DOLLAR-DISSERTATION-2018.Pdf (4.659Mb)

REFLECTIONS OF THE HEART: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY OF A LITERACY

LEADER’S ONLINE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND CHANGE

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE

TEXAS WOMAN’S UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF READING

COLLEGE OF PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

TAMRA R. DOLLAR, B.A., M.ED.

DENTON, TEXAS

AUGUST 2018

DEDICATION

To my life partner and best friend,

Michael T. Dollar

You told me I could, so I did.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I feel privileged to express my eternal gratitude to the people who were directly involved in my doctoral journey. First of all, I would like to thank my advisor and exemplary Chair, Dr. Patricia (Pat) Watson, for whom I am forever indebted. She walked beside me and would gently nudge me when I would get “stuck in the weeds.” Dr.

Watson affirmed my creative ways of thinking while at the same time helped me to stay grounded. I aspire to be the kind of professor and mentor to others just as Dr. Watson has been to me. I am extremely grateful to the members of my Dissertation Committee: to Dr.

Amy Burke for her enthusiasm and great advice that helped me to best articulate my methodology and epistemological stance; to Dr. Claudia Haag for her ongoing encouragement, genuine care and unwavering support through all of my trials and triumphs; and to Dr. Teresa Starrett for her benevolence and guidance throughout the process. I want to express my sincere thanks to all of my professors at Texas Woman’s

University, who guided and assisted me on my doctoral journey to reach this milestone in my life. Last but not least, I am thankful to my family and close friends whose love sustained me and gave me the courage to tell my story. This dissertation is for you as much as for me.

iii

ABSTRACT

TAMRA DOLLAR

REFLECTIONS OF THE HEART: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY OF A LITERACY LEADER’S ONLINE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND CHANGE

AUGUST 2018

Educational blogs, or edublogs, are ubiquitous in today’s society. National literacy organizations such as International Literacy Association (ILA) and National

Council of Teachers of English Language Arts (NCTELA) post literacy resources and teaching tips on a daily basis. In 2013, the researcher became a contributor to this growing body of literacy knowledge with the creation of an edublog, Confessions of a

Literacy Coach. In 2018, Google analytics confirmed Confessions of a Literacy Coach was visited by over 100,000 people from every continent, in over seventy-eight countries, and was routinely accessed by teachers, administrators, and other professionals. This qualitative study explored the researcher’s online identity construction and change as reflected in the edublog. Using autoethnography methodology, the researcher gave a highly personalized account to describe the insights gained from this journey. Through systematic analyzing, reflexive journaling, and support by artifacts, the researcher identified ways childhood experiences and beliefs shaped the message and tone of edublog entries, or posts. Furthermore, the researcher unexpectedly discovered how the social media site, Twitter, created a Community of Practice (CoP) among educators, curriculum directors, and district administrators when edublog posts became the topic of

Twitter chats. Insights gleaned from the autoethnography will contribute to ongoing conversations about identity construction among veteran and novice teacher bloggers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

DEDICATION ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT ...... iv

LIST OF TABLES ...... xii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... xiii

Chapter

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

How I Learned about Edublogs ...... 2 How My Edublog Began ...... 3 My Edublog Today ...... 5 Purpose of the Study and Research Questions ...... 7 Rationale for the Autoethnography Study ...... 8 Significance of the Study ...... 10

II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND REVIEW OF LITERATURE ...... 12

Discourse Identity Theory...... 12 Primary Discourse ...... 13 Secondary Discourse ...... 14 Dominant and Non-Dominant Discourses ...... 15 Secondary Discourse and Affinity Spaces ...... 15

Opposition to Discourse Identity Theory ...... 17 Standpoint Theory ...... 18 Review of Literature ...... 22 Teacher Identity ...... 23 Stage Theory and Identity ...... 24 Literacy Leadership ...... 29 Educational Blogging (Edublogging) ...... 29 Concluding Thoughts ...... 31

III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY...... 33

Background and Social Context...... 33 Becoming a Teacher ...... 35 Learning to Write ...... 35 Return to Teaching ...... 38 Adapting to an Unfamiliar World ...... 39 Philosophical Foundations ...... 39 Autoethnography...... 40 Qualitative Research ...... 42 Hermeneutics and Phenomenology ...... 43 Academic Critiques and Pitfalls ...... 44 Research Design...... 46 Data Interpretation or Data Analysis?...... 47 Data Collection and Analysis...... 47 Prolonged Time in the Field ...... 62 Trustworthiness ...... 64 Credibility ...... 64 Transferability ...... 67 Dependability ...... 68 vii

Confirmability ...... 68 Ethical Obligation ...... 69

IV. REFLECTION ON CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES AND MEMORY TO CONSTRUCT PRIMARY DISCOURSES ...... 70

Social and Cultural Influences ...... 71 Blondes Have More Fun! ...... 72 Angel Unaware ...... 77 A New Brother! ...... 80 The Preacher’s Daughter ...... 82 Purpose to the Pain...... 85 Summary and Insights...... 89

V. REFLECTIONS ON STORYTELLING, ORAL HISTORIES, AND SECONDARY DISCOURSES ...... 90

Gee and Storytelling Discourse ...... 90 Church and Community Storytelling Practices...... 91 Story and Sunday Dinner ...... 91 Grannie Annie’s Lap ...... 96 Felt Board Stories ...... 99 Oral Histories ...... 100 Part I Transcription...... 103 Part II Transcription ...... 105 My Response to the Interview and Transcription ...... 106 Storytelling Discourse as a Literacy Leader ...... 109 Summary and Insights...... 110

viii

VI. REFLECTIONS ON EARLY LITERACIES AND WRITTEN DISCOURSE ...... 112

Informal Letters ...... 112 Church Newsletters ...... 124 Family Bibles ...... 131 Oppression: The Chain of Command ...... 135 Summary and Insights...... 139

VII. REFLECTIONS ON AFFINITY SPACES, ONLINE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND CHANGE ...... 140

Who Am I? ...... 141 Affinity Spaces and the Blogosphere ...... 143 An Affinity Space Architect: Understanding the Nuts and Bolts ...... 146 A Tale of Two Selves ...... 147 Readers’ Comments and Change Overtime ...... 148 Secondary Discourse and Change Overtime...... 152 Summary and Insights...... 154

VIII. REFLECTIONS ON THE MESSAGE AND TONE OF EDUBLOG POSTS ..... 157

The Future: Possibilities in Education ...... 158 The Race to Space Generation ...... 165 Social Justice: Doing What’s Fair...... 167 Political Factor: The Rights of Farmers ...... 175 The Pareto Principle: Fairness in Education ...... 178 The Learning Environment: Everybody Needs a Home ...... 179 A Place to Call Home ...... 188 Poverty and the Environment...... 191

Religiosity: Shame and Redemption ...... 193 Religious Cultural Factor: A Poem, Five Points, and a Prayer ...... 196 Oppression and Religious Discourse ...... 199 Concepts of Self and Teacher Identity ...... 205 Tone of My Posts ...... 206 Not-So-Forgettable Influences ...... 206 Inspirational Tone and Influence...... 208 Confession Reflection: The So What? ...... 209 Summary and Insights...... 210

IX. REFLECTIONS ON TWITTER AS A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE ...... 212

What is Twitter? ...... 212 Twitter as an Affinity Space ...... 214 Twitter Chats as an Online Community of Practice (CoP) ...... 216 What Twitter Chats Mean to Me ...... 218 A Surprise Discovery ...... 220 Finding My Voice with Gatekeepers ...... 222 Publishing Company Twitter Gatekeepers ...... 222 School Administrator Twitter Gatekeepers ...... 225 PLN Twitter Gatekeepers ...... 228 Summary and Insights...... 230

X. REFLECTIONS ON FINDINGS AND FUTURE IMPLICATIONS ...... 231

Reflections on Educational Blogs ...... 232 Reflections on Web 2.0 Literacies ...... 234 Reflection on Roadville and Early Literacies ...... 236 Reflections on Autoethnography ...... 241

Reflection on Memory ...... 243 Reflection on The Outsider-Within: Female Oppression ...... 244 Final Thoughts ...... 246

REFERENCES ...... 249

APPENDICES

A. Autobiographical Timeline….………………………………………………….262 B. Table of Leadership Discourse…………………………………………………268 C. Leadership Identity Bar Graphs…………………………………………………………………………. 274 D. Sample of Reflexive Journal…………………………………………………... 278 E. Sample of Post Analysis…………………………………………………….….281

LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

1. Feminist Movement Organized by Year and Focus ...... 20

2. Philosophical Stance Including Purpose and Beliefs ...... 40

3. Autobiographical Timeline for Posts Dated 2013-2014 ...... 48

4. Frequency Counter of Identity and Change over Time ...... 50

5. Blog Analysis Sample ...... 52

6. Proposed Timeline of Study...... 62

7. Actual Timeline of Study ...... 63

8. Sample posts of My Primary Discourse and Outcomes...... 88

9. Text Examples of Family Colloquials ...... 122

10. Examples of Research Based Discourse and Research Interests ...... 128

11. Examples of Futuristic Theme Text and Interpretation ...... 160

12. Examples of Social Justice Text and Interpretation ...... 170

13. Examples of Learning Environment Themes and Interpretation ...... ….182

14 Examples from Posts Using 5 Points ...... 199

15 Examples of Religious Discourse and Non-Dominant Discourse ...... 203

16 Twitter Chat Topic and Artifacts ...... 219

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. My Pretend Classroom...... 1 2. Twitter Profile with Hyperlink...... 5 3. Facebook Post to Dr. Gee...... 16 4. Facebook Post from Dr. Gee...... 16 5. Sample Reflexive Journal Entry from iPhone...... 57 6. Mentor Support using Google Docs...... 58 7. Affinity Space Model...... 59 8. Screenshot from Twitter...... 60 9. Triangulation of Data Sources...... 65 10. Iceberg Metaphor from Twitter...... 66 11. Picture in Sunday Clothes...... 74 12. Papa’s Favorite Photo and American Angus Association Certificate...... 76 13. Favorite Photo with Brad...... 79 14 My New Baby Brother...... 81 15. Post Showing Photo Standing by Green Alien Statue...... 86 16. Sample Post of Making Myself the Brunt of a Joke...... 94 17. Post Example of Poking Fun at Myself...... 95 18. Edublog all About Me Bio...... 96 19. Photo with Grannie Annie...... 99 20. Oral History Photo of Memaw and Papa...... 103 21. Memaw and Papa in Front of Their Farmhouse...... 108 22. Sample Post of Storytelling Discourse...... 110 23. Envelope Addressed to Memaw and Papa...... 113 24. Letter Writing on Notebook Paper with Transcription...... 116 25. Mom Holding Me...... 120 xiii

26. Sample of Church Newsletter with Transcription...... 126 27. First Reading Experience Slide...... 133 28. The “Chain-of-Command” with Reflection...... 137 29. Affinity Spaces Showing Interconnectivity...... 144 30. Affinity Space Model of the Blogosphere...... 145 31. Screenshot of Dashboard...... 146 32. Sample Post using Quantitative Methods...... 153 33. Technology Themed Word Cloud...... 159 34. Augmented Reality Example...... 160 35. First Day of Kindergarten...... 166 36. Papa’s Draft to Congress and Transcription...... 177 37. Word Cloud of Confession Reflection 2013-2014...... 186 38. Word Cloud of Confession Reflection 2017-2018...... 187 39. Example of Post on Summer Slide...... 193 40. Sample Post of Second Publication of First Post...... 195 41. Sample Post of Chastisement...... 196 42. Sample of a Twitter Verified Account...... 214 43. Analytical Map of Twitter Followers...... 216 44. Screenshot of Collaboration with PLN ...... 221 45. Screenshot of Classroom Tweet...... 223 46. Screenshot of Book Edit...... 225 47. Screenshot of Retweet...... 226 48. Screenshot of Post Retweet by Follower...... 227 49. Web 2.0 Tools vs. Content Sharing Tools...... 235 50. Sample Writing with Pen and Straight Lines...... 238 51. Bitmoji Sample...... 247

xiv

“I am a storyteller at heart and enjoy blogging about the not-so-forgettable experiences in

the classroom. I also enjoy giving my two cents worth if people will listen.”

Tamra Dollar, Confessions of a Literacy Coach

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a teacher. My parents recall how I spent hours in my “classroom” teaching students that no one but me could see.

They attributed this to my lively imagination. A black and white photo of me taken when

I was four-years-old still hangs in my wall of memories. The photo was taken in our

Renton, Washington basement. My dad was a Baptist pastor and we lived in a house called a parsonage, a term meaning a house or living quarters owned by the church. The basement had been refurbished to hold Sunday school classes. In the worn photo, I am wearing a sailor-themed shirt, standing proudly in front of a row of folding metal chairs.

Sitting in each chair is a Baptist Hymn Book that I used for reading lessons (see Figure

1).

Figure 1. My pretend classroom.

More than anything, I loved to tell stories to my class! These stories were likely childhood renditions of my dad’s Sunday sermons or creative mashups from my favorite

Disney movies like Chitty, Chitty Bang and nursery rhymes I knew by heart. I wrote spelling words on a green chalkboard mounted to wooden stilts. I illustrated lessons on a large tablet of chart paper with my crayons. I even had a piano for music time. I took piano lessons from my mother, who was also our church pianist. In my mind, it was the ideal classroom!

If I had had a crystal ball and could see into the future, never in my wildest dreams would I have envisioned a day where my stories could transcend a physical place and time. Today, my edublog, Confessions of a Literacy Coach, has made this a reality.

How I Learned about Edublogs

I learned about educational blogging in 2012, at a district workshop where I worked as a middle school literacy coach. Participants were instructed to start an edublog, which I did, and have since deleted. While I had a plethora of literacy resources and lesson ideas to share, writing felt tedious and I soon grew bored and abandoned my edublog. In 2013, I began hearing more and more about blogging at local educational events called Edcamps which is where I met Cynthia Alaniz, a librarian in my district.

Her edublog, Librarian in Cute Shoes, was engaging and easy to read. Her edublog design was original, and posts were written as narratives with embedded colorful graphics. Her blog title was catchy and original. I guess I could say that my mentor blog was librarianincuteshoes.blogspot.com. I especially appreciated Cynthia’s consistency in writing. To me, it seemed that the majority of edubloggers started strong and fizzled out

2 after their first year of blogging. I pledged to pace myself by writing and publishing one post each month rather than weekly. To avoid burnout, I had the mindset of a marathon runner rather than a sprinter.

How My Edublog Began

In the summer of 2013, I began my edublog, Confessions of a Literacy Coach, using the free Google-sponsored site, Blogger. I decided that I would take an unconventional approach; I would tell a story. After days and weeks of contemplating what to write about, I eventually decided to write about a lie that I had told to my principal. I believed the post was one-of-a-kind and would distinguish my edublog as a storytelling platform. While my post goes into elaborate detail, here is a summary:

It was my first year as a literacy coach and I had been teaching a reading

intervention class. My students, all middle school boys, were vocal about

how much they HATED to read and write! Well, the state assessment was

on the horizon and I decided to bribe my students with an unusual

incentive: I would eat an insect if they passed the reading and writing

section of the exam. I was desperate! After bantering back and forth for

weeks, my students decided that I would eat a chocolate covered cricket IF

they passed. All of my students passed! Suddenly, the stark reality hit me

as I imagined myself eating a real bug and I knew that I could not go keep

my promise. The very thought of eating a cricket (even a chocolate

covered one) made me want to puke! In the secrecy of my kitchen, my

husband and I concocted fake crickets which were raisins dipped in

chocolate. We meticulously created toothpick thin extensions to resemble

cricket legs. We pinky swore to carry our secret to the grave.

Writing the post was actually therapeutic because I truly felt guilty for having lied to my students, the other teachers, and to my principal. It also occurred to me that if my principal read the post, I would lose her trust. To complicate matters, the story took place when she was a first-year principal. My principal had even gone as far as to make sure no

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) rules were violated. More disturbing was the idea that a reader might recognize my at-risk middle school students. I solved this quandary by characterizing my class as a fourth-grade classroom. I did not want any identifiable features that could be traced to struggling readers and writers.

Before publishing my blog online, I emailed my principal (who had moved to another school) and told her the truth in the event she read the post online. To my relief, she began laughing hysterically and said she could not wait to read it! Since my first edublog post was essentially a confession, the title, Confessions of a Literacy Coach, popped inside my head. My first post was appropriately titled, To My Principal...I Must

Confess. The post was simple. There were no pictures, video clips, or hyperlinks that are common in my newer posts. However, I did begin a self-reflection piece called

Confession Reflection. These were three to four poignant questions written to stretch my own thinking and encourage readers to apply principles gleaned from my story to their classroom experiences. Here is an example of a Confession Reflection extracted from my first post, To My Principal...I Must Confess: What are the benefits of encouraging teachers to take risks in the classroom? How does this impact student learning?

● How did this experience build trust with my students? How did it affect student

learning outcomes?

● Do at-risk students learn differently?

Telling original stories from my classroom experiences and concluding with thoughtful application questions continue be staple characteristics of my edublog.

My Edublog Today

Since the inception of Confessions of a Literacy Coach in 2013, I have kept my original goal of posting monthly and I now have over 100,000 viewers. The link to

Confessions of a Literacy Coach is accessible from my Twitter profile page for my followers to access dollarliteracy.blogspot.com (see Figure 2). I am now also a weekly contributor to Monday Blogs which has a following of more than 17,000 followers.

Twitter is the main driver to my edublog.

Figure 2. Twitter profile with hyperlink.

With every new post I write and share, my readership grows exponentially by the thousands. In spite of my personal setbacks and challenges, my edublog thrives in a virtual space dubbed the “blogosphere.” For example, I experienced a setback when I left the classroom and my position as a middle school literacy coach to attend graduate school full time. Since my edublog is titled, Confessions of a Literacy Coach, I was challenged to continue writing without actually being a literacy coach. I struggled with the idea that my identity as a literacy leader through edublogging no longer mattered because I was not in a leadership position in a school district.

However, less than a year after leaving my position, I was asked to contribute to a chapter in Hacking Homework (2016), titled “Hack in Action.” I agreed. Before going to press, the editor asked if I would grant permission to post the web address to Confessions of a Literacy Coach. I hesitated momentarily because I was no longer a literacy coach and I did not want to mislead anyone who accessed my edublog believing I was employed by a district. When I expressed my thoughts, I was surprised by the editor’s response, “Tamra, you are a literacy coach.”

I was elated when I read my contribution in print because the editors added,

“learn more about Tamra’s beliefs” along with how to access my edublog. After this experience, I never doubted whether I was a literacy leader. I did not have to have a title or a paycheck to lead. Being a leader in a virtual space, such as a blog site, is very different from being a literacy coach on a campus! I no longer talked to teachers or went into their classrooms to model literacy lessons. I no longer shared reading strategies with members of my campus Response to Intervention (RtI) team. I no longer worked one-on-

6 one with students. Instead, I sat alone in my home office and published Confessions of a

Literacy Coach posts to an invisible audience. But unlike my childhood, the audience wasn’t imaginary. Real people were reading, posting their comments, and sharing my writing with others.

Purpose of the Study and Research Questions

The purpose of this study is to give a highly personalized description of my journey to understand my identity as a literacy leader as reflected in my edublog,

Confessions of a Literacy Coach. Using autoethnographic methodology and creative writing techniques, I interrogated my lived experiences to make sense of a personal phenomenon (Ellis & Bochner, 2000).

In keeping with the purpose of autoethnography, my study:

(1) describes and systematically analyzes (graphy) personal experience (auto) to understand cultural experience (ethno) (Ellis, 2004);

(2) approaches the study as a “political, socially-just and socially-conscious act”

(Adams & Jones, 2011, p. 112); and

(3) attempts to be honest and transparent about my shortcomings, rather than to look good to others (Adams & Jones, 2011).

Unlike traditional research analysis requiring researchers to minimize self, or to set aside feeling and intuition, my research is communicated through self-reflection and through personal narratives (Jones, 2005). Therefore, the questions guiding my study are:

● How was my identity as a literacy leader constructed and how has it changed over

time as reflected in my edublog?

● What were the social, cultural, and political factors that influenced the message

and tone of my blog posts?

Rationale for the Autoethnography Study

The rationale for my study stems from my curiosity to understand my identity as a literacy leader in the context of Confessions of a Literacy Coach. While educational blogs are ubiquitous in today’s society, I would not be able to understand my identity and motives without solely looking at my own edublog. Secondly, this topic of research is relevant today, especially with the immense popularity of blogging in the field of education. Most recently, I have found resources from professional literacy sites such as

Literacy Research Association (LRA) and National Council of Teachers of English

(NCTE) a strong indication that edublogs are a growing literacy practice in education.

I chose to conduct and autoethnographic study as a result of a qualitative research text I used in one of my graduate courses, An Introduction to Qualitative Research. The author, Flick (2014), validated a trend among scholars to redefine what research is and how it should be presented. He advocated for “a move from writing about research to forms of performative social science and the ways of doing research” (p. 517). After the course, I came to a better understanding of autoethnography as a research method. I learned that all autoethnographies are self-studies, but not all self-studies are autoethnographies. To qualify as an autoethnography, the researcher analyzes their personal experience in order to understand social and cultural experiences and to make sense of their struggles (Adams & Jones, 2011; Bochner & Ellis, 1996, 2002; & Ellis,

2004).

Autoethnography goes beyond traditional research methods because it includes elements of autobiography and ethnography. A fusion of autobiography and ethnography within this autoethnography created a unique opportunity as I position myself as the researcher to conduct a self-study using an insider perspective (Chang, 2008). My inner thoughts, feelings, and motivations are not visible to others. I am the only person who has the vantage point to understand the choices I have made in regard to my identity construction within my edublog.

Furthermore, autoethnography best aligned with the narrative nature of my writing style and affinity for storytelling. Bochner and Ellis (2016) described an autoethnographer as “first and foremost a communicator and storyteller…and autoethnography depicts people struggling to overcome adversity and shows people in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles (p.

111). During a fall literacy conference at the university where I attended, I was able to meet our keynote speaker, Kathy Short, and participate in a question and answer session with other doctoral students and professors. Kathy spoke passionately about the significance of stories and the memory of the writer: “Children’s engagements with literature have the potential to transform their worldviews through understanding their current lives and imagining beyond themselves” (Short, 2009, p. 10). I was curious about the types of stories I engaged in as a child that transformed my views and may have attributed to my identity construction.

Finally, autoethnography invites the reader to experience my journey of identity discovery as an edublogger, by giving the reader the experience of being there (Adams &

Jones, 2011). As with all good stories, autoethnographies seek to evoke an emotional response from the reader to make people “care, feel, empathize on the behalf of social justice” (Ellis & Bochner, 2016, p. 62). Ultimately, I want to raise awareness of the power of edublogging to give a voice to educators who may have had their voices silenced at some point in their lives.

Significance of the Study

The significance of the topic of my dissertation is two-fold. I believe the insights I glean from my study may contribute to conversations about online identity construction through edublogging (Rankin, 2001). Given the number of teacher bloggers and educational blogs available, I believe a space for honest and open dialogue is needed to support and encourage new and veteran edubloggers. Efimova and Fiedler (2004) confirmed that edublogs “provide its author with personal space for learning that does not impose a communal learning agenda and learning style. At the same time learners are not alienated and can benefit from a community feedback, validation, and further development of ideas” (p. 493). Therefore, this autoethnography empirically supports the potential of teacher blogging and self-study in professional identity construction.

Additionally, I hope to contribute to a wealth of scholarly papers that incorporate creative and innovative ways to conduct and report research that would align with the redefining of what literacy is today. I drew from the International Literacy Association’s definition of literacy as “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, compute, and communicate using visual, audible, and digital materials across disciplines and in any context.” Gee (2015) argued that literacy is “more than the ability to read and write” but

10 should also be defined in social terms (p. 30). I believe using autoethnography for a dissertation would support a paradigm shift of what scholarly literacy and research look like in higher education.

