“I HATE TO READ”: ELEMENTARY EDUCATION TEACHER CANDIDATES DESCRIBE THEIR READING STANCES

As teacher researchers, we endlessly contemplate and explore ways to improve instruction and educational experiences for our students. Both authors have worked with elementary education undergraduate students in literacy education. After conversations about our courses and students, we noticed some similarities. What we observed through some of our students’ writing, whole class conversations, and small group discussions, was that many students either strongly disliked or had difficulty with reading. Since they were training to be literacy teachers and would shape the attitudes of future readers, we wanted to know more about how these undergraduate students had gotten this far into their education major with aversions to reading.

We wanted to know more about these students’ personal journeys through their K-12 education and how they viewed literacy skills, especially reading. We focused on six students total, three from each of our courses, who stood out to us through class writing assignments, conversations with these students, or conversations overheard during our classes. To find out more about their educational backgrounds, we conducted interviews to examine commonalities among their schooling experiences, strategies they employed for academic success, and how different reading stances were manifested in these self-identified aversive readers. We wondered if this was a vicious cycle in our education system where students disliked reading early in their education and never “recovered.”

Our purpose was to explore teacher candidates with reading aversions and what they remembered from their academic experiences to understand how to prevent future students from having these same reading difficulties. We theorized our participants’ experiences using Rosenblatt’s (1994) Transactional/ Reader Response (T/RR) theory of reading, which emphasized readers are not simply receivers of text. Instead, they bring personal experiences, backgrounds and situational contexts into each reading and learning experiences. Data for this qualitative interview study comes from interviews and personal narratives from six elementary education teacher candidate participants with self-identified reading aversions due to learning difficulties or disinterest.