to grow my own body of knowledge. The methodology of this study was done using narrative inquiry and autoethnography. This methodological blend allowed me to closely study myself as the primary participant with a unique positionality as a scholarly practitioner. I unpack the complexities, contradictions, and tensions of my lived experience through stories and vignettes set in a rural midwestern public school district. My analysis suggests the importance of advocacy, cultural implications, teacher knowledge, and outcomes of reading intervention to both reading interventionists and secondary literacy coaches. My analysis also includes suggestions to improve secondary reading intervention practice guides and literacy coach standards of practice. This dissertation is an examination of complex issues at the intersection of adolescent literacy, teaching reading, and teacher professional development from a scholarly practitioner perspective. My research contributes to the field by detailing the ways secondary literacy coaches grow their body of knowledge through professional conversations and deep, introspective work to explore contradictions and tensions among a cast of characters. This scholarship provides insight and perspective into the lived experience of a teacher’s ongoing learning journey and process of becoming. Advisor: Elaine Chan