CHAPTER II

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Two theories framed my study: Discourse identity theory and Standpoint theory.

Discourse identity theory was used as a theoretical lens to know and understand how I created my online identity as a literacy leader, and how my identity may have changed overtime. Standpoint theory was used to situate myself within a broader social, cultural, and political context. Flick (2014) described autoethnography as a way to “systematically analyze the researcher's personal experiences in order to understand social and cultural experiences” (p. 534). Standpoint theory allowed me to describe my experiences in ways only I could know and understand. From a unique vantage point, I would be able to know ways I may have been marginalized within the larger social, cultural, and political context by understanding power relationships that shaped my identity.

Discourse Identity Theory

James Gee, researcher and expert on Discourse identity theory, has contributed to a growing body of research on identity as a way to understand school and society. Gee

(2015) believes every person has an “identity kit” or Discourse. Dissimilar to identity theories that focus on a person’s external features of language, Discourses are “social constructs or ideologies” (p. 179). In his book, Social Linguistics and Literacies Gee

(2015) defined Discourse as:

“distinctive ways of speaking/listening and often, too, writing/reading

coupled with distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling,

dressing, thinking, believing with other people and with various objects,

tools and technologies; so as to enact specifically recognizable identities

engaged in specifically socially recognizable activities” (p. 171).

In Gee’s seminal work on Discourse, he distinguished the concept of “discourse” with a lowercase ‘d’ and “Discourse” with a capital ‘D’. Typically, sociologists use the term discourse with a lowercase ‘d’ to refer to talk between speakers and listeners, both spoken and written. Likewise, I will use discourse with a lowercase ‘d’ to indicate when referring to talk, both written and spoken.

According to Gee, discourses (spoken and written) are situated within the

Discourse group and will have different types of representation, syntax patterns, grammar structures, and semantics. For example, Spanish grammatical structure places the adjective after the subject or noun such as in el casa blanco (the house white), whereas, in English the adjective precedes the subject or noun which translates to the white house.

However, limiting discourse to language features and structures is only one aspect of an individual’s social identity. Gee used the example of a biker entering a pub. The way the biker dresses, walks and talks to the pub owner goes far beyond language, or discourse.

Gee (2015) explained, “It’s not just what you say or even how you say it. It’s also who you are and what you are doing while you say it. It’s not enough to say the right lines, you have to be the right person” (p. 3). A person’s Discourse is the totality of all the characteristics that make up a person’s identity.

Primary Discourse

According to Gee, people have a primary Discourse and a secondary Discourse.

Primary Discourses are developed early in life and shape who we are and what we value

13 in society; they are who we are every day. Primary Discourses may describe a person or even a community. For example, ethnographer and social historian Shirley Brice Heath documented a longitudinal study on children’s learning and language use in two communities: Roadville and Trackton in her book Ways with Words: Language Life and

Work in Communities and Classrooms. Heath described Roadville as a working-class community of families who have been a part of mill life for four generations. She described Trackton as a working-class community whose older generations were raised on the land or worked for other landowners (Heath, 1983). Heath argued that the two differing communities shaped children’s use of language depending on the ways the families and communities were structured (p. 11).

Although Heath’s emphasis was on discourse, I believe her study supports

Discourse identity theory. For example, her prologue stated that ethnographic research should not ignore the “social and cultural context which created the input factors for individual or groups” (p. 8). Heath described one of her goals for a reader is to gain an understanding “of the ways of behaving, feeling, believing, and valuing of the children, their community members, and their townspeople teachers” (p. 13). I will be referring back to Heath’s study when I correlate my primary Discourse, or social identity, with the environment in which I was born and raised.

Secondary Discourse

Secondary Discourses are identities that people learn through apprenticeships as part of being socialized into school, church, occupational roles, and organizations, to name a few. An understanding of secondary Discourses may surface social inequities in

14 school and the workplace. For example, children from white middle class families are raised in a social environment that values school-based language and practices. As a result, white middle class children enter school with the “identity kit” needed to be recognized as a good student. In comparison, non-white children from poor families enter a school that uses a language and practice that are foreign. Gee (2015) compared himself to this category of children as he was raised deeply entrenched in Catholicism (p. 188). I can identify with Gee and will draw from his experiences as I compare my own upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian home and how it may have shaped my primary and secondary Discourses as a literacy leader.

Dominant and Non-Dominant Discourses

Dominant discourses are associated with social roles, status, and privileges and allow the member access to benefits and privileges. Non-dominant discourses are marginalized members who may belong within the social network but do not benefit from the wider benefits and privileges. Members of non-dominant social groups can become a member of the dominant group. According to Freire (1970), social equity begins with awareness of the disparity. Social reform begins within the marginalized group.

Furthermore, Discourse may be taught by apprenticeship into the social practices of the group. Modeling and guidance may assist, but dominant Discourses are best acquired through immersion (Gee, 2004).

Secondary Discourse and Affinity Spaces

After extensive searching, I was not able to find research on secondary Discourse associated with blogging, or social media, of any type. This information was crucial to

15 my study. I eventually reached out to researcher and expert on identity and digital literacies, Dr. Gee, using the social media platform, Facebook (see Figure 3). I asked,

“What are your thoughts on social media (twitter, Facebook, blogging) as a secondary

Discourse?”

Figure 3. Facebook post to Dr. Gee. I was pleasantly surprised when Dr. Gee responded to my post (see Figure 4). He wrote, “Social media--like pencils--are tools that can resource many different secondary

Discourses. Tools have no outcomes--good or bad--but do have affordances and allow us to do new things or old things in new ways. Thus, social and digital media have given rise to lots of new Discourses of the sort I have called “affinity spaces.” (Facebook,

2017). Dr. Gee recommended that I read his new book, Teaching, Learning, Literacy in

Our High-Risk High-Tech World (Gee, 2017).

Figure 4. Facebook post from Dr. Gee.

According to Gee (2017), an affinity space is a place, virtual or physical, where learning takes place. Gee coined the term affinity spaces because he needed a name for the spaces “through which people with a shared interest or passion can move back and forth to develop and be a certain kind of person” (p. 116). In other words, secondary

Discourses are constructed and developed within both online and offline affinity spaces.

Examples of online affinity spaces are social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter,

Pinterest, blog sites, and video games. Examples of offline affinity spaces are classrooms, churches, professional development conferences, and events like Edcamp.

Unique to online affinity spaces, individuals may apprentice themselves into a group of people who share a common interests and practices. Since individuals use their secondary Discourse to participate within a virtual space, a person’s race, gender, age, disability, or social class does not have a bearing on the level of an individual’s participation (Gee, 2017). However, in offline affinity spaces, these characteristics may inhibit the level of participation. For this reason, online affinity spaces may support individuals who may have been marginalized when interacting in physical spaces because of gender, ethnicity, social class, or age. An understanding of affinity spaces is crucial to my study of my identity construction and change as reflected in my edublog.

Opposition to Discourse Identity Theory

Criticizers of Discourse identity theory argued that Gee’s theory predestined individuals to success or failure based on their ethnicity and social class. For example, a child who may have a primary Discourse unfamiliar with academic language would likely be unsuccessful in careers that demand scholarly literacies for success

(Delpit, 1998). In defense, Gee (2015) argued that Discourse identity theory was born out of a “history of struggle, contestation, and change,” but instead often emerge as “a new center to social power” (p. 185). As I conducted my study, I used a convergence of

Discourse identity theory and standpoint theory to help me understand my online identity construction and change overtime.

Standpoint Theory

Standpoint theory is defined as a political theory, or strategy, that seeks to understand power relationships through the point of view, or standpoint, of a marginalized individual in relationship to those in power (Martin, Reynolds, & Keith,

2001; Sprague, 2001). Categorized as a postmodern epistemology, standpoint theory uses a naturalistic lens rather than a critical approach to research (Creswell, 2013; Denzin &

Lincoln, 2000; Flick, 2014; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Standpoint theory proposes that an individual’s understanding or perceptions are always shaped in part by his or her social and political experiences (Douglas & Johnson, 1977; Oakley, 1981).

Central to standpoint theory is the belief that a person’s perception about themselves and others is situated within a social context. Descriptors include a person’s ethnicity, gender, age, religion, income, and social status (Kokushkin, 2014). Standpoint theorists believe that society is a hierarchical social construct of power where individuals and groups are situated based on a variety of factors. Depending on the individual or group’s location in the hierarchy, multiple versions of standpoints may exist. Standpoint theorists also believe a shift in power relationships begins when marginalized individuals

18 use their unique vantage point, or standpoint, to ask critical questions and provide insight on ways to challenge the group in power (Littlejohn & Foss, 2005).

Overcoming power relationships described in standpoint theory is similar to the social work of Brazilian educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire. He blamed power relations for what he described as a culture of silence, which, according to Freire, dominates the education system. Freire (1970) believed that in order to revolutionize the education system, change must occur “with the oppressed and not apart from them” (p.

66). In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he asked the rhetorical question, “. . . if the implementation of a liberated education requires political power and the oppressed have none, how then is it possible to carry out the pedagogy of the oppressed prior to the revolution?” (p. 54). Freire advocated that the role of the educator is NOT to treat students as if they were empty vessels and it is the teacher’s job to “deposit’ knowledge into their students. He called this the oppressive pedagogy the banking concept of education because it positioned children as objects in attempt to control their thinking

(1970, p. 72). In order to eliminate the banking system, educators should shift the position of power “through critical questioning and to find creative solutions for the oppressed student” (p. 75).

Unique to standpoint theory is the recognition that a person’s way of seeing and knowing is the product of their entire lived experiences (Behar, 1993). As a result, a person’s standpoint will differ even if he or she is a member of a collective group. For example, American-Cuban cultural anthropologist and researcher Ruth Behar researched the collective experiences of Hispanic women. Although the women shared their cultural

19 and gender dispositions, Behar (1993) discovered that it was the culmination of all of their lived experiences that formed their perspective, or point of view. This is meaningful to me because although I am socially situated as a white, American, middle class woman and educator, my standpoint would be created by all of my lived experiences.

As of 1840, there have been four waves, of feminist movements, documented in

American history (see Table 1). Standpoint theory has its underpinnings in feminist theory. Historically, standpoint theory emerged in the feminist movement between the second and third waves.

Table 1

Feminist Movement Organized by Year and Focus

Waves of Feminism

Wave Period Focus

First 1840-1920 Women's suffrage and citizenship

Second 1960-1988 Social justice; Women’s equality

Standpoint theory introduced 1977 ‘multiple knower positions’

Third 1988-2010 Intersectionality; Race, class, gender are interconnected

Fourth 2010-present day Online activism; Twitter hashtag trends #MeToo women's movement against sexual abuse; #Equal Gender Pay or #Equal pay to advocate for women's equality in the workforce

Feminist researcher and philosopher Nancy Hartsock (1997) was one of the first to address multiple standpoints of women. She drew from Marxist social theory and took

20 a post-positive stance that social relations were the only way to find truth. However, there has been a shift to a postmodernist stance. Postmodern theorists argued that knowledge is a social construct, influenced by social, historical, and political factors and holds that research can only describe someone’s experiences (Neuman, 1994). Feminist researcher

Donna Haraway (1988) coined the term situated knowledge to describe the diversity of women and their lived experiences. She framed feminist standpoint theory as a theoretical guide to turn social and political disadvantage into an “epistemic, scientific, and political advantage” (p. 7).

Feminist standpoint theory acknowledges women as marginalized in society, and their voices need to be valued (Haraway, 1988). At its core, feminist standpoint theory strives to understand the power relations by learning from the standpoint of women

(Sprague, 2001). Expanding on this description, Littlejohn and Foss (2005) explained the goal of feminist standpoint theory is “to understand the different vantage points women bring to communication and the many ways they enact those understandings in actual practice” (p. 89). Standpoint theory connects theory to practice by “drawing upon marginalized standpoints for the purposes of deconstructing hierarchy and oppression”

(Mohanty, 2003, p 505).

American feminist researcher and philosopher Sandra Harding added what is described as “strong objectivity” to standpoint theory. She contended that women could use their marginalized position to change power relations because of what she described as an “outsider-within phenomenon” (Harding, 1993, 1998, 2004). Only marginalized individuals and groups, or insiders, would be able to recognize patterns and behaviors of

21 a dominant group culture, in this case white, middle-class men. Women, having both an outsider and insider perspective could create change from the inside out.

Today, researchers and philosophers who do not identify with feminism are embracing standpoint theory (Kokushkin, 2014). As a result, there is a growing tension between an inclusive standpoint theory stance and postmodern feminists who fear that given the fluid and inclusive nature of situated identity, women’s political power might be put at risk. Unlike the more inclusive definition of standpoint theory, some feminist researchers believe that only women within society have an insider’s perspective and are able to recognize and change these patterns (Hartsock, 1997).

For the purpose of my study, I used standpoint theory in a broader sense as I explored my lived experiences within the context of the backstories I shared in my edublog entries, or posts. Solely using a feminist lens may prevent me from understanding multiple situated identities and points of view. For example, using a feminist standpoint theory lens to explore only my identity as a preacher’s daughter might exclude me from understanding how I may have been marginalized as a member of children (boys and girl) born to conservative, religious families. I would only know this if

I explored my standpoint beyond a feminist-only lens. Standpoint theory guided me as I reflected and described my experiences from my unique vantage point.

Review of Literature

To help me understand how my identity was constructed and how it may have changed, I reviewed literature on teacher identity, literacy leadership, and teachers as edubloggers. I hit roadblocks on all three of these sections in my review. First of all,

22 teacher identity construction research was outdated and there were limited studies on teacher identity within a virtual space. Secondly, there was limited research on identity construction of a literacy leader. I was able to find traits of an effective literacy leader, but few studies to address how identity was constructed or how it changed over time.

Along with my extensive review of current research, I went back to my notes and textbook from my university course on literacy leadership. I was very surprised by the limited research on educational blogging given the wide use of blogs in education.

Teacher Identity

In reading to understand my online identity construction as a literacy leader, I was not able to find substantive research that was current. I decided to include teacher identity in my review because my posts in my edublog include teacher roles as secondary

Discourses. In the course of my review, three themes emerged: 1) stage theory and identity; 2) personal history and identity, and; 3) concepts of self and identity.

Stage theory and identity. A review of literature on teacher identity noted several key players (Burke, 1985; Fuller, 1969; Fuller & Brown, 1975, Katz, 1972;

Watts, 1980). One of the first theories on teacher identity came from the early works of

Fuller (1969) who developed three stages of teacher identity; self (survival and acceptance), task (student performance and duties), and impact (social and educational impact). Fuller’s theory posited that a teacher progressed from one stage to the next stage after problem solving concerns in the previous stage. Through the years, there have been many theories of teacher identity construction and change; however, they build on

Fuller’s model (Fuller & Brown, 1975). Prominent theorists who have emerged are Burke

(1985), Katz (1972), and Watts (1980). Similar to Fuller, the stages of development are similar with variations extending from the original model.

First stage: Novice. The beginning stage of teacher identity construction begins with pre-service opportunities to gain entry-level skills. Once hired, the first-year teacher is focused on classroom management, content knowledge, and seeking to gain approval by administration. Katz (1972) added a characteristic to the first stage known as “The

Survival Stage.” It is during the first year when teachers begin to ask themselves questions like, “Can I make it until the end of the week?” and “Can I really do this day after day?”

Second stage: Advanced beginner. When the new teacher grows and understands that he or she can survive, the teacher becomes more focused on the students.

Burke (1985) and Katz (1972) described this as a student-centered classroom where the teacher tries new ideas and begins to take risks. This is the optimal time to add to the teacher’s knowledge through professional development. This stage lasts between two to four years.

Third stage: Proficient. At this stage, Fuller’s theory is expanded upon in greater

detail. For example, the beginning of the third stage is when teachers become comfortable in their role, and their confidence grows. A middle stage is included in what

Katz (1972) and Burke (1985) described as a period when the teacher becomes frustrated in her career. Fuller claimed that teachers express deep concerns about the school environment and their need for support by school personnel, as well as how they present

24 themselves as professionals. He classified these as “covert” concerns because they were shared during “confidential interviews” (Fuller, 1969, p. 220).

Fourth stage: Expert. Katz (1972), Fuller and Brown (1975) presented a four- stage model of teacher development based on the idea that different stages of teachers' careers were more focused on certain concerns, requiring a four-stage model of development. In the fourth stage, this focus shifted to student concerns. Having mastered content and teaching knowledge, teachers become concerned with connecting the subject to the students, and meeting students’ needs. Teachers also move past the subject- oriented needs of students and become concerned about meeting their emotional needs.

The final part of stage four is the teacher’s exit.

The stage theory does not consider anomalies such as teacher leaders who may have been a part of apprenticeships or have continued postgraduate studies in a field. The stages are a framework I may (or may not) use to explore and describe my secondary

Discourses.

Personal history and identity. In the early 1990s, a paradigm shift positioned a teacher’s personal history at the center of their identity construction (Cole, 1990; Holt-

Reynolds, 1992). For the first time, a teacher’s life history and personal narrative became a focus of research. A qualitative study by Butt and Raymond (1989) studied the autobiographies of two teachers. One participant teacher named Loyd was a 40-year-old, sixth grade teacher working in a low socioeconomic school district. Interviews informed the researchers of Loyd’s intent to create a classroom where students experienced feelings of “survival, safety, and success” (p. 408). Observations of his classroom were

25 included in the study. The researchers described his room as warm and caring. Based on the content of Loyd’s autobiography, the researchers theorized that the teacher’s practices were rooted in his personal life experiences. A similar study was conducted on a forty- four-year-old, female teacher named Glenda. She was in her ninth year of teaching

English as a Second Language (ESL) to refugee children. Themes emerged in her teacher practices such as self-initiation and self-determination (Butt & Raymond, 1989). Once again, the researchers noted parallels between Glenda’s life history experiences and classroom practices.

Knowles (1992) and Crow (1987) argued that a teacher’s lived experiences confirmed these outcomes. Crow (1987) studied what she described as “teacher role identity.” A qualitative study of four secondary pre-service teachers was conducted using interviews and observations. The interviews included their university professors. The study followed the pre-service teachers and documented their experiences during student teaching and into their first year as teachers. Noted were the challenges the pre-service teachers experienced during their student teaching experiences. Rigorous coursework and the practicum students’ lack of cooperation with planned lessons were common stressors experienced by the pre-service teachers. However, the pre-service teachers’ positive attitudes towards their students and teaching remained strong. Crow (1987) concluded that each of the four students carried into their teaching experience a predetermined model of the role of a teacher.

Leading researchers in the field of teacher identity, Connelly and Clandinin

(1990) conducted longitudinal studies on small numbers of teachers over extended

26 periods of time. The qualitative researchers described a variety of narrative data sources and ways of collecting narrative data, including field notes of shared experience, journal records, unstructured interviews, storytelling, letter writing, and autobiographical and biographical writing. Their research showed how personal narrative and the life histories of teachers contributed to teacher identity construction. As a result of their research,

Connelly and Clandinin (1990) adopted the use of narrative as a way to explain the phenomenon as researchers “describe their lives, collect and tell stories of them, and write narratives of experience” (p. 2).

Exploring my personal history supports my efforts to understand my identity construction. Specifically, I would be able to replicate the data sources used in the

Connelly and Clandinin (1990) study. Understanding my personal history in relation to my teacher identity will help me understand the internal and external influences that have shaped the message and tone of my blogs.

Concepts of self and identity. The concept of self can be traced to one’s culture.

Studies can be traced back to Greek philosophers and to early Christian theologians

(Chang, 2008). In fact, the term self was not seen in a positive light, especially in Western

Christian culture. The concept of self was something that should be denied. Scriptures from the Bible by the apostle Matthew quoted Jesus as saying, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24 New

International Version). Postmodern researchers attribute a person’s concept of self to an individual’s “passion, soul, creativity, and moral fiber” (Gergen, 1991, p. 6). From this perspective, a person’s emotions, feelings, and intuition are an integral part of their

27 identity. The concept of self is essential to my autoethnographic study because self within an affinity space is the subject of my research (Chang, 2008). Attention to concept of self has a rich history, especially among anthropologists (Anderson, 2006; Denzin, 2006;

Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).

Literacy Leadership

After an extensive review of the literature on literacy leadership from The U.S.

Department of Education https://www.ed.gov/, National Council of Teacher Quality

(NCTQ) https://www.nctq.org/ , peer reviewed research journal articles on effective literacy leadership, several themes emerged. Effective literacy leaders:

● support teachers and administrators by assisting them in identifying their core

beliefs, determining the content of staff development, providing time for

reflection, and deciding how these efforts will be evaluated (Santa, 2006);

● provide professional development that is ongoing to introduce teachers to new

ideas based on research-based strategies (Greenleaf, Jimenez & Roller, 2002), and

provide follow-up through observation and feedback (Darling-Hammond, Wei,

Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009);

● implement and model new literacies and literacy practices for teachers and

administrators such as blogging, creating wikis, Google Drive, and social media

to prepare students for their future (Leu, 2000; Leu, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004);

● reach linguistically diverse students to close literacy gaps through Sheltered

Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) strategies (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short,

2012). Strategies include: lessons preparation, building background knowledge,

practice and application, lesson delivery, review and assessment; and

● foster caring and trustworthy relationships with teachers, stress-free

environments, and positive conversations (Lyons, 2002; Pearson & Hoffman,

2011; Renyi, 1998).

Educational Blogging (Edublogging)

While searching for research on educational blogging, I found there were limited studies. However, I found several studies to support teachers’ use of blogs for reflectivity and for professional development.

Reflectivity and blogging. A mixed methods study by Yuen (2011) identified the benefits of blogging in education. The study took place at a Hong Kong university over the course of two years. The participants were senior level Bachelors of Education

(B.Ed.) majors. The benefits that emerged from the study were in the areas of self- expression, self-reflection, social interaction, and reflective dialogue. Most notably was the benefit of individual-centered expressions of personal feelings, thoughts, and self- reflection.

A qualitative case study by Coulter and Ray (2008) was motivated by the need to understand the role and function of blogs in terms of language arts teachers’ reflective practices. The researchers framed their research with Dewey’s (1933) theory of reflection as a way of knowing and using information. For the study, the researchers examined twenty-one randomly selected teacher-created language arts blogs. Since blogs are a public domain, prior consent was not required (Anderson & Kanuka, 2003).

A rubric was created to represent the spectrum of reflective practices suggested by

Dewey (1933). The beginning of this continuum is exemplified through this first meaningful level of the rubric. Dewey’s lower levels on the reflective spectrum consist of purposeful discovery of facts. The results of the study indicated that all of the teachers used self-reflection in their blogs; however, the depth of reflection varied from teacher to teacher. The researchers concluded that the results would provide a foundation and frame for further research on teacher blogging and reflection.

Professional development. A yearlong qualitative study investigated ways blogging might contribute to teacher-reform based practices and identity of secondary science teachers (Luehmann & Tinelli, 2008). The study examined how blogging supported reform-based practices of 15 secondary science teachers in a year-long study.

The researchers based their study on the goal for teachers to design student-centered classrooms; however, they asserted that teachers did not have the support to do so. Based on Gee’s (2015) identity theory, the researchers defined identity as “being recognized by self or others as a reform-minded science teacher” (p. 324). Instead of perceiving students as passive learners of the science using rote memorization and teacher-centered approaches, the participants committed to using new approaches and practices. An analysis of teacher’s blog showed affective content where teachers shared their emotions and advocated for reformed practices.

A year-long case study of middle school English Language Arts teachers sought to identify ways that teachers could use professional blogging as professional development (Rodesiler, 2017). The researcher provided teachers with teacher-generated

30 mentor blogs to point out the unique features of blogs as multimodal texts. Teachers were encouraged to consider the teaching-related topics they might explore in their blogs and the genres they might produce as they generate blog posts over a period of time. The responses were coded according to purpose and directions for future blog posts. These purposes were to “(a) express and reflect; (b) inform and explain; (c) evaluate and judge;

(d) inquire and explore; (e) analyze and interpret; and (f) take a stand/propose a solution”

(Rodesiler, 2017, p. 10). The outcome of the study gave the researcher insight on the importance of using mentor texts, modeling, and encouraging teachers to become purposeful in their blogging. These skills sets would foster sustained blogging to support their professional growth.

Concluding Thoughts

After an exhaustive search on teacher identity and literacy leadership development through edublogging, I was not able to find narrative structures within edublogs similar to mine. Out of curiosity, I revisited my mentor blog, Librarian in Cute

Shoes, and discovered that aside from aesthetics and narrative tone, Confessions of a

Literacy Coach bore no other resemblance. I searched for research studies about online identity construction and found five case studies.

The studies did not align with my theoretical lens of identity Discourse theory.

Rather, the studies concentrated on teachers’ use of avatars, or visual representations of themselves. The study analyzed who the teachers “followed” on a social network as constructed identity. There was no indication of intersectionality or convergence between offline and online identities, which is foundational to my study.

Next, I broadened my search to examine edublogs created by educational leaders and teachers. I selected edublogs that have been updated within the past six months and were older than two or more years. I examined edublogs recommended by the

International Literacy Association (ILA) and similar organizations, as well as edublogs I visit regularly. After examining multiple edublogs, I was reminded that the purpose of this autoethnographic study was not to understand others or even to compare myself with others. The purpose of the review was to understand my lived experiences within a wider social context.

CHAPTER III

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This chapter is intended to introduce the methodology I used to answer the research questions guiding this study.

● How was my identity as a literacy leader constructed and how has it changed over

time as reflected in my edublog?

● What were the social, cultural, and political factors that influenced the message

and tone of my blog posts?

This chapter begins with a personal narrative describing the stereotypical beliefs rooted in my family history. This is to give background and context relevant to the development of my primary Discourse (Gee, 2004). Using standpoint theory (Martin et al, 2001; Sprague, 2001), the narrative begins to build the tension that arises from a juxtaposition of the cultural and social stereotypes that frame the backstories in my edublog posts. Following the narrative, I state my philosophical stance, define autoethnography in detail, and describe how I used this methodology to collect and analyze data. I conclude with a description of the strategies I used to make my research trustworthy, followed by a discussion on ethical obligations.

Background and Social Context

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a teacher. My dream was well on its way to becoming a reality when I received my acceptance letter to attend

Hardin-Simmons University (H-SU). I was one of only three Baptist preachers’ kids in my high school, or PK’s, as we were called. I did not like being different or singled out

33 but eventually acculturated to the label society gave me. As Lisa Delpit (1995) noted in

Other People’s Children, “We live in a society that nurtures and maintains stereotypes”

(p. xiii). Initially, there was an expectation for me to go to a large Baptist university in the city where I lived. But truthfully, I wanted to find a smaller campus where I could carve out my own identity. I wanted to be my own person, instead of my identity being linked to my dad or the church.

By all accounts, H-SU was a perfect match for me! It was a small campus and being a preacher’s kid or missionary’s kid was not out of the ordinary. The strict conservative values I was raised to adhere to were in place as well. Dancing and drinking were forbidden. Of course, students found a loophole in the “no dancing” rule and we would have “turkey trots” off campus. The no drinking rule stuck. This especially pleased my parents and my West Texas grandparents whom I affectionately called Memaw and

Papa. Well, Memaw insisted that Jesus and the disciples drank grape juice or wine that was unfermented. This was what her pastor believed, and of course, a preacher could never be wrong. I learned to never second guess authority figures or question religious beliefs imposed on me.

I graduated four years later with a B.A. in education and a minor in reading. I was especially proud to be the first woman in my family to graduate from college!

I was also the first woman in my family to work outside of the home. My sorority sisters joked that I had earned an M.R.S. degree! There was a long-standing joke at H-SU comparing the university to a shoe factory because “students entered as singles and

34 graduated in pairs.” At the time, being married was as important to me as having a teaching certificate.

Becoming a Teacher

I was married the week after my college graduation. A week later, I was hired to teach Kindergarten in the same city as my dad’s church. My new school was one of the poorest in the city, and it broke my heart to see my students come to school wearing the same clothes and visibly hungry. I loved my students and wanted desperately for each child to know that I saw them in a special way. I put my heart and soul into teaching! My paycheck went to pay rent and bills while my husband attended graduate school. At the start of my second year of teaching, I discovered I was pregnant. I prepped my principal by letting her know that I would not be returning after I had my baby. For me personally, daycare was out of the question because women in my family had all been stay-at-home moms. I was expected to do the same.

I delivered my first child, a boy, over Thanksgiving break and retired before the school year ended. At 25 years old, I was a retired teacher! Like my mom and every woman before me, I believed it was my responsibility as a woman and mother to stay at home, raise children, and be a loving and submissive wife. I never dreamed of returning to teaching.

Learning to Write

Being a stay-at-home mom soon became lonely and exhausting! My husband had taken a job at an accounting firm in another city. I felt lost in my new and unfamiliar role as a stay-at-home mom. I missed my church. I missed teaching. I especially missed the

35 relationships I had formed with the other teachers at school. To fill the void, I signed up to take a distance-writing course. In the 1980s, this meant corresponding with my instructor via the U.S. postal system. I paid $200 and received a thick blue notebook and corresponded with my writing instructor by mail. After the course ended, I began writing short religious-themed stories and would submit them to small publications.

My first published article was Mom’s Bacon and Egg Blessing! It was a humorous story recounting the time my mother had cooked and fed our family breakfast in the middle of the night. She had set her alarm wrong! It was a religious publication based on the idea of the Proverbs 31 woman as she “gets up early to prepare breakfast for her household” (Proverbs 31:15). I received a check for $25 (that most likely went to diaper money), but I was hooked!

We joined a church after our move, and I became a contributor to the church newsletter. My stories were humorous and inspirational. One day after church, the pastor’s wife approached me about helping her write an article for a religious publication.

Soon afterwards, more and more opportunities arose to write for others. I began being a ghostwriter which is a writer who essentially writes for someone else and paid to remove her name. I spent years and years writing for others to be published in the religious market. One of my proudest writing accomplishments was Exposed Heart (2000) which I originally wrote as a ghostwriter, to support a single woman in ministry. I was touched by her story of overcoming a slew of abusive marriages and used her experiences to support women who have been abused. I wrote the book as a gift but with the contractual requirement that my name would always be attached to the book. I am not sure how

36 many copies the book sold, but I do know that it was made into a graphic novel to be distributed to women in prisons. Even though I was writing for others, somehow, I was able to channel my own thoughts and feelings into the manuscripts. Writing absorbed my loneliness.

One of the many lessons I have learned that did not come from the Bible or from a Sunday school lesson was from what my papa described as “The School of Hard

Knocks.” I learned the difficult lesson that life is not fair. Following the golden rule was good advice, but it did not shield me from getting divorced, becoming a single mom, and needing a full-time job. Suddenly, I was thrust into an unfamiliar world of being a divorced woman. I quit attending church and stepped out on my own into a strange world. I decided my best alternative would be to return to my first love, which was teaching.

Return to Teaching

It took almost a year to reinstate my teaching certification in Texas because (1) it was on microfilm; and (2) the No Child Left Behind Law (NCLB) had invalidated my teaching certificate. After taking exit exams along with pre-service teachers who were half my age, my teaching certificate was brought back to life and I returned to teaching.

However, technology had changed the landscape of teaching as I remembered it. Long gone were chalkboards and carbon copy machines. It took years to fully acclimate to what was called the 21st Century Classroom.

During my second year of teaching, I was invited to be a member of a district cohort and earned a master’s degree in educational leadership. Upon graduation in 2011,

37 a literacy coach position opened on my campus and I applied for the job. The positive relationships I had nurtured with teachers and administrators on my campus positioned me as a top candidate, and I was hired.

Adapting to an Unfamiliar World

One of my immediate challenges was adapting to digital literacies as instructional tools. My school district was progressive and believed in technology use over what was described as pencil and paper tasks. In fact, my district became one of the first 1:1 iPad districts in the state. Every student in fifth through twelfth grades was assigned an IPad!

Students were even allowed to keep their iPads during the summer until they graduated.

My district also used Smart boards in place of whiteboards, which were in place of chalkboards. Google classroom became a norm and allowed students to complete and return homework digitally. Even the campus library allowed students to check out digital/audio books.

I noticed a trend of teachers creating “fun” lessons, but they were unable to articulate how their practice was supported by research. In order for me to be able to support teachers, I decided to return to graduate school. In 2013, I applied and was accepted into the master’s reading program at a nearby university. Mid-way into the program, I was invited to apply for the doctoral program to earn a Ph.D. in Reading. The unfamiliar world became familiar when I understood the research to support the “fun” lessons by putting theory into practice.

Philosophical Foundations

Lincoln and Guba (1985) explained that there are three primary theoretical dimensions of qualitative research: (1) ontology; (2) epistemology; and (3) methodology.

Ontology describes my belief about the social nature of reality and an epistemological philosophical stance describes the approaches I can choose to understand the social nature of reality. My ontological and epistemological philosophical beliefs form the basis of this proposed study (Lather, 2006). Autoethnography was the methodology that emerged from my philosophical beliefs. Consistent with qualitative research, I ascribe to a constructivist ontology to describe my belief about the social nature of reality. I will use this paradigm as I explore how my online identity was constructed and how it changed over time. According to Lincoln and Guba (1985), epistemological beliefs are often intertwined with one another.

For this study, I drew from three intertwined constructivist epistemologies: interpretivist, critical, and postmodern (see Table 2). An interpretivist perspective posits that reality has multiple points of view and is socially constructed. Flexible and personalized research structures are adopted as opposed to rigid frameworks (Lincoln &

Guba, 1985). A critical perspective focuses on issues of political inequality by acknowledging that resources are distributed unevenly in society across both dominant and marginalized populations. Postmodernist paradigm acknowledges that there are many ways to knowledge and that one should not be privileged over another way. Neuman

(1994) explained a postmodernist “distrusts abstract explanation and holds that researcher

39 can do no more than describe his or her personal experience” (p. 74). Furthermore, knowledge and truth are products of social, historical, and political interpretations.

Table 2 Philosophical Stance Including Purpose and Beliefs

Ontology: Social Constructivist

Epistemological Stance

Interpretivist Critical Postmodern

Purpose: to describe, Purpose: acknowledge Purpose: to describe interpret, and understand social inequities; promote personal experience social change

Belief: multiple ways of Belief: multiple realities Belief: knowledge and knowing; does not privilege situated in social, cultural, truth are products of one way of knowing over and political contexts social, historical, and another political interpretations; truth is a social construct (Table: Adapted from Lather, 2006)

My epistemological beliefs are not independent of one another, but rather, blend together to form my philosophical paradigm. These beliefs emerged as themes as I reflected and described experiences that I perceived had contributed to my online identity construction (Bochner & Ellis, 1992) as reflected in my edublog, Confessions of a

Literacy Coach.

Autoethnography

Autoethnography is a qualitative research method in which the researcher/author uses self-reflection and writing to explore her lived experiences and to connect her

40 experience to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings (Ellis,

2004). Autoethnography blends the work of ethnography with autobiography and is often referred to as narrative inquiry, or personal narrative. Flick (2014) described autoethnography as a way to “systematically analyze the researcher's personal experiences in order to understand social and cultural experiences” (p. 534). Bochner and

Ellis (1996) explained the purpose of autoethnography “as a way for people to engage in the process of figuring out what to do, how to live, and the meaning of their struggles” (p.

111). Throughout the research process, the researcher (autoethnographer) seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experiences (ethnos) (Ellis, 2004).

I appreciated the descriptive nature and comprehension tone of the definition provided by Ellis and Bochner (2000).

Autoethnography is a self-reflexivity research method that is both the method and

the product. Autoethnography is a genre of writing and research that displays

multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back

and forth autoethnographers gaze, first, through an ethnographic wide-angle lens,

focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience: then,

they look inward exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move

through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations. As they zoom backward and

forward, inward, and outward, distinctions between the personal and cultural

become blurred, sometimes beyond recognition. Usually writing in the first-

person voice, autoethnographic texts appear in a variety of forms – short stories,

poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essay, journals, fragmented

and layered writing, and social science prose. In these texts, concrete action,

dialogue, emotion, embodiment, spiritually and self-consciousness are featured in

relations, family, institutional, and community stories affected by history, social

structure, and culture, which themselves are revealed through action, feeling,

thought, and language. (p. 739)

This definition appealed to me because it mirrors the fluidity, complexity, and non-linear nature of autoethnography. According to Ellis and Bochner (2016), autoethnography is research, writing, story, and method that connect autobiographical and personal experience to the cultural and social aspects of society. As the researcher and subject of my study, I had a unique perspective as an insider as I explored my identity and the social, cultural, and political factors that may have influenced the message and tone of my posts. This easy access privileged my perspective over other researchers in data collection and analysis

(Chang, 2008).

Qualitative Research

Autoethnography falls under the bigger umbrella of interpretive qualitative research methodology. A qualitative research approach involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to the world, which indicates that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). They list ten precepts that are foundational to the methodology:

1) The researcher is part of the data;

2) The text is composed by a particular somebody, someplace;

3) The writing process is part of the inquiry;

4) Research involves emotionality and subjectivity of both the researcher and

participants;

5) The relationship between the researcher and research participants is

democratic; the researcher’s voice should not dominate the voices of participants;

6) Researchers should accept an ethical obligation to give something important

back to the people and communities they study and write about;

7) What researchers write should be “for” participants as much as “about” them;

8) Researchers and participants should be accountable to each other;

9) Research should be about what could be (not just about what has been);

10) The reader should be conceived as co-participant, not as spectator, and given

opportunities to think about the research story or findings. (p.56)

As I conducted this study, my overarching goal as the qualitative researcher was to better understand human behavior and experience (Creswell, 2013).

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology

Autoethnography has close ties to hermeneutics and phenomenology approaches.

Similar to autoethnography, hermeneutics seeks to understand the structural causes of cultural practices or events such as a “Freudian slip” (Flick, 2014, p. 42). Hermeneutics is the nature and the means of interpretation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defined Hermeneutics as the “methodology of interpretation concerned with the problems that arise when dealing with meaningful human actions and the products of such actions,

43 most importantly texts (Mantzavinos, 2016). Within this vein, the researcher asks, “What does this experience really mean?” in an effort to connect experience with reality

(Raudenbush, 1994). In autoethnography, the researcher is the subject of the study attempting to make meaning of experiences within a broader context.

Autoethnography has components of phenomenology in that the researcher uses lived experience to describe rather than explain a phenomenon (Husserl, 1970).

Phenomenological research design describes the lived experiences of individuals about “a phenomenon as described by participants” (Creswell, 2013, p. 42). This description results in the essence or meaning of the experiences for several individuals who have all experienced the phenomenon. Phenomenological research strives to be free from hypotheses or preconceptions and relies more on the senses of the researcher (Husserl,

1970). In my research, only phenomena confirmed by my senses would be considered knowledge (Bryman, 2004).

Academic Critiques and Pitfalls

Autoethnography has not emerged in the academia arena unscathed. Spry (2001) explained how autoethnography research method “challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others because it reveals the fractures, sutures, and seams of self-interacting with others in the context of researching lived experience” (p. 712). Due to the social nature of autoethnography research, Adams (2015) described the research process as messy, uncertain, and emotional. He cautioned that if it is an individual’s desire to research social life, then the research method should acknowledge this. Even

44 academics who are open-minded expressed concern of the autoethnography as a method because of a “lack of systematic and methodical rigor” (Wall, 2006, p. 8).

Another critique is on the part of the researcher. By using one’s self as the source of data, the researcher has been viewed as narcissistic, too introspective, and too individualized (Sparkes, 2000; Wall, 2006). A focus on a single subject, who is placed on a metaphorical pedestal, is believed to lack the formality needed for academic texts.

Atkinson (1997) made these comments when reviewing an autoethnography, “The narratives seem to float in a social vacuum. The voices echo in an otherwise empty world. There is an extraordinary absence of social context, social action, and social interaction” (p. 339).

Chang (2008) cautioned the autoethnographer to avoid the temptation of being

“swept away by the power of storytelling and neglect the important mission of the autoethnography—culture interpretation and analysis of autobiographical texts” (p. 55).

While story and narrative may be engaging to the reader, it is important to go beyond telling a story or creating a journal entry (Tomkins, 1996). However, Duncan (2004) noted that criticisms have been leveled at the “more experimental forms of autoethnography in which the boundaries of scholarship are merged with artistic expression” (p. 11). Autoethnographies with strategies to support trustworthiness may be unclear in artistic expressions.

I agree with these criticisms and held myself to a high standard as I conducted my autoethnography:

1. My research sought to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) my personal

experience (auto) to understand cultural experience (ethno) (Ellis, 2004). By

doing so, I avoided the impulse to indulge in lengthy narratives that lack purpose

and focus.

2. I approached my research as a “political, socially-just, and socially-conscious act”

(Adams & Jones, 2011, p. 112). I kept in mind the goal of autoethnography as a

method to connect my lived experiences to wider cultural, social, and political

understandings.

Research Design

My research design describes the guidelines I used to connect the theoretical perspective to the strategies I used to answer my research questions (Denzin & Lincoln,

2000). A metaphor for ethnographic research design is a compass or blueprint that becomes a guide the investigator uses on how to conduct the study (LeCompte &

Schensul, 1999). My research design situated me as researcher, the research instrument, and the topic of inquiry (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2013). As the online literacy leader in my autoethnographic study, my personal story privileges me as an insider. Therefore, the data that may seem random to others would make sense to me.

Data Interpretation or Data Analysis?

Chang (2008) explained how the autoethnographic research process “is not linear in the sense that one activity leads to the next one and so on until you reach the final destination” (p. 121). Data analysis and interpretation are intertwined and are collected simultaneously. Interestingly, data interpretations and data analysis are often used

46 interchangeably in autoethnographic studies (Chang, 2008). Creswell (2013) explained the difference: data interpretation involves “making sense of the data” (p. 144). This is done through on ongoing process of reflection and writing. Data analysis is explained as

“the identification of essential features and the systematic description…in short, how things work” (Wolcott, 1991, p. 12).

I adhered to Morse’s (1994) description of data analysis that captures the fluid and “messy” nature of autoethnographic research. He explained:

Data analysis is a process that requires astute questioning, a relentless search for

answers, active observation, and accurate recall. It is a process of piecing together

data, of making the invisible obvious, of recognizing the significant from the

insignificant, of linking seemingly unrelated facts logically, of fitting categories

one with another, and attributing consequences to antecedents. It is a process of

conjecture and verification of correction and modification, of suggestion and

defense. It is a creative process of organizing data so that the analytical scheme

will appear obvious. (p. 25)

Similarly, Denzin and Lincoln (2000) stated, “The processes of analysis, evaluation, and interpretation are neither terminal nor mechanical” (p. 469).

Data Collection and Analysis

In order to answer my research questions, I used both external and internal data sources (Chang, 2008). The internal data sources I used in my study were an autobiographical timeline, edublog posts analysis, reflexive journaling, and an affinity space model. The external data sources I used were readers’ comments to posts,

47 screenshots from social media, and textual and non-textual artifacts from my family history such as photos and letters.

Internal data sources. Internal components of autobiography were revealed as I interpreted lived experiences as the primary source of data. Chang (2008) argued that easy access to data from the researcher’s lived experiences privileges the researcher’s perspective over other researchers’ data collection and analysis.

Autobiographical timeline. I began collecting data to analyze by creating an autobiographical timeline (see Table 3). This allowed me to situate my online identity as a literacy leader within posts. For example, my secondary Discourse in the post Fleas in

Room 212 (2013) was a first year teacher. I went through posts from 2013-2017 and matched the post with my educational identity or secondary Discourse (see Appendix A).

Table 3 Autobiographical Timeline for Posts Dated 2013-2014

Literacy position Blogposts 2013-2014

1. first year teacher Fleas in room 212!

2. special education teacher SpongeBob Squarepants to the Rescue!

3. 6th grade ELA and SS co-teacher Accidently on Purpose @edcampHome

4. creative writing teacher Ready…Set…Play! The Ghost Plant and other (Potentially) Fateful Tales

5. literacy coach (campus) A Teacher’s Summer Tale; How to Keep Your Sanity and Teach Kids Simultaneously; Lost in Translation;

6. reading interventionist (campus) Game On! Building Comprehension with Video Games;

Table 3 (continued).

7. sheltered ELAR teacher/high school What’s in a Name? ESL summer school teacher

8. District level roles and leadership (i.e. The Butterfly Effect DEIC; curriculum writer; evaluation committee)

9. Reading doctoral student; adjunct Literacy in the New Millennium; instructor (Dept. of Reading). Conference Burnout: Reviving Educators in a Most “Un”Common Way

10. ESL literacy teacher; Reading The Future is Calling: Are We Listening? doctoral candidate; ELLevate research Explaining the Unexplainable to Kids assistant (present day)

I analyzed the data from my autobiographical time line by creating an Excel spreadsheet and listing all of the online identities, or identity kits, reflected in my edublog. Identity kits are needed to be a “kind of person” (Gee, 2004). Through analysis,

I identified four online identities associated with literacy leadership:

1) Practioner: This identity included all of my Discourses where I am directly supporting teachers and students.

2) Academic: This identity included both independent and collaborative research projects, and engaging in university projects.

3) Presenter: This identity included presentations in the classroom, on a university campus, and at literacy conferences.

4) Author: This identity included works that I had self-published on Amazon or published professionally.

In order to understand how my online identity as a literacy leader changed over time, I used frequency counts. On the chart, I placed an “x” where there was evidence of an identity within the post: practitioner, academic, presenter, and author (see Table 4).

Using the data from 2013-2017, I created bar graphs to understand the ways my identities changed over time (see Appendix B).

Table 4 Frequency Counter of Identity and Change over Time

I used the Excel data to create bar graphs that coincided with the year. The outcome of my autobiographical timeline collection and analysis are described in Chapter

VII: Reflections on Affinity Spaces, Online Identity Construction and Change.

Edublog post analysis. Chang (2008) explained the importance of collecting, evaluating, and organizing data to avoid a “total sense of randomness” (p. 76). According to Freire (1970), in order to read the world, I need to be able to map who and what shaped my world, the reasons for it, and how these factors influenced where I am and the choices I make today. Using a template, I recorded and described five years’ of edublog posts 2013-2017 (see Table 5). There were fifty-four posts in all. I included:

 the name of the edublog post with a live link and lead picture;

 date of publication;

 the primary Discourse/D1 and secondary Discourse/D2;

 an interpretation to answer the question, what does the post mean to me?

 Confession Reflection questions;

 intended tone of my post;

 evidence of literacy leadership traits such as shared resources; intent to

support teachers and administrators; comments from readers;

 supporting theory or research (if applicable); and

 affinity space (offline and online).

I describe my analysis and findings in more detail in the Chapter IV: Reflection on

Childhood Experiences and Memory to Construct Primary Discourses and Chapter V:

Reflections on Storytelling, Oral Histories, and Secondary Discourses.

Table 5 Blog Analysis Sample

Identity Social Cultural Political Blog post D1- First (historical/family) Discourse D2- Secondary Discourse A Teacher's D1 Middle age 4th of July Traditional roles 2015- TX Summer Tale woman; middle celebrations from my family legis. class; white; cooking, Passed wife; storyteller cleaning, with concealed other women at handgun D2 Literacy the hunting law Coach ground. The men passed were the hunters.

Interpretation. What was my secondary discourse? What were my motivations for selecting a hunting trip for my story? What did this experience mean to me? Intended Tone: humorous, suspenseful Literacy Leadership: I wrote this story as a way to support ELAR teachers to model/guide ways to use creative storytelling to teach. I embedded a plot map for reference.

Table 5. Blog Analysis Sample (continued)

Confessions Reflection:

 In your opinion, are there advantages to teacher storytelling? Are there disadvantages?

 Why would it be important to allow student-directed activities in response to a story (creating a title, researching more on a self-selected topic i.e. vampire bats)? Would student engagement change if teacher stories were followed up by graded assignments or a quiz?

 What is the value of creating a space for teacher storytelling in the classroom? Why is it important to recognize and encourage teacher's unique voices and ways of telling stories?

How would teacher storytelling support student learning of Common Core standards? Theory to practice: Reader Response Theory- Louise Rosenblatt Affinity Space: Shared link on twitter; retweets; reader’s comments

In the top left section, I included a link to the post and the date/year it was published. I call the embedded photo a logo because it is associated with the title. Next, I identified my primary Discourse (D1) and secondary Discourse (D2). Primary Discourses are the identities developed when I was very young and are who I am every day.

Secondary Discourses are identities that I was apprenticed into, such as an academic

(Gee, 2015). The sections labeled section social, cultural, and political are where I noted my findings after researching the external factors that framed the post. For example, in the sample template I described a social factor as July 4th celebrations, I described a cultural factor related the traditional roles of women at the campsite similar to the roles of women in my family, and I described the political factor associated with newly passed

53 handgun laws passed in my state. I never left a section blank; instead I would use TBA as a place marker if info was to be added, or NA if not applicable.

In the section below labeled Interpretation, I asked myself, what does this experience mean to me? I would then free write any ideas that came to me. I did not worry about grammar, but concentrated on being transparent even if the entries were painful. In the Intended Tone section of my post analysis, I recorded what I knew to be the general attitude from which I wrote. In the section Literacy Leadership, I went back to my review of literature and connected the ways I demonstrated leadership such as sharing resources with teachers. I would copy and paste any resources I shared such as the story plot diagram in the sample. In the sample post analysis, I shared a story plot diagram to reflect the elements of a good story. In the section labeled Confession

Reflection, I copied and pasted the reflection questions from the post. In the bottom section labeled Affinity Space, I noted both online and offline affinity spaces where my online identity engaged. I will define and describe affinity spaces extensively in Chapter

VII.

Post analysis was an example of the fluid and complex of nature of autoethnography research as described by Ellis and Bochner (2000):

Autoethnography is a genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers

of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back and forth,

autoethnographer gaze, first, through an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing

outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience: then, they

look inward exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through,

refract, and resist cultural interpretations (p. 739)

Often my interpretation would trigger a memory or spark and idea that would cause me to use my reflexive journal to complete my thought. I would abandon my chart and shift to reflective writing as I connected to my personal experience. My reflexive journal became was completed in tandem and as an extension of my post analysis.

Reflexive journaling. Self-reflection is important in the process of identity construction and change (Baird, Fensham, Gunstone, & White, 1991). Consistent with autoethnography, I wrote my interpretations in first person to reveal my thoughts and feelings. In doing so, I connected the autobiographical and personal to the cultural and social aspects of society (Ellis & Bochner, 2016). I used reflexive journaling to draw these interpretations. According to Chang (2008), self-reflective data results from

“introspection, self-analysis, and self-evaluation” (p. 95). Chang (2008) described personal memory data as the building block of autoethnography because “the past gives context to the present self and memory opens the door to the richness of the past” (p. 71).

I collected personal memory data through reflexive journaling to describe my emotional experiences (Allbon, 2012; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Ellis, 2004; Flick, 2014). Personal memories were prompted as I read and responded to the blog posts I selected to analyze more in depth. I kept in mind that my memory would reveal partial truth based on my interpretations of past events (Gee, 2017).

I analyzed my reflexive journal using discourse analysis of written text. Discourse analysis uses the analysis of linguistic frameworks (the analysis of words and phrases in terms of exemplars and the application of the principle of sufficient reason). Gee (2015) described the workings of ontological models and frameworks in the world. Consistent with my study, Gee confirmed that discourse analysis involves digital and multimedia texts.

I went line by line through reflexive journals associated with posts 2013-2015 and highlighted words and phrases that emerged (to me). For example, discourse analysis revealed that I often refer to the reader as “you” as if I am talking directly to him/her.

Examples are “I promise you” or “you wouldn’t believe your eyes!” I used informal expressions I would say to a family member or friend, but not to an academic. I was able to understand how I use non-dominant instead of non-Dominant discourse within the narrative of my edublog posts. I embedded discourse analysis charts within my study.

I used two types of mediums for my reflexive journal: a talk to text notepad app on my iPhone and Google Docs (see Figure 5). When I was in the car or away from a computer, I was able to speak notes into my iPhone which would then create a text on a virtual notepad. This allowed me to write reflexively anytime, anywhere.

Figure 5. Sample reflexive journal entry from iPhone.

I used Google Docs when I had access to a computer. I added a second layer of data analysis by reflecting on my reflections using the “comment” feature on Google docs. Also, I was able to share my documents with a mentor who I trusted with my story and received a new layer of analysis. Throughout my study I used layered accounts, combining analysis and story, in describing the results of my study. Ellis and Bochner

(2016) compare layered writing to a double decker sandwich, or when story and analysis coexist side by side.

While analyzing my reflective journal, I privileged the narrative over quantitative data. When I had access to a computer, I used Google docs. My reflexive notes recounted

57 memories, often very sad ones. According to Gee (2017), painful details or memories may be rewritten in our minds in order to help us see a purpose for why something did or did not happen. He explained, “Most people need to know why things have happened, and do not like to think that things, especially very good or very bad things, are just random events, with no real meaning beyond that of change. We want to know that things happen for a reason. We want to know that they might portend for the future” (pp. 24-

25). Google Docs afforded an additional layer of analysis and support from a mentor who

I trusted with my story (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. Mentor support using Google Docs.

I discuss my findings from in Chapter IV: Reflection on Childhood Experiences and Memory to Construct Primary Discourses. Reflexive journaling became therapeutic for me.

Affinity space model. An affinity space model as data gave a visual of the interactions and connections of affinity spaces (see Figure 7). Gee (2017) described affinity space as “teaching and learning spaces” (p. 123). Gee argued that teaching and learning are not well distributed; as a result, educators become isolated from other spaces

(p. 115). Since my edublog exists in a virtual affinity space, it was important for me to

58 understand how these spaces connect and/or overlap. Chang (2008) described a similar model he labeled as a culture-gram (p. 97).

Figure 7. Affinity space model. People who create affinity spaces are known as architects and must know and understand the physical “stuff” and virtual “stuff” related to the affinity space (p. 128).

Therefore, I am the architect of Confessions of a Literacy Coach. I created an affinity space model using a triangle position center of the model to represent my edublog. I used circles for virtual or online affinity spaces and squares for physical affinity spaces. This data helped me understand my online identity and the ways affinity spaces were connected. According to Gee (2017), secondary Discourses live and interact within affinity spaces. When people visit my edublog they are fellow travelers, they do not need to interact with one another nor do they need to be a member.

External data sources. According to Chang (2008), the primary source of data is the researcher’s past and present. As a type of ethnography, data is heavily anchored in

“lived experience” (p. 103). However, to support the credibility of the research, data from external sources such as interviews, documents, and artifacts provided “additional perspectives and contextual information” (p. 103). For this study, I used readers’ comments, social media interactions, and textual and non-textual artifacts like photos and letters.

Reader's comments. I used readers’ comments from posts as I explored the types of interactions I had online. First, I went through all of my archived posts from 2013-

2017 and cut and pasted comments. As I read the comments, I used reflexive journaling to describe memories of these interactions. I used narrative analysis to understand and describe what I noticed in the comment and my response to the reader. I used these descriptions to support the ways my online identity changed overtime.

Social media screenshots. I used screenshots as verification of blog posts shared and added these to my autobiographical timeline (see Figure 8). I added the screenshots to the section of my post analysis table labeled “Affinity Space.” This helped to me understand the affinity spaces where my primary and secondary Discourses existed.

Figure 8. Screenshot from Twitter.

Textual and non-textual artifacts. Chang (2008) describes artifacts as “material magnifications of culture that illuminate their historical context” (p. 107). Muncey (2005) explained the importance of artifacts as valuable data source for autoethnographic studies. Examples of textual artifacts used in my study were personal letters, newspaper articles, and certificates of birth and death. Recently, photographs and videos have emerged as valuable textual artifact sources because of the lasting impressions they have on viewers. For example, a taped oral history of my maternal grandparents depicts the storytelling Discourse I learned as a child. A transcription of sections of the video revealed patterns of outside influences that influenced my storytelling approach to authoring blog posts.

Non-textual artifacts include family heirlooms, collections, and objects that held memories such as a baby blanket. For my research, I made a list of artifacts like family heirlooms, and other memorabilia. As I collected both internal and external data,

I reminded myself that all data is “heavily anchored” in my “lived experience” (p.

103) and not based on other people's interpretations.

Prolonged Time in the Field

The fieldwork that I conducted referred to the time I vested in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of my online identity through reflexivity; however, I did not keep a time journal. Like ethnographers, autoethnographic researchers are not able to conduct a study until they have access to the field (Adams, Jones, & Ellis, 2015).

However, since my field was my blogsite, Confessions of a Literacy Coach, data was readily accessible to me. The original timeline I proposed was 12 months (see Table 6).

Table 6 Proposed Timeline of Study

During the course of my research, there were circumstances beyond my control that prompted me to revisit traumatic events in my life. For example, my grandson was diagnosed with a terminal illness and I spent many hours in a hospital waiting room while he went through experimental treatment to save his life. I took my laptop, and I was able to complete data analysis over winter break. In addition, I sustained a severe injury to my left foot and was unable to put any pressure on my foot for five months. I worked part- time at the university as a graduate research associate (GRA) but the rest of the time I was home. I battled depression during this phase of my research and found writing to be

62 therapeutic. These circumstances allowed me to complete my student in six months as opposed to a year (see Table 7).

Table 7 Actual Timeline of Study

Month Task August -September Research autoethnography 2017 Reached out to Gee (Aug. 27) Read! Read! Read! Review of literature Methodology (proposed) October 2017 Proposed study accepted November – December Create affinity model 2017 Complete Data Charts Identify Discourse 1/Discourse 2 Identify external social, cultural and political Factors Record interpretations Identify literacy leadership traits Identify infinity spaces Write source for support November-April 2017- Reflexive Journaling (ongoing) 2018 January –April 2018 Narrative Analysis Post Analysis Create excel charts Writing! Writing! Writing! Complete 1st draft Meet weekly with mentor April – May 2018 Dissertation Bootcamp (14-17) Revise 1st draftComplete 2nd draft Revise 2nd draft Meet with Michan May-June 2018 Complete 3rd draft Meet with Michan Revise Complete 4thdraft

Table 7. Actual Timeline of Study (continue)

July 2018 PowerPoint approved Practice! Get input from mentor Practice! Defend

It was during these months of writing that my autoethnography grew, in both width and depth. Instead of a few edublog posts to analyze, I was able to chart and analyze all 54 posts.

Trustworthiness

Lincoln and Guba (1985) defined trustworthiness as the degree to which the qualitative study is “worth paying attention to” (p. 290). Several questions proposed by

Lincoln and Guba (1985) to establish trustworthiness are:

Do we believe in the claims the research report puts forward? On what grounds do we justify those as credible? What evidence is presented to support the claims? To support the researcher in this endeavor, four elements of trustworthiness should be present: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (Creswell, 2013; Lincoln &

Guba, 1985).

Credibility

Credibility is the first aspect of trustworthiness that should be established. This is because credibility asks the researcher to clearly link the researcher’s findings to reality in order to demonstrate the truth of the researcher’s findings (Lincoln & Guba, 1985;

Merriam, 2009). Strategies like triangulation, searching for disconfirming evidence, member checking, and peer debriefing are a recommended procedure (Creswell, 2013;

Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Maxwell, 2012). For my study, I addressed credibility by using the following strategies: (1) Triangulation of multiple data sources; (2) Prolonged time in the field; and (3) Persistent observation (see Figure 9).

Triangulation involves using multiple methods, data sources, observers, or theories to gain a more complete understanding of the phenomenon being studied

(Creswell, 2013; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Merriam, 2009). Chang (2008) suggested looking across several data sources to find emerging cultural themes and patterns. An example of theme might be “my family values on education” or “religious beliefs as a root of my sense of justice.” Shank (2002) noted how themes and patterns “seem to cut across various aspects of the data” (p. 129). Therefore, it was important for me to triangulate holistically from my data sources rather than from a linear perspective.

Reflexive Journal

Post Artifacts Analysis

Figure 9. Triangulation of data sources.

I compare my autoethnography and time in the field to an iceberg (see Figure 10).

The metaphor is a visual I used throughout the research process to help me grasp the depth of analysis that went into my study. I found this picture "Success Is an Iceberg" on

Twitter and printed it off to post in my home office. The metaphor encouraged me to keep moving forward in my study when I felt frustrated or wanted to give up.

Figure 10. Iceberg metaphor from Twitter. Unlike a traditional study, an autoethnography is delivered as a narrative. Story is the data and the researcher's interpretations are privileged over quantitative data measures or other people’s interpretations (Adams, et al., 2015). The time in the field and the depth of analysis are hidden from view. What others eventually see is only a tip of the process and does not show the hard work, struggle, risk, failure, perseverance, and sacrifices made throughout the course of my study.

Transferability

Lincoln and Guba (1985) defined transferability as the degree to which the results of qualitative research can be transferred to other settings. Unlike generalization, transferability may apply to varying degrees in most qualitative studies. My goal was to describe my research in such a way that other researchers may be able to apply the process to their autoethnographic study. I did this by including rich descriptions within my reflection. However, due to the highly personal and intimate nature of my research, some of my descriptions and findings were kept in a private Google file labeled For My

Eyes Only. These descriptions were used during data analysis, but I have not shared excerpts of these personal files.

Dependability

Dependability is an assessment of the quality of the processes for data collection, data analysis, and theory generation (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Throughout the research process, I strived to make my processes and interpretations as transparent as possible.

Embedded in my narratives, readers will find examples of my data and analysis. Further examples are included in Appendix E. Keeping an audit trail and making it available to my mentors and advisor throughout the course of the study supported trustworthiness. I showed through my autobiographical timeline and reflections how my research connected to my theoretical frames of standpoint theory and identity Discourse theory.

Confirmability

Confirmability is a measure of how well the findings are supported by the data collected in the study. This is especially important in qualitative research, because the researcher is the primary instrument of data collection. Conformability is also supported by the extent that others agree with the research findings. An audit trail is a key strategy for establishing conformability, allowing an external “auditor” to follow the natural progression of the study. Keeping an audit trail and making it available to my mentors and advisor throughout the course of the study supported confirmability. I showed through my autobiographical timeline and reflections how my research connected to my theoretical frames of standpoint theory and identity Discourse theory.

Lincoln & Guba (1985) compiled six data sources for an audit trail: (1) raw data such as records, audio, and screen shots; (2) data reduction and analysis products; (3) organization of themes; (4) process notes (procedures, trustworthy information); (5) materials associated with intention (proposal, journal); and (6) instrument development information (forms, schedules). Throughout my study, I collected and organized sources of data to add to the audit trail supporting confirmability.

Ethical Obligation

Autoethnographies share the same ethical complications as other types of qualitative research (Ellis & Bochner, 2016). In fact, autoethnography may increase ethical issues that have greater consequences on the researcher’s personal life (Mairs,

2008). As I disclosed stories from my life, it was important that the people in my stories

68 are unrecognizable to the reader. However, it was not possible for me to prevent some people or communities within my story from recognizing themselves, also referred to as internal confidentiality (Tolich, 2004). The World Wide Web (www.) has added an additional layer to ethical consideration (Mitra & Cohen, 1999). Unlike a hard copy document, web texts posted on the internet are public and permanent. Therefore, since my autoethnography is digital and is linked to a social media site, Confessions of a

Literacy Coach, it was imperative for me to be extremely cautious in any remarks, narrative description, or dialogue that would be disparaging to any person or community.

In Chapters IV, V, and VI, I begin a journey of reflection as I seek to identify and describe my primary and secondary Discourses. In chapter VII, I continue a journey of reflection to understand my secondary Discourse as a literacy leader and the ways my online identity has changed over time. I conclude the chapter by answering my first research question: How was my identity as a literacy leader constructed and how has it changed over time as reflected in my edublog?

In Chapter VIII, I shift my reflection to the external factors in order to answer my second research question: What were the social, cultural. and political factors that influenced the message and tone of my blog posts?

In Chapter IX, I reflect on the way Twitter chats became a Community of Practice

(CoP) when my edublog posts became topics of a Twitter chat. In Chapter X, I conclude my study with a reflection on my research findings on the possible future implications about online identity construction.

CHAPTER IV

REFLECTION ON CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES AND MEMORY TO CONSTRUCT

PRIMARY DISCOURSES

“The most important gift anyone can give a girl is a belief in her own power as an individual, her value without reference to gender, her respect as a person with potential.” Emilie Buchwald

The overarching purpose of this chapter is to name and describe my primary

Discourses that contributed to my online identity construction. These Discourses exist within my edublog’s backstories and were coded as D1 in my edublog’s analysis chart.

This chapter begins with a description of the world I was born into and the ways society and my family beliefs about girls shaped my primary Discourse. Next, I connect how my constructed memory associated with my childhood Discourses became a bridge to shape my theoretical perspective about learning and teaching. Consistent with autoethnography mythology (Ellis, 2004; Ellis & Bochner, 2000, 2016), I did not attempt to separate my emotions, but rather, allowed myself to express my feelings.

As described in my methodology, my data will be primarily communicated through personal narrative and supported with excerpts from edublog posts. Throughout the chapter, I will use layered accounts, combining analysis and story, in describing the results of my study. Ellis and Bochner (2016) compare layered writing to a double decker sandwich, or when story and analysis coexist side by side.

As a result, the narrative is the data. My findings are a synthesis of both internal and external data sources (as described in my methods section).

I will use the lenses of Discourse identity theory and standpoint theory to frame my research within a cultural and social context. In order to identify my primary

Discourse, it was necessary for me to understand my identity as a girl in my family and in society. I will explore the ways my perceptions of being a female were shaped by examining three of my primary Discourses: a blond-headed girl, a preacher’s daughter, and a big sister.

Social and Cultural Influences

I was born in 1962 and raised during a time period in history when women in society had limited career opportunities as compared to men. As a child, I watched commercials on television targeting girls who looked like me. My memories of favorite birthday gifts and Christmas presents were a toy ironing board and iron, an easy-bake oven, a potholder loom, a Betsy Wetsy doll with a bottle and diapers, a Baby’s First Step doll, a Barbie doll, a playhouse, and a “girl” bicycle. One year my Papa disrupted the girl themed gifts and bought me a John Deere tractor to replace my tricycle. I loved my tractor and remember riding it up and down the driveway pretending to plow my imaginary cotton field. My mom promised it was an accident when she ran over my tractor with her car and it was beyond repair. I cried for weeks.

Popular television shows in the 1960s characterized women in subservient roles.

Shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, Leave it to Beaver, and The Andy Griffin Show

71 characterized women as stay-at-home moms or nannies who depended on the husband or father to take care of them. My mother could have walked off the television set of The

Dick Van Dyke Show because she dressed in stylish clothes like Laura Petrie, the fictitious wife to Dick Petrie. My mom didn’t wear pearls around the house, but she did spend long hours ironing my dad’s shirts, pants, and handkerchief to wear on Sunday, ironing sheets for the beds, styling her hair and putting on makeup to look pretty. By societal standards, my mom was considered a middle-class woman who had a nice home, nice clothes, a nice car, and was able to stay at home to raise a family. By the church’s standards, my mom was the epitome of a submissive wife and good mother.

Blondes Have More Fun!

I was born into a world riddled with stereotypes. I was a girl, and if I were fortunate, I would be able to be a housewife and mother. Women who worked outside of the home were frowned upon in my family. Attending a college or a university was unheard of, even though a large university was less than a 30 minute drive from the front steps of my grandparents’ farmhouse. The only person I knew who had attended college was my dad, who attended a university on a full basketball scholarship. Higher education was for boys, not girls. Unlike girls, boys grew up and could attend college and climb the career ladder. A man could become a preacher, a soldier, an astronaut, a doctor, or even the president of the United States! My destiny was set in stone before I was born, as it was for all the women in my family. Well, every woman in my family except my Aunt

Frances!

Aunt Frances was an iconic figure in my family. She grew up on the farm, but dressed like the girls in a glamour magazine. She shopped from a Sears & Roebuck catalogue and purchased bright colored blouses, stylish pants, and skirts. Aunt Francis also worked at a bank as a teller. When visiting my grandparents, I would beg my mom to drive through the bank so I could see Aunt Frances. She would smile back at me from the bank window and pretend that we were customers. And I always got a sucker or piece of bubble gum. She once gave me a free plastic piggy bank she had brought home from the bank. I had no idea what to do with it, since I did not have money of my own.

I did not know why my Aunt Frances never had children, even though she married out of high school. I assumed that she was not able to conceive, but years later, I learned that she did not want children. She would tell me, “Tam, you’re like my daughter.” I am not sure how happy my parents were with my aunt when she bought me a pair of white “go” boots one Christmas. I wore those boots everywhere! She also taught me to act “prissy.” I would hold my head up, put my shoulders back, put one hand on my waist, and walk moving my hips side to side.

Aunt Frances loved to color her hair! It seemed like she had a new shade of hair every time I turned around! One year she was a redhead, the next year she was a brunette, but nothing compared to being blonde. She would tell me, “Blondes have more fun!”

My mom, on the other hand, kept her hair natural color, which was brown. My hair was light blond, but became darker as I grew older. Aunt Francis told me how my hair was blonde like hers, just a shade or two darker. I liked my hair on Monday,

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. On Saturdays, I did NOT like my hair. My mom decided that I needed to have curls on Sundays. My hair was naturally “straight as a board,” as my mom described it. And so, every Saturday I would sit on the bathroom counter looking at my reflection in the mirror while my mom spent what seemed like an eternity parting my hair in even strips and adding a beauty product called “Dippity Do.”

It was globby and messy. She would put a dab of product on the ends on my hair and then roll it up tightly with pink sponge curlers. My mom was determined for me to have curls every Sunday!

I dreaded Saturdays. I wore rollers all day and then slept in them all night.

Sunday morning, my mom would take out the rollers, brush my hair, carefully flipping up the ends into an upward curl. I would cover my eyes and close my mouth while my mom sprayed hair spray to make the curls last until Sunday night. I complained and complained about my hair until my Aunt Francis reminded me, “blondes have more fun!”

I reflect on my dislike of rollers in the post Paint by Number and Run! (2014):

Sunday mornings meant cold cereal, sleeping in sponge rollers so I would have

curls for the day, a Sunday school lesson, church, warm hugs, and more kisses

than I wanted from a handful of adopted grandmothers…”

On Sunday mornings I would bathe, and dress in Sunday attire from head to foot.

I wore a Sunday dress, Sunday shoes, Sunday socks, Sunday bow, and on special occasions like Easter, I wore Sunday gloves. Looking back at pictures, I look more like a doll than a living girl (see Figure 11). I was groomed on how to smile “like an angel” and

“sit quietly like a young lady.” On special occasions, pictures were snapped and the roll of film would be sent off to the developer. A few weeks later, we would pick up the pictures, sort through to find the best ones, and put at least one in the mail to my grandparents.

Figure 11. Picture in Sunday clothes.

One of my favorite photos was inserted into the corner of Papa’s prized certificate belonging to the American Angus Association (see Figure 12). Years of the West Texas sun streaming through the window damaged the picture. But, this is one of my favorite pictures because I know this picture always put a smile on my Papa’s face.

Figure 12. Papa’s favorite photo and American Angus Association certificate.

Hair seems like a trite topic for an autoethnography, but it describes a distinct characteristic associated with my primary Discourse; my identity kit. Society was partly to blame for my Saturday torture. I had dolls to prove it! My dolls had blond hair like me, with curls. My Barbie was blond and her hair flipped up on the ends like mine on

Sundays. When I was given a “Baby’s First Step” doll at Christmas, I squealed with delight! She had straight blond hair and bangs. She looked like me on every other day of the week! The girls on television commercials also looked like me, with a shade of darker blond or light brown. My favorite television teacher, Miss Margaret, had blond hair (I assumed it was blond. We had a black and white television but I imagined it was). Yes, my genetics mattered. My gender, my ethnicity, my social-economic status, my religious affiliation, and the time period when I made my debut in the world were factors that

76 shaped my primary Discourse. I had to be pretty, quiet, smile on cue, and most of all, well-behaved.

Looking back, I am able to understand how something as seemingly insignificant as a hair-do and being a girl could shape my primary Discourse, as well as marginalize me in society. But it did. Unlike boys from my generation, society groomed me to be a future housewife and mother. Through Discourse as a preacher’s daughter, I believed my outer appearance, my facial expressions, and my demeanor, were valued over my thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

Angel Unaware

My parents desperately wanted another child, but were unable to conceive and turned to adoption. A caseworker matched my parents with a five-month-old baby boy with big blue eyes and light brown hair. The moment my parents saw him they fell in love. They named him Richard Bradley, but called him Brad. After my dad’s resignation in 1995, my mother wrote an autobiography, Pieces to Peace (Crossland, 1998). My mom described my relationship with Brad, “Tamra absolutely adored her new little brother. He was a thousand times more lovable and fun to play with then any doll she had” (p. 8). Sadly, and unexpectedly, Brad became infected with a fatal disease, meningococcal, a bacterium that attacked his body and he was pronounced dead less than twenty-four hours after being admitted into the hospital. My last memory of Brad alive was standing in the drizzling rain looking up from the hospital parking lot. (I was not allowed to go into the hospital). My dad held him against the window of a floor high

77 above the ground where I stood. I blew kisses upward and waved my heart out, believing that he would return home after the doctor made him well.

I had never experienced anyone dying. I believed Jesus died on the cross for my sins, but he was raised from the dead. As a child, I did not understand the permanence of death. One of the falsehoods of the church was the teaching that God would never let a child die if the parents had enough faith. When Brad died, my mom fell into a deep depression. I relied on my mom’s description of my response to my brother’s death since my memory of the event was gone. She wrote:

“Tamra told God she was tired of pretending that Brad had gone away on a long

trip, even though her mom and dad had told her that her brother was in heaven.

‘I’m ready to get Brad back,’ she whispered tearfully. ‘I’m gonna close my eyes

and count to 10. When I say 10, I want to put Brad back in his bed.’ She began

counting to 10, ever so slowly, her faith increasing with every number. Finally, it

was time to open her eye. ‘Ten!’ Expecting to see Brad’s smiling face peering

over his crib. Tamra looked up. But God hadn’t answered. After trying again and

again, she burst into tears and ran from the room” (Crossland, p. 11).

Brad’s death was traumatizing and shaped my primary Discourse by making me aware of the uncertainty of life. I wrote the post, Paint by Number and Run! (2014) and included Brad in the storyline. The post was a story describing an event in my childhood when I destroyed a map created by a widow’s Sunday school class that was held in our basement. (The same basement where my pretend classroom was located). The class was

78 made up of older women who were studying the Holy Land as a precursor for an actual trip to Jerusalem. I decided to help paint the map and ended up with paint everywhere! It basically looked like a calico painting of a hodge-podge of colors. I placed the blame partially on Brad. In the end, I was forgiven and the women brought me back a necklace containing a small mustard seed representing faith. I also included one of my favorite pictures of us taken together before his death (see Figure 13). The post was therapeutic for me to write. I cry. I laugh. But I always feel better.

Unique to standpoint theory is the recognition that a person’s way of seeing and knowing is the product of their entire lived experiences (Behar, 1993). For this reason, I am sensitive to the uncertainty of life and rely on faith to carry me through difficult times in life, even when my faith feels small. This blog post is special to me because it is a way to keep his memory alive and strengthens my faith.

Figure 13. Favorite photo with Brad.

A New Brother!

As an adult, I have heard of cases when a couple have not been able to get pregnant, but after the couple adopts, the woman gets pregnant. This case described my parents. Within a year of Brad’s passing, my mom discovered she was pregnant. In fact, photos of my mother pregnant were on the same role of film as pictures from Brad’s funeral. Over the course of my mom’s pregnancy, I have no memories of being at home.

I have seen photos where I am standing beside my mom and touching her round belly. I have been shown pictures taken of me at Christmas opening gifts and at birthday parties, but it is like my memory was wiped.

Less than a year after Brad passed, my brother was born (see Figure 14). I remember every detail of welcoming him home from the hospital, holding balloons and toys. I felt like my brain woke up from a long nap. My parents say that I would not leave him alone! I was always asking to hold him, rock him, and play with him. I remember teaching Rod to play peek-a-boo and coaching him to learn to sit and to crawl. I sang to him. I made him laugh. I held him when he cried.

A piece of my heart came back to life the day my brother was born.

I was given a second chance to be a big sister! I was eight years old.

Figure 14. My new baby brother. Interestingly, I have never written a post about the birth of my brother who is now in his forties. As an insider, I know this is because I have not experienced a loss;

I do not feel the need to capture my memories in a posted story, as I did when writing Paint by Number and Run! (2014). I addressed this questions in my reflexive journal:

Why have I not blogged about memories of my brother, Rod, even though he was

a gift; a second chance for me to be a big sister? Is it because I have somehow

used Confessions of a Literacy Coach to canonize Brad’s short life? Is the post

Paint by Number and Run my way of preserving his memory in a virtual space?

I’m not sure. This will perhaps be a question I may never answer. (Journal entry

1/21/18).

The Preacher’s Daughter

People I met later in life would joke, “Oh, I’ve heard about preachers’ kids!”

And I would feel my skin crawl. During my adolescent years, the stereotype of preachers’ kids as being wild did not describe me in the least. Some people assumed preachers’ kids became rebellious because of an overly strict upbringing. Yes, some preachers’ kids do rebel and act out, just like any normal teenager. However, I have met many, many preachers’ kids who did the opposite. I was one of them. Maybe it was my fear of authority that kept me in line. I had a strict upbringing and was taught to “fear God and flee from evil.” Evil was basically anything that contradicted my dad’s sermons, what I knew of the Bible, or conflicted with the lessons I had learned in Sunday school.

I was never short of hugs and kisses from the older ladies who would flock to me after church. I lived a privileged life. When a family member was sick, we would have a home visit from the doctor in our church. He would prescribe medicine, if needed. When

I had my tonsils out, surgery was in the office of another physician at no charge. By the time I was in junior high school, my family had become prominent in our community. I had free access to the country club and hobnobbed in elite social circles through early adulthood. When special guests would visit the church, they would stay in our guest room. I have had the privilege of meeting contemporary religious singers/songwriters, famous authors, and have been a dinner guest of societal elites.

One of the most impactful guests who visited our home was Holocaust survivor,

Corrie Ten Boom and author of The Hiding Place. I remember a story she told about a

82 time her father asked her to carry a heavy suitcase filled with watches and other items off the train for him. She pulled and tugged, but she was unable to lift it off of the floor of the train. In response, her father explained how some knowledge was too heavy for a small child. When she grew older, she would be able to bear it, but not then. I have never forgotten the truth behind her words.

As my dad’s church grew, the parsonages became bigger. The last house we lived in was a two-story brick house with a private tennis court. We had a “dumbwaiter” that connected the upstairs and the downstairs, and my brother and I would have fun sending items up and down without having to climb the stairs. The formal dining room had a bell located near the head of the table that was designed to notify servants in the servant quarters. We never had a servant (that was not in the church budget). As I grew older, I was well aware of the social status associated with being a preacher’s daughter, and I liked it. Yes, there were times I wanted to feel like I was my own person, but in reality, it was the only life I knew.

As life so often does, I was thrown a curveball. I was 24years old, newly married, and pregnant with my first child when my dad was forced to resign the church he pastored for over ten years. He was accused of doing something terrible and called a

“wolf in sheep’s clothing.” I was devastated when my parents, my brother, my husband, and I were forced to leave the church. I was shocked, angry, and lived in denial for years, always imagining my dad had been wronged. Less than 10 years later, my parents divorced, and my wall of denial crumbled. I had foolishly clung to the hope that one day

83 my dad would be reinstated as pastor, or would go on to find a bigger church. It was like another death to me. I spent years grieving not only the loss of church family and friends, but also the death of my identity.

I described my experience in my reflexive journal:

I felt more like a robot than a person when I stood beside my dad as he read his

letter of repentance to his 4,000 member church congregation. I looked across the

crowd. I saw my youth pastor, friends from the youth group, families I had gone

on vacations with and spent time in their homes, students from the nearby

university, faces I would never see again. Just as I had buried my brother, Brad, I

had to bury my identity of being a preacher’s daughter; an identity given to me at

birth. (Journal entry, 12/18/17).

In retrospect, being a preacher’s daughter was a primary Discourse given to me from birth. Using standpoint theory, I see how my identity was situated within a hierarchical social construct of power (Kokushkin, 2014). My dad had a powerful influence over the church congregation and moved in social circles. I remember being stopped in airports or at restaurants and being asked, “Aren’t you ______’s daughter?

By default (and not on my own merit) I was given the same privileges because of who my dad was, not for who I was. Our family was forced to leave the church and the people I loved and who I believed loved me. It was a burden my mom, my brother, and I never should have had to bear.

My primary Discourse as a preacher’s daughter is present in only two blogs: Paint by Number and Run! (2014) and Creating a New Structure to Grow 21st Century Writers

(2014). The posts were written over the course of a year and once written, I kept the posts in draft form until publishing almost a year later. The posts are highly personal and

I sobbed like a baby when writing them. No one but me would understand the strong emotions attached to my posts.

Purpose to the Pain

According to Gee (2017), painful details or memories may be rewritten in our minds in order to help us see a purpose for why something did or did not happen. Gee explained, “Most people need to know why things have happened, and do not like to think that things, especially very good or very bad things, are just random events, with no real meaning beyond that of change. We want to know that things happen for a reason.

We want to know what they might portend for the future” (2017, pp. 24-25).

During post analysis and reflection, I recognized some of the ways I used edublogging to reconstruct my stories, especially painful ones. I do not intentionally write for this purpose; it is something that I do subconsciously. For example, after returning from a vacation with family to New Mexico, I came up with an idea to write a post about whether aliens exist or not. It was meant to be funny. I even had a hilarious picture of myself with an alien statue to add to my post (see Figure 15). The post would shift to my belief that Edcamps were “out of this world!” I discovered the reason for my sadness had to do with a death of a family member. While writing in my reflexive journal. I wrote:

Memaw was fumbling with my iphone trying to figure out how to take my

picture. I kept running back and forth from the alien to the Suburban showing her

how to take a picture. She’d take a picture and it would show the suburban

dashboard, or a tree, anything but the alien! We began laughing so hard I got the

hiccups. We finally got the shot of me posing to be silly. I never knew this would

be our last trip together. (Journal 3/5/18)

The picture captured a moment that was joyful and not sad. The post took me several weeks to write, as do most of my posts. By the end of the draft I had unknowingly reconstructed a memory. I named the post, Alien Matters: Keychains, Bobble Heads and

Refrigerator Magnets, (2015). Google analytics confirmed that this post has remained in the top three all-time popular posts.

Figure 15. Post showing photo standing by green alien statue.

Ultimately, my purpose for writing is to share theory that will translate to effective classroom practice that give purpose to the pain. I am really not sure how to explain how I do this. I have no idea how this happens…it just does. The story I tell will result in a theme that emerges from my belief system. (I will address theme in more detail in Chapter VIII).

According to Bochner and Ellis (2016), the story and my interpretations are the theory. The tensions that arise within a story and the resolutions are theory. Ellis explained, “When we move from responding to a story with our stories to finding themes, we have turned from thinking with to thinking about stories” (p. 130). A theoretical story does not have to have a literature review or focused themes spelled out because they are present within the story. Ellis continued, “Citations or no citations, stories explain, analyze, and theorize, (p. 131). As an educational blogger and literacy leader, my ultimate goal is to cleverly weave within a story, ways to connect theory to teaching and learning practices.

To help me understand how I reconstructed memory, I created charts to represent my understandings. In the first column I listed the post with a live link and the year. The next column I identified my primary Discourse associated with the post. Next, I described a reconstructed memory that brought me joy or happiness. Lastly, described my theoretical perspective and how I improved classroom practices (see Table 8). In this way I was able to make sense of my pain (Gee, 2017) by connecting theory to practice.

Table 8 Sample Posts of My Primary Discourse and Outcomes

Posts Primary Reconstructed Theory to Practice Discourse Memory

Creating a New Preacher’s Happiness Children need a new Structure for Daughter associated with structure to grow. We 21st Century memories of my cannot keep using an old Writers dad preaching when structure expecting new (2013) I was a child. results. Implementation of Genius Hour is an inquiry-based teaching practice to support higher level thinking.

The Ghost Plant Granddaughter I am remembering Instead of viewing (and Other conversations with child’s writing from a Potentially Memaw and Papa deficit model, focus on Fateful Tales) before they passed what the child does (2015) right.

The Future is Girl I am remembering It is important to equip Calling: Are We trips to the Space students with future Listening? Needle and seeing ready skills to help them (2017) what the future will succeed in careers that be like. do not exist today.

Within the table, I included more examples of the way I used the point of view of my primary Discourse and a reconstructed memory that brings me joy or happiness. The last column is the theory that emerged from my story and how it is applied to classroom practice.

Summary and Insights

My primary Discourse was given to me at birth. I had no control over the time period when I was born, the family I was born into, or the choices others made that shaped my identity. As a girl, I was born into a society that placed limitations on what I could grow up to be. My family and religious affiliation as a preacher’s daughter limited my choices even more. My experiences being a sister to two brothers shaped my early concepts of life and death. I have discovered that Confessions of a Literacy Coach is a creative space where I can manipulate my memories, especially painful ones, and massage until the pain is gone. I experience a therapeutic effect when I write and read the posts I have written from my pain. Through my backstories and recollections from childhood memories, I am able to encapsulate the memories I want to hold onto, and literally write off the ones I no longer want to remember.

When completing the analysis piece to identify types of memories associated with posts, I discovered something interesting. Unknowingly, I used the pain of my memories and found a way to associate with positive changes in education. As per Gee’s statement, this is the way I give purpose to my pain.

CHAPTER V

REFLECTIONS ON STORYTELLING, ORAL HISTORIES, AND SECONDARY

DISCOURSES

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or

why we’re here.”

Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

This chapter describes how my secondary Discourse as a storyteller at heart was created, and how it is reflected in my edublog. Gee (2015) described secondary

Discourses, or D2, as identities that people learn through apprenticeships as part of being socialized into school, church, or organizations. Similar to Heath’s descriptions of the community of Roadville, I draw similarities between my family and community storytelling practices and how they are reflected in my edublog. In this chapter, I include two YouTube videos of my maternal grandparents (Memaw and Papa) as they recounted the hardships of farming in West Texas in the 30s and 40s through oral history. The videos give the reader a first-hand account of my grandparent’s primary and secondary

Discourses in a way that writing about them could not. I conclude with my new understandings of storytelling as a literacy leader and describe ways I applied my secondary Discourse to improve instructional practices.

Gee and Storytelling Discourse

On my edublog, I describe myself as “a storyteller at heart.” According to Gee

(2017), I am adopting an “activity-based identity” because my identity as a storyteller

90 would not exist unless I told a story (p. 101). All activity-based identities are identities that individuals have by free choice. Gee explained, activity-based identities are

“reciprocal relationships between a person and a social group and its core defining activities. Such identities change in history as groups change their activities, norms, values, and standards change” (p. 97). In my family history and religious social culture,

I was apprenticed into social norms and practices in which storytelling was how a person shared information.

Church and Community Storytelling Practices

Through ongoing reflection, edublog analysis, and artifacts, I was able to trace my secondary Discourse as a storyteller to early influences from my church community, my caretaker, and my maternal grandparents. I learned to be a storyteller from listening to the stories around me. Unlike written language, oral language is instinctive and develops apart from formal schooling (Pinker, 1994). There are also differing language styles spoken within families and cultures depending upon the intent of the message. Just as a person could distinguish between different types of clothing, there are distinctive ways of talking. Storytelling for different purposes and in different settings is a part of a person’s identity kit (Gee, 2014). Through socialization, storytelling became a part of my identity.

Story and Sunday Dinner

After leaving West Texas to live in Renton, Washington, the church my dad pastored was a second home to me. Older ladies in the church became surrogate grandmothers. We referred to church members as part of our “family of God.” I was

91 around my church family more than anyone else. I went to church every Sunday morning,

Sunday evening, Wednesday evening, and an occasional mid-week impromptu prayer meeting. Sunday afternoons were a social time. After the Sunday sermon ended, the mood became light-hearted, even jubilant, as arrangements were made to invite the

“Pastor over for dinner.” For my father, a “good story” would be factual, but with enough exaggeration in facial expressions or suspenseful tone to end with everyone laughing. There was a similar lightheartedness at end of sermons when my dad would say, “Who gives a hearty Amen?” and the church in one accord would bellow, “Amen!”

This contrasted with the alter call to invite anyone who did not know Jesus as their Lord and Savior to some forward. Of course, unless there was a visitor, everyone else was

“saved” but the invitation was given anyways.

The meal after church was called “Sunday dinner” and would last well into the afternoon, giving our family only a few hours to get ready for the Sunday night service.

Most Sundays we would go to a church member’s house and be treated to a feast. I never understood why, but most Sundays, fried chicken was the main course. Today, I find it funny because fried chicken is a southern dish and we lived in the northwestern part of the United States. I asked my mom about this, and she remembered my dad raving about a church member’s fried chicken and said it was his “favorite” meal. And so, from that moment on, we ate fried chicken most Sundays.

During Sunday dinner, the children would sit at the same table as the adults but were excused to go play after we would eaten enough to satisfy our parents.

Conversations around the table started somewhat serious around a topic, but by the end of the meal, laughter would erupt. In her ethnographical study, Heath explained that members of the Roadville community, and likewise, our church, expressed how storytelling in this way formed a social unity, a commitment to maintenance of norms in the church and their roles in the community (p. 151). Members of the Roadville community said the purpose of a story was to make people laugh by making fun of oneself. Telling stories that might come across as embarrassing to an outsider would be common. Over a home-cooked meal, humorous stories would be shared, often involving telling on oneself. Similar to Roadville storytelling practices, my dad shared stories of funny incidents during his sermons, like the time he swallowed a fly while he was preaching.

In my edublog, I purposefully script stories with myself as the brunt of a joke or framed as telling on myself. I believe my post, To My Principal...I Must Confess (2013), set the tone of the stories to be told in this manner. One of my favorite examples is the post Fleas in Room 212 (2013, 2015), which is a story about my first year of teaching when a sandbox in my learning center became a breeding ground for fleas (see Figure

16).

Figure 16. Sample post of making myself the brunt of a joke. I read it and laugh to this day! Another tell-all post, The Butterfly Effect (2014), tells the story of how a mouse and a box of Cheez-Its resulted in pandemonium breaking out in my special education classroom (see Figure 17). I wrote the post after reading

Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 based on the idea of chaos theory, also known as the

Butterfly Effect, which claims that one small event like the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can result in something as big as a hurricane. I applied King’s theory to recreate an event in my special education class that resulted in my becoming a curriculum writer in our district.

Figure 17. Post example of poking fun at myself. I believe this propensity as a storyteller to make fun of myself mirrors the ways stories were told in my church culture and community. I confirmed this trait in my biography posted on my edublog. I wrote, “I enjoy blogging about the not-so-forgettable experiences in the classroom…” (see Figure 18). Poking fun at myself is a common discourse I use in my posts. I use pictures and narrative to get a laugh from readers.

Figure 18. Edublog all about me bio. These posts are often a result of looking through photographs and keepsakes. When an idea comes to me, I create a humorous story and then find a way to apply this to helping educators improve their teaching practice.

Grannie Annie’s Lap

Another source of stories came from an older lady, a caretaker, who became my surrogate grandmother, Grannie Annie. I was only three years old when my dad left his first church in West Texas and moved us to Washington. The move was especially difficult on my mom who had never lived anywhere other than the small farming community in West Texas. My mom described her worries for me. She wrote,

“’Three-year-old Tamra kept patting me on the head and pleading, ‘Mommy,

please don’t cry anymore.’ When that didn’t work, she said, ‘Let’s take turns. It’s

my turn to be the mommy and cry.’ Tamra didn’t know it, but much of the pain

came from knowing she didn’t understand that we were moving so far away and

that she wouldn’t get to see her Me-Ma and Papa the next week, or the next, or

the next (Crossland, 1998, p. 6).

Leaving my grandparents had been especially difficult for me and so I gravitated to Grannie Annie. She was retired with no children of her own. During the week, Grannie

Annie took care of me if needed. Sometimes she would care for me in her home, which I now know is called a trailer. I liked going to her house because it was small and I felt safe. I’m told she would rock me and sing songs to me. My parents say that she could calm me down when I was crying by singing to me. I do not remember early songs, but I do remember a finger play she taught me,

Here’s the church.

Here’s the steeple.

Open the door.

Where’s the people?

Here’s the church.

Here’s the steeple.

Open the door.

There’s the people! Church Finger Rhyme (author unknown)

Grannie Annie would hold me in her lap (see Figure 19) and show me how to interlock my fingers and then build a steeple with my pointer fingers. During the first verse, I would turn my hands over (facing upwards) to show my empty palms. This

97 represented an empty church (without people). The second chorus I would repeat but interlock both hands in a way that my fingers that when I turned my hands over (palms upward) I’d wiggle my fingers and shout, “There’s the people!”

The influence of Where’s the Church? Where’s the People? finger play is represented in my post: Summer Slide is No Walk in the Park (2016). I wrote the post during the summer when working on an independent project with one of my university professors. We were researching a summer reading loss program for children in poverty.

The culmination of the study was a mixed methods research report to be distributed in search of funding to support the program. The program was funded by a Christian organization and held in a community center that was named after a city in the Bible. One morning I arrived at the center early and decided to drive around the neighborhood. I described the scene in my blog post I wrote:

The streets were littered with potholes. I drove by a house with the doors and

windows boarded up and a Private Property sign was nailed to a wooden post. It

was clearly abandoned. The house next door had bars on all of the windows and

the next house. And the next house. There were no bikes or toys in the yards. No

furniture on the patios. No one was out walking their dog. No morning joggers.

Where were the people?

The question, “Where were the people?” was rhetorical. I knew the people were inside living behind the bars on the windows. When writing the post Summer Slide is No

Walk in the Park (2016), the church finger rhyme I had learned (and played) as a child

98 came into my head. As a reader, one would not be able to see the connection between the finger play and my post. However, due to my insider status, I would be the only one who would be able to understand.

Figure 19. Photo with Grannie Annie. Grannie Annie was one of the few people I would let hold me after our move. I would cry for my grandparents, but she had a way of soothing me. While I do not remember it, my mom recalls that Grannie Annie held me and consoled me after Brad’s passing by singing to me and telling me stories about Jesus. I believe this is why storytelling is important to me. I associate storytelling with feelings of pleasure

(Gee, 2017). Gee theorized that adult talk between an adult caretaker and a child can influence a child’s ability to socialize as a member of a family and the community.

Sitting in Grannie Annie’s lap listening to stories and learning finger plays and songs taught me how to socialize as a listener and storyteller.

Felt Board Stories

Another source of storytelling came from my Sunday school teachers. They would teach Bible stories by telling a story using a felt board prop and cutouts. The teacher would start with a large piece of felt, usually a dim shade of blue or gray attached to a large piece of plywood. Pieces of felt in the shape of characters and objects important to the story were placed on the large felt as the story progressed. The story might be a true story or a parable from the Bible. Examples I remember are The Boy and Five

Loaves of Bread, Daniel and the Lion’s Den, and The Parable of the Lost Coin.

Listening to a variety of real and make-believe stories are important building blocks for imagination. According to Gee (2017), our imaginations are foundational for humans’ ability “to plan, hypothesize, prepare, assess, and hope. The core of human intelligence is to imagine and plan things in our minds before we act in the world. But we can do this only if our imagination capacities are well-developed” (p. 37). The stories from Sunday dinners with church family, stories Grannie Annie told to me, and stories from my Sunday school teachers, resulted in heavily charged feelings of positivity.

As confirmed by Gee (2017), the stories became a part of long-term memory and are readily accessible to me. The memories may last for a lifetime.

Oral Histories

Heath (1983) observed the oral traditions of the literate communities of Roadville and Trackton and described them in a highly personal, first person account, unlike third person accounts that came across as “more formal and distant” (p. 231). Roadville

100 residents used writing only when they had to, as a memory tool to help buy and sell things, or to help keep in touch with family members. Memaw had an address book. Papa had list of groceries and a daily to do list to help jog his memory. Trackton women wrote few letters but sent cards. Memaw sent cards with a little personalized note written in a blank space, and always signed Memaw with xxxooo to represent kisses and hugs. Unlike

Roadville, my grandparents did not grow up around print because they were too poor.

Passing down stories replaced writing.

Within every language, there are different ways of speaking (Irvine, 2001; Labov,

1972). I was immersed into a family and culture of storytellers. These were not fantastical, imaginary stories, but stories around daily events, embedded in conversations, or told as a record of my family history. I would overhear my mom tell my aunt, “You wouldn’t believe what happened to me today!” and then she would proceed to tell a story.

At some point in the conversation, my aunt would respond “You don’t say!” and the conversation would continue. If asked, “How are you?” a member of my family would not be expected to say, “I’m fine, how are you?” Rather my family member might reply,

“Well, my arthritis seems to have a mind of its own today. I woke up stiff as a board and just made myself get out of bed.”

My grandparents, who I called, Memaw and Papa, passed along our family history through stories. They told true stories of family happenings. Most stories were told over breakfast. The smell of crackling bacon frying, fried eggs cooked in bacon grease, made-from-scratch butter biscuits, and fresh milk were a staple at my

101 grandparents’. Memaw and Papa lived long enough for me to hear (more than once) stories about our family history. Some of the stories were funny, like when my great-aunt was bitten by a snake when using the outhouse. Some stories were sad. Memaw would reminisce about her older brother who died in an airplane crash in World War II. Papa and some other relatives found the plane in mucky water and they were able to give him a proper burial. Memaw would pull out an old suitcase filled with letters from her brother, and I could tell it was as if she went back in time.

Papa would tell stories about the weather such as the lightning storm when he had to deliver twin calves in the middle of the night, a drought that ruined one of his best cotton crops, or a year he had a “bumper crop.” Papa told the story (more times than I could count) about when he broke both of his arms getting bucked off a horse he named

“Bucky.” Some of his stories were light-hearted, and he would interject humor.

When my Papa had the floor to talk, his stories would go on and on and on, and this became a lighthearted joke among the listeners. He did what we called “chasing rabbits.”

After my grandparents’ passing, my uncle shared an interview as part of a study on early West Texas in the 30s and 40s through oral history (see Figure 20). In the video, my grandparents were well into their 80s. Papa was retired from cotton farming and planted a pecan orchard to make money by selling shelled pecans at a local farmers’ market. Memaw continued to take care of the household chores. The interview took place in the house they purchased after retiring from farming. As part of my research, I was

102 curious to see if my secondary Discourse as a storyteller could be traced back to my grandparents. I chose to transcribe an oral history section of the video about how my grandparents met as an example of their rich description, their sense of humor, and keen memory for detail when storytelling.

Figure 20. Oral history photo of Memaw and Papa. Part I https://youtu.be/S_Tzo3m4P60

Part I Transcription

Interviewer: Now when did you meet Nadine? (11:56)

Papa: Well we went to school, or they moved from Alabama down there to this

area where we were in Collin County, so her sister and brother started to school

there, the same school. That’s where I met her.

Interviewer: Now Collin County is…

Memaw: McKinney

Papa: McKinney, Northeast of Dallas. Sort of now it’s practically in Dallas. At

the time, seemed like quite a ways from McKinney to Dallas, like Plano and

103

Dallas and McKinney now all those towns now are kind of like Wolfforth and

Shallowater are to Lubbock.

Memaw: And back then you run off to get married. You didn’t tell your folks you was going to get married. (laughs)

Papa: Well, not everybody did this, just poor people. I guess you might categorize it that way, but we did run into a little problem.

Memaw: Well, we’s wasn’t old enough to get married for one thing.

Interviewer: How old were you?

Memaw: I was seventeen, well, I was barely seventeen. He was eighteen.

Papa: Well, the deal was we were planning on getting married. That particular year, which was 1937. I was working with my uncle in Shallowater. So we decided we’d get married then. So anyway my cousin who was about my age we went and got our license and he vowed to the fact that I was old enough which I weren’t. Our beginning was sort of based on fraud to begin with (laughing). Lying about our ages and all of that stuff (both laughing). So her dad read that we’d got a marriage license in the paper and so for meanness I guess. Well, I don’t know.

He just loaded everybody up and went home. So I didn’t have no telephones. So I didn’t know it. So anyways I went ahead and made preparations for a Saturday night wedding. My cousin and me we came down and he brought his girlfriend along and her cousin told us, “Well, Dave heard about ya’ll gett’n a marriage

104

license.” Now I was just sitt’n there prepared to be a, you know, a groom, so to

speak, with no bride around (all laughing).

Interviewer: (15:58) So you went with your dad.

Memaw: Yes (laughing).

Interviewer: So what did you do?

Memaw: Well, he came the next day or two and we went a got married! He

probably had about ten dollars in his pocket. And that’s all the money we had

between us when we married (17:78).

Interviewer: Where did you live after you go married?

Memaw: We lived in the house with his mother for a year, well, nearly a year.

She had a little, we called it a car shed, in the back. We made a little room out of

that. And we set up housekeeping in that. And that’s whenever we moved out here

the next fall. So we moved out here and our first house was a shack. Do you know

what a shack is? (30:18).

Part II https://youtu.be/My8i0JUr5bo

Part II Transcription

Memaw (20:21) You know in this day and age when a person gets married now

they got to have all this big showers and that house has got to be furnished before

they even move in. And uh, maybe they stay married for about a year or two and

then they split up and get a divorce. Well, our first place we lived in, the only

thing we bought new was a cook stove. And we bought it to pay it out on time.

105

We never bought nothing since then to pay it out on time. That was the hardest

thing to pay for. We went to Montgomery Wards and bought that cook stove. It

had an oven and two burners. And it was four dollars a month. We had a hard

time paying that stove off. And we borrowed a bed from a neighbor and we took

orange crates and fixed em up for a cabinet. A bottom part and a top and fixed

curtain around them. And the bed where my dressing table was at was two orange

crates and a ruffle around it and a mirror.

Interviewer: And you made the ruffle.

Memaw: And I made the ruffle. And so I never will forget we had a neighbor and

she was a school teacher. And she came up there and I was kind of apologizing

for not having a fine house, you know. And she says, “Honey, if anybody

wouldn’t keep a shack then they wouldn’t keep a mansion.” (22:50)

Interviewer: What a good thought!

My Response to the Interview and Transcription

I noticed the same features of spoken discourse as the people from the Roadville community (Heath, 1983). My grandparents used the term “ain’t” and would sometimes contradict one another. For example, Papa contradicted Memaw when she declared, “And back then you run off to get married. You didn’t tell your folks you was going to get married.” Papa immediately corrected her, “Well, not everybody did this, just poor people.”

106

I found that the ways my grandparents answered questions with the types of

D/discourse (talk), mirrored my own propensity for telling stories about my family. For example, in one part of the interview Papa is asked how he gathered crops. Literally, five minutes later in the video, Papa is talking about being a fifteen-year-old and finding his way onto a farm to earn money by harvesting cotton! When the interviewer asked my grandmother “How old were you when you got married?” Memaw answered, “I was seventeen, well, I was barely seventeen. He was eighteen.” Papa immediately chimed in with a lengthy monologue that became a story.

I love listening and watching my grandparents on YouTube. I am reminded of the power of the internet to capture memories of our loved ones. As I listened and transcribed parts of their interview, I had to laugh because I had heard these stories many times over breakfast. Papa would wear a straight face when talking and then a few minutes into his story, he would begin laughing. Memaw loved to give her opinion, especially when it came to newly married people. She would always remind me of the importance of keeping a clean house. She would say, “If you can’t keep a shack clean, you can’t keep a mansion clean.” Until the video transcription, I had no idea this saying came from a teacher!

I was also reminded of the struggles my grandparents had to overcome to survive.

They worked as sharecroppers, meaning they gave a portion of the money from their crops to the landowner. They also grew most of their own food. Every penny counted!

They did not have the luxury of continuing their education past the eighth grade. It was

107 not until my Papa retired from farming that they bought their first home (see Figure 21).

And true to their beliefs, they never went into debt again. They had saved all of their money and were able to pay cash for their first home and a car!

If you could see an aerial view of my grandparent’s farm, there is not another home in sight for miles. They lived in the middle of the land they farmed. Papa had carved out a dirt road that led to a pig pen, a wooden stall for horses, a wooden windmill, a small vegetable garden, a work shed, and a trough filled with water, which I was convinced was a swimming pool.

Figure 21. Memaw and Papa in front of their farmhouse. I cherish the video of my grandparents and sometimes listen to the videos to hear

Papa tell stories or to hear Memaw remind me to be thankful for what I have. I feel comforted knowing that their stories will live on to be shared with generations to come.

108

Storytelling Discourse as a Literacy Leader

As literacy coach, I implemented storytelling in classrooms on my middle school campus. I routinely told stories to my students. The stories were well thought-out and planned to model for my students the elements of storytelling. Stories like, The Possum

Who Forgot to Play Dead, and The Vampire Bat and the Lost Camper were two favorites. I would bait my students with the title and say, “The story may be too scary.”

My middle schoolers would some days beg me to tell them a story and promise they

“could handle it!” After I became comfortable telling stories in my literacy classroom, I would schedule days to go into teachers’ classrooms on my campus and model storytelling.

In 2017, I took advantage of the global platform and I wrote a post titled A

Teacher’s Summer Tale: The Trade Secrets to Creating Stories that Teach! (2017). The post was designed to demonstrate the power of storytelling in the classroom (see Figure

22). I prefaced the post by writing: “I confess that I can weave a tale that would hold the attention of most reluctant readers and writers.”

109

Figure 22. Sample post of storytelling Discourse. The narrative is layered with modeling, explicit instruction, and supported by theory. I did not directly reference Rosenblatt’s theory of aesthetic reading; but rather I modeled how to give the aesthetic interaction between student and text. In the aesthetic reading experience, the reader’s attention is focused on what he/she is living through during the relationships with the text (Rosenblatt, 1969).

Summary and Insights

My secondary Discourse as a “storyteller at heart” was developed through immersion into a storytelling culture. During my childhood and into adulthood, stories were all around me. I heard stories told from my dad during after-church lunches, from my caretaker, and from my Sunday school teachers. My grandparents, Memaw and Papa, passed down our family’s history using stories. Storyteller became a tradition in my literacy classroom as I told stories to my students. These stories were timely, purposeful, and designed to engage resistant readers and writers. Overtime, I saw success in my

110 classroom as my students began to design and tell stories of their own. Confessions of a

Literacy Coach is a creative space for me to tell stories of my own, model storytelling for teachers, and to keep family memories alive.

111

CHAPTER VI

REFLECTIONS ON EARLY LITERACIES AND WRITTEN DISCOURSE

“Reading is not walking on the words, it is grasping the soul of them.” Paulo Freire

In this chapter, I closely examine the features of written discourse within my edublog posts. D/discourse with a lower case ‘d’ refers to words spoken or written.

Framed by standpoint theory, my descriptions are how I see and interpret the world from my unique vantage point (Hartsock, 1997; Harding, 2004). I draw from my earliest memories of literacies that surrounded me as a child. I share sample texts from these external artifacts: informal letters, church newsletters, Bibles, and oppressive religious literature and teachings. Using discourse analysis, I give examples of ways these early texts influenced my word choices within my edublog. I conclude the chapter with new understandings of ways early literacies shaped my beliefs about myself and others, especially in relation to authority figures in my life. These insights are the crux to understanding my secondary Discourse in my first post, To My Principal...I Must

Confess, (2013).

Informal Letters

When I was three years old, my dad accepted the offer of a pastor’s position at a small Baptist church in Renton, Washington. The move from West Texas was difficult for me because I was very attached to my maternal grandparents, Memaw and Papa.

112

I have been told how my mom cried and cried on the car trip to Washington State.

I would hand her a Kleenex and tell her we could take turns crying. It was 1965, years before internet or cell phones, and the only way to communicate was by making a long- distance telephone call, which could cost up to $1.00 a minute, or by letter writing.

My mother would write about once a week, and at three years old, I began writing letters as well. My earliest letters to my grandparents were scribbles. I am told that I would have my mom or dad read my letters back to me. Of course, I realize now they would cleverly ask me to read my letter first! On the backside of the letter, either my mom or dad would write a note or letter. As I grew older I learned to address the envelopes myself (see Figure 23). I knew their address by heart. The post office workers knew that Box 55 belonged to Maurice and Nadine Cain even though I addressed letters to “mema and papa. This was because in a town the size of Ropesville, Texas,

“everybody knew everybody’s business” as Memaw would say. I later changed the spelling to Memaw and Papa.

Figure 23. Envelope addressed Memaw and Papa.

113

After my grandparents passed, our family discovered a shoe box with EVERY letter I had ever written them from the time I moved to Washington to years later when I was married and had children! In the shoebox, I discovered a letter written on a piece of notebook paper when I was four years old. On one side, I had written my name in all capital letters, TAMRA. Below my name I wrote PAPA and MAMA followed by a series of what looks like a row of candy canes.

On the reverse side of the letter, my mom wrote in cursive handwriting using blue ink on lined notebook paper (see Figure 24).

114

Figure 24. Letter writing on notebook paper with transcription (page 1).

Artifact Transcription

Tues. night Dear everybody at the Cain house, Well, I really don’t know any news since just got through talking on the phone but since Tam wrote her letter I thought I better add my 2₵ worth. Annie is watching the President’s speech on T.V. I’m cleaning my kitchen floor—I’m waiting for it to dry so I can wax. I really got energetic today. I got all my kitchen cabinets and drawers cleaned out. Now, Daddy, you can come see me and won’t have to clean cabinets! I also cleaned my oven & stove. Talked to Peggy while ago. Sunday will be her and Mike’s 2nd wedding anniversary. Boy! They’ve just got started! Well, better close and wax and bath (that is wax the floor & bath me!) Love ya gobs, Us

115

Figure 24. Letter writing on notebook paper with transcription (page 2).

TAMRA

PAPA

MAMA

When sifting through artifacts from the shoebox, this letter caught my attention because of the similarities to Heath’s description (1983) of letter-writing in the working class, white community of Roadville. She described their letters as “conversations written down” (p. 213). Heath wrote, “Every letter is a part of a familiar unbroken chain of linkages between relatives and/or friends” (p. 215). Women who wrote letters assumed a shared background of knowledge or spelled out presuppositions behind their statements or queries. In other words, letters were written with the assumption the reader would understand meanings, without explicit explanations. Another commonality was the medium used. My mom typically used pen/pencil and notebook paper just as women in

Roadville wrote on notebook paper or stationary in either pencil or pen.

116

In the first sentence, my mom explained that she just got through talking on the phone “but since Tam wrote her letter I better add my 2₵ worth.” This is a term I’ve heard all of my life. I’m not sure what it means to other people, but my family and friends use the term to mean “I’m gonna tell you what I think.” Sometimes the phrase is followed by the comment “take it with a grain of salt.” Similarly, I used the phrase “give my two cents worth” to describe myself in my edublog. I intentionally used the phrase because it is everyday language people use. The discourse of the person talking would be considered a “non-dominant” discourse because someone who is not speaking from a position of power says it. (Or, at least this is my interpretation).

I especially liked how the discourse (written language) in my mom’s letter captured how ordinary speech sounded (to me). I could have used language of a dominant discourse by situating myself as an academic in higher education. In reflection, I wanted my stories to be read and to make sense to anyone, academics and non-academics alike.

Gee (2017) described informal language as “high context” or implicit language and is used as a way of “bonding with people and expressing solidarity with them” (p. 50).

“Low-context” or explicit language is used with people who do not share the same background knowledge and want to be more formal. Low context language is more school-like (p. 50). The ways we use implicit and explicit language depends on the

Discourse or a person’s “identity kit” within a social setting.

My mother’s letter is high context, implicit because she and her parents share a common knowledge and understanding and hidden nuances, like the gentle jab to Papa

117 for his obsession with cabinet clearing. Closing with “Love ya gobs” meant love that could not be measured. More commonly used with a new baby or child, one might say, “I could just gobble ’em up!” The phrase “don’t know any news” is also a common phrase in my family when talking on the phone or in letters. Before hanging up the phone one commonly says, “Well, I don’t know any news…” These expressions are high context and require the person reading to understand the meaning. I believe my discourse, the social language, I use in my description of myself in my edublog is the language I would use with my family or friends and not with strangers. It is both high context and implicit.

I would never say I am going to “give my two cents worth” in a meeting with my dissertation committee, as it would be highly disrespectful!

By first glance, the letter my mom wrote may sound demeaning, but framed by standpoint theory and by understanding the social and cultural paradigms of white, middle class women living in suburbs, the letter contains bragging rights. My mom situated herself as the person responsible for maintaining the house. Also, she had a floor that could be “waxed” which implied wealth to an extent. For example, my grandparents first home was a shack. They had a dirt floor and used cardboard boxes for furniture.

When my parents married and had me, they had a small two-room house and could not even afford a crib for me. Instead, I slept in a drawer and they carried me places in a box.

And so for my mom to talk about waxing was her way of describing her status.

Also, in the late 1960s, women who could not afford to stay at home were entering the workforce. The discrepancy between men’s and women’s pay ushered in the

118 second wave of the feminist movement for equal rights (Rampton, 2014). But for women who did not have to work, staying home was a status symbol that was modeled by

‘culture icons’ like television stay-at-home moms June Cleaver, Donna Reed, and Harriet

Nelson—white, middle class housewives who had the responsibility at home to rear children, clean house, and bake cookies (Meyerowitz, 1994).

Commercials in the 1960s also situated white, middle class women as housewives. I remember helping my mom cook fried chicken, a favorite country recipe my Memaw made on Sundays. Memaw cooked fried chicken the “old fashion way,” as I called it. She would buy a whole chicken at the store and separate the parts. Then she would dip each piece in a flour/egg/milk batter and fry it in melted Crisco shortening.

(Crisco was an expensive brand). Similarly, girls in Roadville would play in the house alongside their mothers incorporating real ingredients like water, milk, and flour into their play (Heath, 1983, p. 274). The “old fashion way” at Memaw’s house meant catching a chicken, wringing its neck, plucking feathers for starters! But when the Shake

N Bake commercials came out, women in society were shown doing very little work to cook chicken. After the chicken was cut up, it went into a Shake-N-Bake mixture inside a clear baggy and then shaken until it was coated. I can remember the commercial. My mom and I would copy the mother and daughters’ dialogue. I remember my punch line came after my mom cooked chicken using Shake-N-Bake and I would say in an exaggerated, country voice, “And I--- helped!”

119

Below is a picture with my mom. On the floor beside her, is notebook paper for letter writing and taking notes from religious study guides (see Figure 25). I have only seen my mom read religious books such as Hinds Feet on the High Places by Hannah

Hurnard and Angel Unaware by Del Evans Rogers. She routinely read materials printed by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) like Sunday school manuals, study guides, and daily devotionals. Along with notetaking from my dad’s sermons and from Bible study guides, letter writing was a part of her daily life.

Figure 25. Mom holding me.

In retrospect, the letter artifact mirrored my mom’s “identity kit” as a daughter, housewife, and friend (to Peggy). She also mentioned the President’s speech that my caretaker, Grannie Annie, was watching as she wrote this letter. However, my mom chose to write a letter to her parents over watching the President’s speech. Analyzing this letter from standpoint of a married woman in 2018, my mom’s letter would be interpreted

120 as a sign of oppression in society; however, she did not see herself as marginalized. I cannot help but wonder why my mom did not see the importance of watching what was most likely an important political event. She wrote, “Annie is watching the President’s speech on T.V. I’m cleaning my kitchen floor—I’m waiting for it to dry so I can wax.”

Standpoint theory proposes that an individual’s understanding or perceptions are always shaped in part by his or her social and political experiences (Douglas & Johnson, 1977;

Oakley, 1981). In the 1960s, only white men were commentators, news anchors, weathermen, or cameramen. There were no women in the newsroom and certainly no women candidates!

The written discourse my mom used in both speech and letter writing resembles the language I use in my writing. A closer analysis of my edublogs from 2013-2017 revealed ways I used phrases that were high context, implicit by using similar terms and related to sayings I grew up hearing either from my parents or from my grandparents. I described the spoken discourse I learned from my grandparents in the post, The Art of

Speaking Texan (2015). I blogged:

I confess that I learned to speak “Texan” at an early age of from my West Texas

grandparents. “You don’t say!” and “Oh my lands!” are household exclamatory

phrases meaning, “Your statement is unbelievable to me given the

circumstances!” I remember going to the state Fair and hearing Big Tex say,

“Howdy!” which in everyday English means, “Hello!” or “Greetings from

Texas!” I coded these terms as Family Colloquials. If read aloud the posts are

121

intended to sound like a talk written down. (I make a point to read the post aloud

to myself and/or to a friend before I publish). I want it to sound like talking. A

systematic analysis for edublog posts showed family colloquials was a regular

feature of posts dating 2013-2017 (see Table 9).

Table 9 Text Examples of Family Colloquials

Posts 2013-2014 Text Example

Accidentally on down-to-earth educators who had children to feed, lawns to Purpose mow just like anyone else @edcamphome

Fleas in Room 212 I know, you're rolling your eyes, because learning stations are (republished in 2015) as common as jam on bread

Lost in Translation I scrambled to get sub plans together a lump formed in my throat

Posts 2014-2015 Text Example

Paint by Number and Faith isn't believing in superstition or old wives' tales. Run!

A Colt Named Carl I grabbed my wallet and was caught up in a stampede of other bargain shoppers in the direction of "orange tagged" items

The Butterfly Effect Although they "say" the mice had been disposed of, rumors of a school-wide cover-up spread like wildfire that the mice had, indeed, not been captured and they were likely breeding as we spoke.

122

Table 9 Text Examples of Family Colloquials (continued)

Posts 2015-2016 Text Example

Secrets from the Crypt by sheer determination my chicken scratches slowly came to life

Alien Matters I don't buy it.

Fleas in Room 212 If you've never been to Texas in the heat of summer, it can get so hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk!

In case you've never been bitten by a flea...those suckers are quick!

Posts 2016-2017 Text Example

What’s in a Name? Ms. Heartless (not her real name) sat perched on a wooden stool carefully eyeing her new class.

Emoji’s, Selfies, and Have you wondered why the letter "u" keeps popping up in Memes: Innocuous student essays…? Terms in Today’s …as your student's fingers fly across teensy weensy keys Classroom

Hacking in Action! every scrap of paper Excerpt from Hacking It never failed for a student to run into my room in a near frenzy Homework

Posts 2017-2018 Text Example

Literacy in the New I found comfort in the familiarity of "dog earring" pages from a Millennium dime store paperback novel.

Explaining the I can promise you our children are far more worldly than we Unexplainable to Kids want to imagine.

Ready…Set…Play! You will feel like kicking the dog when you get home

123

Discourse analysis revealed that I often refer to the reader as “you” as if I am talking directly to him/her. Examples are “I promise you” or “you wouldn’t believe your eyes!” I use informal expressions I would say to a family member or friend, but not to an academic. (I addressed storytelling Discourse in Chapter V).

Church Newsletters

A second form of literacy from my childhood was church newsletters written by my dad. Church newsletters were a fluid literacy practice in my home. There seemed to always be one laying around either on the kitchen cabinet or in a pile with the rest of the mail. After my grandparents passed, we found stacks of newsletters written through the years. Church newsletters were written and mailed every month to inform church members of happenings in the church. The newsletters were divided up into sections:

● a message from the pastor;

● upcoming events;

● church budget;

● departmental news i.e. young married, youth group, nursery;

● prayer needs;

● marriages, births, deaths;

● Sunday’s attendance; and

● programs and schedules.

While searching through keepsakes, I found a church newsletter my dad wrote in

March 1969, titled, The Beacon (see Figure 26). It marked his fourth year as pastor of his

124 church. I asked my dad about the newsletter and he expressed how proud he was after creating the tagline, “The Lighted Steeple and the Friendly People.” My dad began every newsletter with what he called the, “Pastor’s Paragraph.” I find it endearing that he enjoyed the title, Pastor’s Paragraph so much, even though his message was multiple paragraphs! Even though he had a secretary, my dad preferred to type his message using a manual typewriter.

The discourse my dad used is lower context and explicit (Gee, 2017) because it was written for a more formal audience: church members. My dad was also writing from a Dominant Discourse because he was pastor. My dad’s identity kit was “a pastor.” He dressed, walked, talked, and wrote using the secondary Discourse to align with his social and religious role. I was reminded of Gee’s explanation, “It’s not just what you say or even how you say it. It’s also who you are and what you are doing while you say it. It’s not enough to say the right lines, you have to be the right person,” (2015, p. 3). My dad’s discourse positioned him as Dominant because he was in the ultimate position of power writing the “Pastor’s Paragraph.” When a person received their newsletter in the mail, my dad’s message was located directly beneath the person’s name and address. It was front and center. Dominant discourses are associated with social roles, status, and privileges, and allow the member to be privileged to benefits (Littlejohn & Foss, 2005).

My dad closes with “Your Pastor” another example of a dominant Discourse. He is using an authoritative Discourse by declaring to the congregation, or church members, that he is their spiritual leader.

125

Artifact Transcription

March 1969 my dad wrote: Our hearts have been filled with the joy and praise as the Lord Jesus continues to be exalted in His Church, seven prayer groups met each week to pray for the “Crusade of the Americas”, and spiritual renewal is evident in many. So many are also seeking the spirt-filled life which we believe will always result in holy living, iffumination (illumination?) of the word and power to witness. OH! That we might commit ourselves to for such an induement (endowment?) of from God. This past month marked my fourth year as Paster (pastor) of Trinity and aside from every abundant spiritual blessing, one interesting thought has been the weather. Every season has been described as “Unusual” until I’m not sure what is “usual”. Most recent unusual has been the nineteen inches of snow on the ground. During my first year in Renton, (name omitted) told me we were due an earth tremor, but then the “unusual happened! a real earthquake! A group of youth revival and we had instructed them to bring long sleeve shirts and jackets, but another “unusual” happened as the temperature rose to a record high since 1907, maybe all this means something as we look forward to each season with anticipation of what will happen next.

Perhaps we need the “unusual” to happen in our churches instead of “Services as Usual Sunday after Sunday! When the Holy Spirit fills our Churches then we too will look to each service with anticipation and joy.

Your Pastor

Figure 26. Sample of church newsletter with transcription.

126

Written discourse also showed his storytelling nature. Within the “Pastor’s

Paragraph,” my dad used a story as an example of the need for “spiritual renewal.” He wrote,

“During my first year in Renton, [name omitted] told me we were due an earth

tremor, but then the “unusual” happened! a real earthquake! A group of youth

revival and we had instructed them to bring long sleeve shirts and jackets, but

another “unusual” happened as the temperature rose to a record high since 1907,

maybe all this means something as we look forward to each season with

anticipation of what will happen next.”

Next, it was evident that my dad had done some research; how else would he have known about the record high temperature in 1907? This was also before YouTube or

Google and so I am not sure how he found this information. Today, factual tidbits are common in my edublog. As an insider, I also know that this was a characteristic of his other writings. My dad used vocabulary that would be considered academic in schools.

Even if a word were misspelled, he would attempt to use it correctly in context. I attributed my dad’s extensive vocabulary to his level of education.

Unlike my mom who did not attend college, my dad received a scholarship to play basketball at a four-year Southern Baptist university. He majored in sociology, and was a star athlete and honor student. He met my mother when she was a junior in high school and swept her off her feet. My dad’s parents valued education, and both had high

127 school diplomas but were not able to attend college. I also knew, as an insider, that my dad was an avid reader by the vast collection of books in his church office.

Today, factual tidbits are common in my edublog. If I am referring to a date, or incident in history, I will do my research before writing about it in a post. Sometimes I become so enthralled with a fact that I will spend hours researching to learn more about a topic. For example, after reading Stephen King’s book, 11/22/63, I began reading information on The Butterfly Theory, also known as chaos theory. I had to thoroughly understand chaos theory to apply and create a story for my edublog. The post, The

Butterfly Effect (2014), was written because of my research. As I examined posts from

2013-2017, I noticed facts where I conducted research in preparation (see Table 10).

I discovered a pattern of research within the posts I wrote.

Table 10 Examples of Research Based Discourse and Research Interests

Posts 2013-2014 Text Example Research Interest

How I Found My The year was 1969. I researched the history of the Genius television show Romper Room. I verified the years the show aired.

Lost in Translation It was 2007, light years away I researched the history of from Angry Birds, IPhones, smartphones and confirmed when and Instagram. the iPhone was put on the market.

128

Table 10. Examples of Research Based Discourse and Research Interests (continued)

Posts 2014-2015 Text Example Research Interest

Alien Matters: Mr. Foster who was, in fact, I researched alien conspiracy Keychains, Bobble the very farmer who cited the theories, specifically the incident in Heads and visitation of the 1947 UFO Roswell, New Mexico. Refrigerator landing on his ranch! Magnets

Posts 2013-2014 Text Example Research Interest

How I Found My The year was 1969. I researched the history of the Genius television show Romper Room. I verified the years the show aired.

Lost in Translation It was 2007, light years away I researched the history of from Angry Birds, IPhones, smartphones and confirmed when and Instagram. the iPhone was put on the market.

Posts 2014-2015 Text Example Research Interest

The Butterfly Effect Check out this link Butterfly I researched chaos theory. Effect (also known as chaos theory)

129

Table 10. Examples of Research Based Discourse and Research Interests (continued)

Posts 2015-2016 Text Example Research Interest

Secrets from the When the King Tut exhibit I researched about King Tut and Crypt rolled thru Dallas in 2008, he artifacts from the exhibit. I verified was one of the first to see it. when the exhibit was in Dallas, Texas.

Game On! Building When iPhones erupted on the I researched the history of the iPhone Comprehension with market in 2007 and creators John Casey, Jonathan Video Games Ives and Bill Gates.

Posts 2016-2017 Text Example Research Interest

No More Quiet Eric Jensen, author of I researched poverty and the effects Game: Inviting Talk Teaching with Poverty in on children’s brains. I included the into the Elementary Mind: What Being Poor Does book as a reference for readers. Classroom to Kids Brains and What Schools Can do about it.

Emoji’s, Selfies, and Do you remember the yellow I researched when and how the Memes: Innocuous smiley face during the late popular smiley face icon was Terms in Today’s 60’s and 70’s stamped on t- created. classroom shirts, posters and billboards?

Posts 2017-2018 Text Example Research Interest

Literacy in the New My first digital book was I confirmed the title and author. This Millennium: Finding David and Goliath by was the first book I read on a Kindle. a Balance between Malcolm Gladwell. Digital and Audio Texts

The Future is I entered kindergarten in I researched the Race to Space years. Calling: Are We 1967 at the height of the Listening? Race to Space years.

130

When researching a topic, I will find myself reading to learn far more information than I need. It is actually fun and relaxing for me. I experience what I describe as “being in the zone.” I am able to forget about everything else and focus on what I am learning.

Family Bibles

Bibles were the most common book in my early life. When I speak of Bibles, I do not mean the kind that are pristine and on display as family heirlooms. No! Our Bibles were well-worn, with notes on the outer rims of paragraphs and crinkled pages. The cover was usually personalized with the person’s first and last name printed in gold print or cursive on the bottom right corner. Scraps of paper were also commonly placed in Bibles as bookmarks. Bible bookmarks might be a hand-written poem, or an obituary of a loved one cut from the newspaper and covered with clear contact paper. Just as a waxed floor was a status symbol for my mother, a well-worn Bible was a sign of being a good

Christian. My earliest memories of Bibles were that they were always visible, laying around on coffee tables, on countertops, and on our carpeted floor. The only exception I remember was at church where a large Bible rested in the open position on a table called the Communion Table where the Communion or The Lord’s Supper would be served on a monthly basis.

Writing in Bibles was reinforced not only by watching my parents making notes in their Bibles, but when I visited my mom’s parents as well. My Papa did not go to church, but my Memaw had more Bibles than I could count. There seemed to always be a

Bible in Memaw’s car sitting on the dashboard. I once overheard Memaw tell my mom

131 that she had kept a Bible on the dashboard because it had helped her get out of a ticket when she was stopped for speeding. My mother kept a Bible on her dashboard because the gold embossed signature on her Bible read “Reverend____ & Mrs.______.” She believed association with being a preacher’s wife would keep people from breaking into her car.

Like my mom’s Bible, Memaw’s Bibles were well-worn with hand written notes.

I have even seen recipes cut out from the newspaper used as bookmarks (or at least this is what Memaw led me to believe). After she passed, she had enough Bibles to give to each of her four grandchildren. I was so proud of the Bible passed down to me. I laughed when

I saw she used a torn corner of a box of color she used to dye her hair blond as a bookmark.

My first Bible was a children’s Bible. It had colorful pictures of Bible stories and a zipper to keep it closed. I am sure I worked hard at getting my Bible to look like how I thought a Bible should look. I would sit in big church with my pen underline the words, and circle numbers on a page to make my Bible look like the adults. I also LOVED looking at the pictures during church and they fed my imagination. As part of an assignment for my first graduate literacy course, I captured this memory on a slide titled

“My First Reading Experiences” (see Figure 27).

I wrote, “My dad was the preacher of a small Baptist church which meant I was in church Sunday, morning, Sunday night, and every Wednesday! I spent hours thumbing thru my Bible and underlining scriptures long before I could even read. I loved looking at

132 the pictures in the Bible…and wondering things like, ‘How did Noah get ladybugs into the Ark?’”

Figure 27. First reading experience slide. When I reached school age, I participated in Bible drills, a competitive activity to find Bible verses. Bible drills were not games. They were an actual competition for children and teenagers sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention. A special Bible was used to prevent cheating (marking one’s Bible). Competitors would stand in a row, holding the Bible in front with one hand on top of the Bible and one hand on the bottom.

An adult would call out a verse such as Numbers 7:5 and say “go!” Whoever found the verse first would receive a point. To this day, I am able to find Bible verses quickly.

As I got older, I received printed stories from Sunday school class with Bible verses to memorize. The memory verses began with Genesis and progressively became more difficult. Anyone who memorized the assigned Bible verse received a sticker and

133 the teacher’s initials. This practice is similar to the white, working class community in

Heath’s ethnography, Ways with Words: Language, Life and Works in Communities and

Classrooms. She noted,

Children learn from very early ages simple verses, such as the shortest verse in

the Bible, John 11:35 ‘Jesus wept’ and later more complicated verses such as John

3:16, and particular passages or chapters (such as I Corinthians 13).These

memorizing tasks are graded in difficulty, so that the youngest children learn the

names of the Bible characters, words of songs such as ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and

move on to short verses, books of the Bible, short passages, and whole chapters of

psalms by the time they reach junior high age. There is orderly progression in

what is learned and how it is learned. (p. 140)

When I visited my grandparents, I would go to church with my Memaw. Papa would say he had to work, but Memaw would fuss at him for not going. Her church reminded me of the church experiences in the white community, Roadville (Heath, 1983).

She attended a small country church. During the Sunday sermon, the preacher would ask all the children to come down to the front and he would tell a story that had a moral or a lesson.

Consistent with my strong Christian fundamentalist upbringing, I was groomed to see the Bible as God’s word that was to be used or put into practice. The physical paper, or book, was not sacred. God’s word was alive - living and breathing, and resided within people. The Bible was used to teach us how to live.

134

Oppression: The Chain of Command

The same year my brother was born, my dad left his position as pastor and was hired as the national coordinator for a religious organization. We left Renton, Washington and spent one year in Irving, Texas where my dad began training. I was enrolled in fourth grade for one year and was miserable!

I referenced that year in Texas in my post, The Art of Speaking Texas, (2015):

My family uprooted from Renton, Washington and moved to Irving, Texas and

enrolled me in fourth grade. I colored the state bird, the state tree, the state

flower, the state flag, the state capitol. I wished we'd never moved to Texas. I also

wondered how long learning about Texas would last. It lasted all of fourth grade.

After one year in Irving, we moved to a suburb of Chicago where the ministry was located. We called it the “Headquarters.” My family moved into the largest house I had ever seen! I learned that it was called a manor and we lived in a gated community.

The leader of the ministry handpicked our furniture and paintings. We had a grandfather clock, expensive furnishings, and even a fountain in the front yard. I remember overhearing my mom call the furnishings “French Provincial.” What people did not know is that we were not allowed to have books, television, radio, or games that were not approved by the organization’s leader. My dad was chastised when he took me on a father-daughter outing to see a Walt Disney movie.

A large notebook became a central fixture in our new home. The notebook was called “Life Principles” and contained the teachings of the leader. It taught us that he had

135 received truths from God when fasting and praying. One of the principles that changed my life was called the “Chain-of-Command” (see Figure 28). Looking back, this was possibly the most damaging and demoralizing teaching. The “Chain-of-Command” was taught using a picture of a triangle labeled God at the top of the paper. God’s hands (a left and a right) were holding a hammer in one hand and chisel in another hand. The hammer was labeled “Father.” The hammer was hitting a chisel. The chisel was labeled “Mother.”

The chisel, in turn, was positioned to hit a diamond, labeled teenager. Women were labeled as mothers with no other identity. I learned to be obedient and never question discipline because I wanted to be a diamond. I was nine years old.

136

Artifact Reflexive Journal Entry

Chain of Command was a foundational principle that shaped my belief system throughout my entire life. I transferred the hammer to anyone who was in authority over me. I am not in a position of power. Notice the bullet to the right. When a teenager reacts against the “tools” God brings upon his life, he is, in fact, reacting against God Himself. Severe warnings against this are given in the Scripture... I even memorized the entire book of I Peter! I see the discourse using the masculine pronoun. Where is the daughter? Feminine pronoun; she, her? I notice that the hands of God are also masculine, the father (male figure) is a hammer (perceived as manly tool, worker, provider). The Woman is getting beaten by the hammer and is called “Mother”...the teenager is depicted as a diamond that has to be sculpted to be accepted or approved by God. There are no references to girls. Parents are the “tools” but clearly the Mother is below the Father. It is only through “chastisement” that the teenager can be of value. Figure 28. The “Chain-of-Command” with reflection. For years, these teachings and the repercussions of being disobedient instilled a fear in me of people who I perceived as being in authority. The “Chain-of-Command” convinced me that my value was directly correlated to the extent I followed God’s principles as prescribed in the red notebook. I was conditioned to believe the only way

137

I would be accepted by God was to be a diamond, which represented perfection. I learned to find ways to get favor from the leader and felt special when I was affirmed for my

“quiet disposition” or for having a “glowing countenance.” I believed I earned the leader’s favor by memorizing scripture that would prepare me to be a wife. Even as I write, I can hear the words “These are the sayings of King Lemuel taught to him at his mother’s knee,” which echo in my mind (Proverbs 31:1).

Freire (1970) noted how rigid and oppressive influences in the home (and schools) are structures of domination. The oppressiveness is transferred to the parent and child relationships within a home. If the conditions in the home are “authoritarian, rigid, and dominating, the home will increase the climate of oppressions” (p. 154). To this day,

I feel a knot in my stomach when I think back to living life as if I were walking on eggshells.

However, there were some wonderful memories formed during my school years. I attended public school, and that is where I learned to love books. I had a teacher who read to our class daily. After lunch, we would lay our heads on the desks and she would read stories that fed my imagination. One of my favorite books was The Hobbit by J. R.

R. Tolkien. In my minds-eye I could imagine what a hobbit looked like. The adventure kept me wanting the story to never end. I also learned about Greek mythology, which opened my eyes and mind to other cultures and beliefs beyond fundamentalist Christian faith. We did not pray at school or memorize Bible verses, and I did not fear my teacher or the principal. I felt safe and valued.

138

In one sentence from The Art of Speaking Texan (2015), I paid respect to the teacher who taught me the joy of reading. Nestled in the sixth paragraph, like a hidden gem, I wrote: I adored my new 5th grade teacher who read to our class every day. Only I know and feel the positive, strong emotion attached to this one sentence. I knew beyond a shadow-of-a-doubt that I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up. I wanted to be like her.

Summary and Insights

The early literacies that surrounded me are reflected in my word choices across five years of posts. I used Gee’s (2017) descriptions of formal and informal conversations to reflect on the ways my parents communicated in written text. High-context/implicit language is informal and used in casual conversations with family and friends. Low- context/explicit language is more formal and used when we want to show respect or express deference, even if we know the person.

The literacies I grew up with in my home contributed to my beliefs about myself and the people whom I perceived were in authority over me. Through reflexive journaling and analysis of my edublog posts, I interrogated my beliefs and was able to understand the initial feelings of guilt I had when writing my first post, To My Principal…I Must

Confess (2013). I also became acutely aware of ways my edublog was a confessional, of sorts. In my mind’s eye, my edublog has become a place where my secondary Discourse exists in a safe place. Behind a firewall, I am able to write stories, hold onto memories, and heal invisible wounds in my heart. I am simply free to be.

139

CHAPTER VII

REFLECTIONS ON AFFINITY SPACES, ONLINE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION

AND CHANGE

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

The overall goal of this chapter is to answer my first research question: How was my identity as a literacy leader constructed and how has it changed overtime as reflected in my edublog? I begin this chapter with an anecdote describing a high school experience that shaped my beliefs about myself as a writer. Using Gee’s Discourse identity theory, I define the terms blogosphere and affinity space to describe in detail how my secondary

Discourses interact with others within these spaces. Next, I explain my role as an affinity architect to show how I manage my edublog.

The chapter will be a journey describing my two selves, who I was as a literacy leader before an epiphany to who I am today as a literacy leader (Bochner & Ellis, 2016).

Consistent with autoethnography, I will be forthcoming about my insecurities as I make discoveries about myself, as opposed to trying to make myself look good to others. Using post analysis, self-reflection, and interpretations of readers’ comments, I support my new understanding with:

 an affinity model of both physical and virtual spaces related to my edublog;

 an affinity model of the blogosphere;

 readers’ comments to posts; and

140

 figures and tables embedded within the narrative.

I conclude the chapter by answering my first research question in two parts: 1)

How was my online identity as a literacy leader constructed? and 2) How has my online identity as a literacy leader changed overtime? As with pervious chapters, the narrative is the data and told as story through the lenses of identity Discourse and standpoint theory.

Who Am I?

As I was looking through family keepsakes for my study, I found a poem I wrote when I was in the ninth grade. The poem is called Reflections.

As I glance into the water My glance becomes a stare. The puddle tells me much about myself As it is nature’s looking glass. Things never before noticed stare back at me. Reflections make me see me!

The poem was special to me because I felt positively about myself. I liked my reflection. I was so proud of my poem I mustered up the courage to share it with my ninth grade English teacher. I needed courage because my teacher had an intimidating presence and sometimes yelled at a student and at our class. I dodged her wrath by being quiet and turning in my homework on time. Sharing my poem with her was my one brave act the entire year to break my silence.

My poem was neatly typed on white paper and tucked inside a clear slipcover. I added a picture of a bird looking into a pond cut out from a Good Housekeeping

141 magazine. As hard as I tried, I never made a grade above a B on a book report or other written assignments. I felt like I had finally written something she would like.

My teacher adjusted her reading glasses, looked at my poem and handed it back to me. I do not remember her exact words, but what I heard was that I was not a good writer. In that moment, my English teacher became my natural looking glass. What I saw reflected in her mannerisms and tone of voice convinced me for years that my writing was not worth sharing with others. I never shared my creative writing with a teacher again.

I continued to write well into adulthood but lived in the shadows of others by removing my name from manuscripts or by writing stories anonymously. This is because

I felt ashamed of events in my family. I allowed other peoples’ opinions to become my looking glass; as a result, I no longer liked my reflection. For years I dodged the spotlight and hid behind the reputation of others whom I admired. When I created my edublog,

Confessions of a Literacy Coach in the summer of 2013, I no longer hid in the shadows. I once again believed my writing was worth sharing with others. I liked my reflection.

Most importantly, I no longer let other peoples’ perceptions and beliefs define me.

Who am I? This question is difficult to answer when my online identity, or secondary Discourse, exists in a space I am not able to physically touch, see, or hear. I am not able to look into a mirror and see a reflection as I can with my physical self. I grew up hearing the saying “pinch yourself” to see if something was imaginary or real.

Well, I am not able pinch myself in a virtual space even though I am anything but

142 imaginary! I am more than words on a webpage. I am more than an embedded video or web link to a resource. I am more than an avatar, or picture representation of myself.

Within my edublog, I exist in real time and am able to express my thoughts and feelings with real people from around the world.

In retrospect, I titled my autoethnography, Reflections of the Heart because I believe only through reflection can I fully understand who I am and how I have changed.

It is not an accident that each chapter of my autoethnography is, in essence, a reflection of my online identity

Affinity Spaces and the Blogosphere

Author, researcher, and leading expert on identity, Dr. Richard Gee, coined the term affinity spaces. In his book, Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-

Tech World, Gee (2017) explained that he needed a name for the spaces, both physical and online, where people become a type of person as they interact with others who share a common interest or a passion (p. 110). Gee described these spaces as “Teaching and

Learning Spaces” (p. 123). As part of my internal data, I created an affinity space model to represent how my edublog was situated within social spaces. Similar to Gee’s model, I used circles to represent online affinity spaces and squares to represent physical affinity spaces. In the center, I placed a large triangle to represent my edublog, Confessions of a

Literacy Coach (see Figure 29).

143

Figure 29. Affinity spaces showing interconnectivity. Gee (2017) confirmed the ways affinity spaces could be connected to each other without one place being beside another. For example, I attended an Edcamp held at my university, so this would be a physical space. After attending Edcamp, I wrote the post,

Conference Burnout: Reviving Educators in a Most “Un”Common Way (2016) as a story to reflect on my experiences at Edcamp.

I included photos of people I met in person, who I had only known through

Twitter. As a result, I created teaching and learning links between Confessions of a

Literacy Coach, the university, Edcamp, and Twitter affinity spaces.

All blogs exist in an online affinity space called the blogosphere (see Figure 30).

Educational blogs, sports blogs, healthy eating blogs, and travel blogs are a few

144 examples. A blog dedicated to educational content is called an edublog or educational blog. However, it is common to use the term blog when speaking between educators because it is understood that the content is educational.

Figure 30. Affinity space model of the blogosphere. A model representing my edublog in relationship to others is a large sphere with multiple inner layers similar to an onion. The outer most layer represents the affinity space where all blogs exist on the World Wide Web or www. The next inner layer is where only educational blogs exist. Within that layer are all edublogs powered by

Google. In the inner sphere is Confessions of a Literacy Coach. I have a one-of-a-kind web address as unique as my fingerprint.

145

An Affinity Space Architect: Understanding the Nuts and Bolts

One of my secondary Discourses is an affinity space architect. Gee (2017) explained that an affinity space architect must understand the inner workings or the nuts and bolts (p. 128). The dashboard would be considered the inner workings (see Figure

31). When I first began blogging in 2013, I knew the basics: how to write a post and save it as a draft until I was ready to publish it. I did not know how to embed pictures or even to access readers’ comments. In fact, I had no idea anyone was reading my posts until almost a year later! I was able to get support from the technology coach assigned to my campus. She showed me how to embed my Twitter feed and how to add links, videos, and pictures into my posts.

Figure 31. Screenshot of dashboard.

146

On occasion, someone will ask me what I would do if my blog were lost in cyberspace. I guess I will always have a fear that all of my stories will someday be lost. I am probably one of the only people in the world who keeps a paper copy of every post!

A Tale of Two Selves

While taking doctoral classes, I began to feel pressured to publish in peer- reviewed journals to strengthen my curriculum vitae. Publishing is heavily weighted in higher education (Gee, 2017). A ray of hope came my way when a professor sent me information on an educational blog site and link to the submission guidelines. The blog,

Teachers, Profs, and Parents: Writers Who Care: A Blog Advocating for Authentic

Writing Instruction, was seeking submissions written by teachers on the importance of the classroom learning environment.

I immediately thought of my post, The Importance of Classroom Environment:

Lessons from a Colt Named Carl (2015). The story was about how an oversized stuffed animal changed the learning environment of my classroom. Google analytics confirmed readers enjoyed it as well, because the post remained in the top ten most popular posts of all time. Excitedly, I followed the submission guidelines, tweaked the length to adhere to the word limit, and removed the Confessions Reflection. I was hopeful when I submitted my manuscript. A week or two later I was contacted by one of the editors through email.

She wrote that she “loved the post” but felt it needed some revising. After weeks of back and forth edits, the final draft left me feeling discouraged because it no longer resembled the original story.

147

I was honest with the editor about my dilemma. I admitted to being emotionally attached to the story and did not want to change it. To my surprise, the editor asked if I had any other posts addressing the learning environment. I said that I would write an original post using examples from my literacy classroom. The post would be instructional more than storytelling. And so I wrote Environment Matters in Creating Confident

Writers: A Pledge to My Students. I was proud of the professional blog and have linked it to Confessions of a Literacy Coach. Interestingly, the post is one of the least viewed on my blog site.

Two significant things happened as a result of this experience. First of all, a shift occurred in my mindset about writing and storytelling. I understood ways that I could do both: tell a story and weave in research-based literacy practices to support teachers and students. I did not have to be one or the other. I could be both a storyteller and help teachers improve classroom instruction.

Readers’ Comments and Change Overtime

The first time I realized anyone was reading my posts happened in 2014 when I read a reader’s comment for SpongeBob SquarePants to the Rescue! (2013). Although the post was written in 2013, I didn’t access it until a year later.

Great story. Thank you for sharing. Funny enough, my son (11) always tells me he doesn’t have to read or go to school. Everything he needs to know he learns from SpongeBob. He was explaining about gladiators to my youngest daughter the other day and I asked him how he knew about that. He said “learned it on SpongeBob!”

148

I responded:

I know, right? For years after this experience it seemed that everywhere I looked I saw SpongBob! Teachers on my team started giving me SpongeBob gag gifts, stickers, candy, gadgets...he is everywhere! Thanks for your comment and sharing your son’s story!

I liked that I shared a common experience with a reader concerning our love-hate relationship with the cartoon character SpongeBob. Our conversation was high context and implicit because we used informal language and shared an insider joke.

It was not until I wrote The Ghost Plant and Other (Potentially) Fateful Tales

(2015) that readers’ comments added a new dimension. The comments opened a door for rich dialogue between myself and the reader. I wrote the post in response to a keynote address at a literacy conference. Katherine Bomer, author of Hidden Gems, shared stories about teaching writing in ways that affirmed children as opposed to a deficit stance. Her message touched my heart and I was reminded how negative feedback from a teacher can strip children of their joy of writing. I had intentionally included bits from Freire’s banking model from my Literacy Diversity course. Here are a few examples:

One afternoon, I was on the dashboard, scrolling through the post when I noticed comment after comment after comment rolling in faster than I could answer! Here are a few sample comments:

Your post has appropriately forced me to see how our approach as teachers affects student learning. I never really stopped to consider that by constantly highlighting the errors we are saying to our students ‘You can’t. You didn’t quite. You won’t be able to: Thank you for your post. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and I look forward to sharing this information with others. (posted 7/4/15);

149

In the above post, I noticed how the teacher had read something that had them “stop and consider.” This was significant because reflection is essential for change. Secondly, the reader wrote, “I look forward to sharing this information with others.” Now that I understand affinity spaces, this would be an example of affinity spaces as “Teaching and

Learning Spaces” (Gee, 2017, p. 123)

In response to a broader context, your post is about giving students more control over not just their writing, but also their learning. Things like Genius Hour, Google 20% time, and other opportunities for them to explore their interests are what we need more of in education. Thank you for continuing the discussion (posted 7/5/15) The above post was especially meaningful because the reader was seeing the “broader context” by “giving kids more control over their writing” The reader also reiterated several ways to put theory into practice like “Genius Hour” and “Google 20% time.”

There was one comment that stood out from all the rest. It was from my professor.

She recognized the influence of Paulo Freire on my beliefs.

She wrote:

In response to “Assessments will come and go...but valuing (or devaluing) a child’s voice will stay with them forever. When we give them a voice we empower them to make changes in their own lives, their community, and the world.” Loved this quote, Tamra! I see Freire!

My professor’s comment became a natural looking glass where I saw my reflection. I was more than a storyteller. I was a literacy leader sharing theoretical perspectives to support students and teachers in the classroom. Confessions of a Literacy Coach was a real

150 platform where rich conversations could start and extend far beyond what I could imagine!

After my contribution to Hacking Homework (2016), the growing audience motivated me to continue writing posts that were substantial and went beyond storytelling. I also saw a change in readers’ comments to me. In the beginning, readers’ comments were a friendly exchange of opinions or affirmations. Over time, readers’ comments evidenced ways my posts were supporting changes in the hearts and minds of educators. Sometimes comments would be unrelated to a post I had written. Below is an example:

Hi Tamra, I am an aspiring literacy specialist and I love your blog! I am currently writing a research paper in order to finish my CAS degree in Literacy Education at the University of Southern Maine and would love your help! My thesis seeks to answer the question- “What makes a successful literacy specialist?” I am comparing the International Reading Associations Literacy Specialist Standards to current research, to survey results from active literacy specialists. Please fill out the attached survey- I will be thrilled to share the results of my research and thesis with you! If you know any other willing literacy specialists- please forward them this e-mail. Thank you! Heidi Link: http://goo.gl/forms/8vZUK2qhc6

An aspiring literacy specialist wrote the above comment. In this post, the reader asked for me to give input on her research on ‘what makes a successful literacy specialist?’ An email address and link were given for my contribution. The reader’s comment extended the teaching and learning space (Gee, 2017) between myself and a reader, as well as, give me the opportunity to contribute to research.

151

Secondary Discourse and Change Overtime

I used D/discourse analysis to identify the roles or identity kits associated with being an online literacy leader. These identity kits are needed to be a “kind of person”

(Gee 2004). To identify these identities, I created an excel chart and listed chronologically the names of all of my posts from 2013-2017 associated with my secondary Discourse, or D1. Next, I identified four secondary Discourses associated with literacy leadership:

1) I am a practitioner. This identity includes all of my Discourses where I am directly supporting teachers and students.

2) I am an academic. The identity includes both independent and collaborative research projects, engaging in university projects.

3) I am a presenter. The identity includes presentations in the classroom, on a university campus, and at literacy conferences.

4). I am an author. The identity includes works that I have self-published on Amazon or have published professionally.

These four identities are action-based Discourses (Gee, 2017) because they were created by an action. To be a presenter, I would have to present. An example of becoming a presenter is reflected in the post, Game On! Building Comprehension using Video

Games (2015). I wrote the post after presenting at a literacy conference on the ways I used video games to engage my middle school students in reading and writing. Another example of identity construction as a presenter is in the post, Literacy in the New

152

Millennium: Finding a Balance between Digital and Audible Texts (2017). The post was written after I gave a presentation in one of my graduate courses. Some posts have two or more of the identities within the same post (see Figure 32).

Figure 32. Sample post using quantitative methods. For example, Summer Slide is No Walk in the Park (2016) represents both an academic and a publisher identity. I wrote the post after conducting a mixed methods research study on the outcomes of students’ reading progress after attending a summer reading loss program. The study resulted in a publication that was distributed to potential investors to support funding for the non-profit summer program.

In order to understand how my online identity changed overtime, I examined fifty-four postings across five years. As my first layer of analysis, I used qualitative research measures. On the chart, I placed an “x” where there was evidence of an identity within the post: practitioner, academic, presenter, and author. Using the data, I created bar graphs to understand the ways my identities changed over time (see Appendix C).

153

My identity kits associated with being an online literacy leader evolved overtime.

In 2013-2014, I wrote from the standpoint of a teacher practitioner and literacy coach. I did not engage in research, present, or author any papers. This year also marked the beginning of my graduate studies. In 2014-2015, I began taking doctoral courses and had one publication. In 2015-2018, all four identities are present in my posts during this time period. I attribute these changes in my online identity directly to opportunities afforded me as a graduate student, graduate teaching assistant, and graduate research associate.

Being immersed in a culture surrounded by leaders who mentored and advised me greatly contributed to my growth overtime.

Summary and Insights

My edublog Confessions of a Literacy Coach exists in an online affinity space called the blogosphere. I am the architecture of my edublog and I am continuously learning about the inner workings of the site. My secondary Discourse as a literacy leader moves in and out of both offline and online social spaces or teaching and learning spaces.

Readers’ comments confirmed that my online identity as a literacy leader exists in real time and I am able to express my thoughts and feelings with real people from around the world.

My online identity as a literacy leader was constructed as an action-based

Discourse (Gee, 2017). This was an identity I chose for myself, and I have grown as a leader by immersion into literacy theory, as well as through apprenticeship opportunities at Texas Woman’s University. Through discourse analysis of posts between the years

154

2013-2017, I identified four distinct literacy leadership Discourses, or identity kits: practitioner, academic, presenter, and author. Using quantitative data analysis, I identified how the four identities changed over time. I interpreted the growth of my leadership

Discourses to what I was learning in my graduate studies. Growth overtime was also evident by reflecting on readers’ comments to my posts.

Key to my new understandings of my online identity is the practice of reflection.

In fact, every chapter of my study is a reflection. Ellis and Bochner (2000) confirmed the complexity and fluid nature in the definition:

Autoethnography is a self-reflexivity research method that is both the method and

the product. Autoethnography is a genre of writing and research that displays

multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back

and forth, autoethnographers gaze first through an ethnographic wide-angle lens,

focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience. Then

they look inward exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move

through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations. As they zoom backward and

forward, inward and outward, distinctions between the personal and cultural

become blurred, sometimes beyond recognition. Usually writing in the first

person voice, autoethnographic texts appear in a variety of forms: short stories,

poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essay, journals, fragmented

and layered writing, and social science prose. In these texts, concrete action,

dialogue, emotion, embodiment, spirituality and self-consciousness are featured in

155

relations, family, institutional, and community stories affected by history, social

structure, and culture, which themselves are revealed through action, feeling,

thought, and language. (p. 739)

Through reflection on my identity, I am aware of many layers to my identity within Confessions of a Literacy Coach. My identity is revealed through my thoughts and feelings such as in the Confession Reflection. Just as I am always learning and growing in the physical world, my online identity will continue to evolve as well.

156

CHAPTER VIII

REFLECTIONS ON THE MESSAGE AND TONE OF EDUBLOG POSTS "I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message." Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter

In this chapter, I explore the social, political, and cultural factors that influenced the message and tone of my posts. My findings are based on interpretations of my lived experiences from my childhood and into adulthood. I confirm my findings with examples from posts analysis, reflexive journaling, a word cloud, photographs, and family artifacts.

Consistent with autoethnography method, I continuously interrogate my interpretations by asking, “What is going on here and what does it mean?” (Ellis & Bochner, 2016, p.

184). The chapter will end with an expanded description of my findings to answer my second research question, what were the social, political, and cultural factors that influenced the message and tone of my blog posts?

The chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section, I describe four themes that emerged through analysis of written text and reflexive journaling. I titled the themes: 1) The Future: Possibilities in Education; 2) Social Justice: Doing What’s Fair;

3) The Learning Environment: Everybody Needs a Home; and 4) Religiosity: Shame and

Redemption. In the second section, I describe the intended tone of my posts and support my interpretations with text examples from my edublog.

157

The Future: Possibilities in Education One prominent theme that emerged during analysis of the blog posts was the future possibilities in education. Reflexive journaling and my interpretations confirmed that I am motivated by the future possibilities in education, especially in regards to technology. In fact, I have dedicated entire posts to technology use in the classroom:

 Accidentally on Purpose @edcamphome (2013),

 No Wifi? No Problem! IPad Applications to Use When the Internet Goes on the

Blink! (2015),

 Game On! Building Comprehension with Video Games (2015), and

 Literacy in the New Millennium: Finding a Balance between Audio and Digital

Texts (2016).

I also discovered that the questions at the end of posts, Confession Reflection

favored technology use in the classroom, especially the posts from 2015-2016. The

Confession Reflection sections are four to five questions at the end of every post. For

example, I wrote a post addressing the millennials, students born between 1982 and 2000,

and the new literacies they bring into the classroom. An example of reflection questions

from a 2015 post titled Emoji’s, Selfies, and Memes: Innocuous Terms in Today’s

Classroom are:

 What are some ways to invite ideas and social behaviors of millennials into the classroom?  In your opinion, is acknowledging and integrating millennials’ social behaviors into the classroom a form of culturally responsive teaching? Why or why not?

158

 What does this statement mean to you? “Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater?”  Why do some educators resist change?  How can we equip students with the skills they will need for the work place? What changes would need to be made in the classroom to do so?

I cut and pasted my Confession Reflection for all posts written from that year and created a word cloud to help me determine theme (see Figure 33). The results showed that the word technology was used more than any other word. I also noticed that the words vocabulary, writing, video, integrating, and learners were also used many times.

Figure 33. Technology themed word cloud. As can be seen in my autobiographical timeline, I began my doctoral studies in

2015 and did several literature reviews on New Literacies theory. I believe I began translating what I was learning in my graduate classes to classroom practices.

159

Augmented Reality (AR) is one of my most shared resources within my posts (see

Figure 34). AR creates an overlay to make flat or two-dimensional projects three- dimensional. I did not dedicate a blog to AR but would provide pictures of my students’ projects in posts. An example of an embedded AR project is in the post The Ghost Plant and Other (Potentially) Fateful Tales (2015). I described how I used AR with a seven- year-old boy I was teaching as part of a research course I was taking in the fall. He told me, “I hate to write!” I used AR to engage him with a picture of shark he colored. He used AR to bring his story to life. After my student wrote his shark story, we created a short video using an app called iMovie to record his reading of his original shark story.

Figure 34. Augmented reality example. I created a table of all of my edublog posts from 2013-2017 (see Table 11). I analyzed the written text of every post to help me identity possible themes. There are three columns: (1) the name of the post; (2) examples of texts; and (3) my interpretation.

I bolded the words in the text that I perceived as having had something to do with future implications for learning.

160

Table 11

Examples of Futuristic Theme Text and Interpretation Posts 2013-2014 Sample Text Interpretation

Accidentally on I became keenly aware that I I am motivated by future Purpose was witnessing a first-hand possibilities of ways educators @edcamphome account of something that (to can engage in online my knowledge) was making professional development PD history. without leaving their homes. I like being a part of “first time” “While Edcamp online PD is events. common today, this was the first event ever!”

How I Found My “There is a new movement I am inspired by the possibilities Genius sweeping Twitterville and of an educational revolution schools across the world called, happening through the “Genius Hour.” implementation of innovative programs like Genius Hour. Can you imagine what kind of revolution could start if this generation begins to believe that they have something to give, that the world is better off because they are here?

Creating a New What if 21st century I ask what if questions to Structure for 21st learning happens in a encourage educators to become Century Learners different container, using innovators and to imagine what different tools, and the could be instead of focusing on outcome is something we have what is. yet to imagine?”

161

Table 11. Examples of Futuristic Theme Text and Interpretation (continued)

Posts 2014-2015 Text Example Interpretation

A Colt Named Carl I applied to become a I am enthusiastic about curriculum writer and coach for leadership opportunities. I enjoy 8th graders for a pilot designing pilot programs in program to help middle school schools. students transition to the high school.

Paint By Number and Yes, the world was my oyster Even as a child, I envisioned Run! and at the ripe age of four-and- exploring the world beyond what a-half, I was there to claim it I could see. As an educator, I am able to see the potential in ‘what The power of faith is in the could be’. potential of the seed

Posts 2013-2014 Sample Text Interpretation

162

Table 11. Examples of Futuristic Theme Text and Interpretation (continued)

Posts 2015-2016 Text Example Interpretation

Rules of Engagement: This post was the first time I Within my blog, I like to explore Administering State used animated gifs. and implement new types of Assessments and technology not previously used. Living to Tell About It In this post, I found a way to use gifs, or animated images that move.

The Ghost Plant and In a competitive world and race I am willing to challenge the Other (Potentially) to be academically exemplary, status quo in education to find Fateful Tales WHAT IF we carved out ways to shift instruction to moments when our learners student-centered, rather than could write without the fear of curriculum-centered. I want to being corrected? WHAT IF the help this generation of children Conners of the world could to find their voice. I am create without being graded or constantly asking “what if?” corrected under the guise of "teachable moments?” WHAT IF this generation finds their voice and believe that what they have to say matters?

No Wifi? No It is one of the primary ways to I see the potential of ways Problem! iPad prepare our students for life in technology can create global Applications to Use a world that is global, virtual, connections to equip students When the Internet and full of possibilities! with the tools to help them Goes on the Blink! succeed. Technology can be implemented with or without the internet.

163

Table 11. Examples of Futuristic Theme Text and Interpretation (continued)

Posts 2016-2017 Text Example Interpretation

Literacy in the New As the millennium nears the I am motivated by the changing Millennium: Finding twenty-year mark, changes in landscape of technology to a Balance Between technology will continue to include technology as tools in the Audio and Digital shape and define the literacy classroom to engage students in Texts landscape. literacy. There will be more and more ways for students to engage with books whether it is auditory, digital, or perhaps with virtual reality.

Summer Slide Is No I couldn't wait to see a nine- I enjoy exploring new ways to Walk in the Park week summer reading loss support students through intervention program in full innovative programs. swing!

How to Survive the Ask yourself, What is I am intrinsically motivated to Dog Days of Summer something I've wanted to do move outside of my comfort but never felt like I had the zone. time? I understand the importance of There will be changes in supporting teachers to adapt to technology, assessments, and future changes. perhaps a new educator evaluation system.

164

During analysis of the posts, I found other ways I was motivated by future

possibilities in education. For example, I am motivated by:

 the idea of students having the freedom to explore their passions and interests

beyond the curriculum;

 new experiences like pilot programs and other first time events; and

 teaching future-ready skills students will need to perform jobs that do not exist

today.

In the post, The Ghost Plant and Other (Potentially) Fateful Tales (2015) I bolded the words, “WHAT IF?” Surprisingly, I noticed that on my Twitter account I describe myself as someone who is always asking “what if…?”

The Race to Space Generation

After identifying the theme: future possibilities in education, I referred back to

my blog analysis to explore the possible political, cultural, or social factors that

influenced my futuristic ways of thinking. I was able to confirm that being part of the

Race to Space generation was a primary factor in shaping the message of my posts.

What is the Race to Space? The Race to Space was a period in history when the

United States and Soviet Union were in competition with space flight. The political

climate in America was hyper-focused on landing a man on the moon before the Soviet

Union. Federal dollars were invested into aerospace industries like the Boeing factory,

which happened to be in Renton, Washington where I lived.

165

I was in the first Kindergarten class to attend a school funded entirely by science and designed by Boeing. My school was round and had sliding doors that partitioned off rooms. In the morning, my Kindergarten class had one teacher who taught us fundamental skills related to reading, writing, and math. In the afternoon, the doors opened and students moved from classroom to classroom to participate in experiments taught by other teachers. Boeing aerospace engineers routinely visited and taught us science experiments.

While sorting through artifacts, I found a picture taken on my first day of

Kindergarten (see Figure 35). The school I attended is pictured in the background. I find it humorous that I am standing proudly, ready to take on the challenge of landing a man on the moon, armed with my Barbie lunch box!

Figure 35. First day of kindergarten.

166

In the post, The Future is Calling: Are We Listening? (2017), I described my inclination to be futuristically-minded. I wrote:

I confess that I think about the future more than most people. It may have been

predestined. I was born the same year the future-themed Seattle’s World Fair

opened and I was a member of the Race to Space generation...I entered

kindergarten in 1967 at the height of the Race to Space years. The school I

attended was an experimental school funded by Science. Unlike traditional

schools that had desks in rows and subjects segregated by topic, my school was

round and had walls between classrooms that would open in the day to allow my

class to move to different stations to be taught by different teachers. Reading,

math, and writing revolved around science. Learning was meaningful and

relevant to our school mission: Land a man on the moon before the Russians.

Without question, being part of the Race to Space generation and a member of a pilot program influenced my beliefs about education. The negative experiences after the moon landing were impactful as well. I experienced the disappointment and disillusionment when learning became more about the curriculum than about wonderment.

Social Justice: Doing What’s Fair

In addition to the futuristic possibilities of education, another theme that emerged during discourse analysis was social justice in education. My first year as a literacy coach, students were assigned to my class as “sheltered instruction.” I taught students

167 from Mexico, Burma, Egypt, and Japan. I was surprised how many of my posts addressed the challenges of English Learners (ELs). In 2015, I wrote a post, What's a Lug Nut?

(And Other Pertinent Questions). The post has remained the most read post since it was published.

I blogged:

Handing (students) a list of terms to define isn’t enough. I can define lug nut in

the dictionary, but it is meaningless without a picture to give me context. There

are also incidences where the dictionary can make it worse. For example, if the

dictionary defines lug nut as a noun: a large rounded nut that fits over a heavy

bolt, used especially to attach the wheel of a vehicle to its axle. If I were an

English Language Learner and trying to make sense of words with multiple

meanings, a dictionary would make the meaning more confusing. This is

especially unhelpful if I think a “nut” is a pecan or a walnut and a “bolt” is

lightning. This would make me think of a large walnut that fits over a bolt of

lightning attached to the ‘wheel’ used to steer a car…It is only fair for our

English Language Learners or economically disadvantaged students to be

supplied the prior knowledge most privileged students have.”

When I became a graduate research associate, I had the opportunity to help design and co-teach a summer literacy institute for bilingual newcomers. One of the lessons resulted in a co-learning experience between the teachers and the students. I wrote the post Heart Maps under Construction: A Lesson on Learning and Relationships (2017) to

168 share the story of my summer learning beside my students. Instead of positioning myself as the sole source of knowledge, I became a co-learner with my students. The post describes the lesson I learned on the importance of relationship over lesson objectives and learning outcomes.

During the summer literacy institute, there was no class lectures requiring students to take notes, all followed up by a test. Learning happened in a social environment. The banking concept of education, described by Freire (1970), is a metaphor to describe students as empty containers in which the teachers fill with knowledge. The teacher is the sole source of knowledge. The banking concept penetrates the education system and is oppressive to students, especially students who are in poverty. The summer program afforded our students to become active participants in their learning.

To confirm social justice as a theme, I went line by line through posts from 2013-

2017 and bolded words and phrases I associated with social justice. On a chart, I created a column and listed the post with a live link, a sample text with bolded words and phrases, and my interpretation (see Table 12). For example, in the post How I Found My

Genius (2013) I bolded the phrases, “…children who desperately need to hear the words,

‘you matter.’” I was referring to the disparity in children who come from loving, nurturing homes and children who are not.

169

Table 12 Examples of Social Justice Text and Interpretation

Posts 2013-2014 Sample Text Interpretation

SpongeBob “I was also angry that the law I see the need for policy change SquarePants to the did not make exceptions for in education to provide Rescue! terminally ill students.” flexibility for students who are

“I wonder if it was also a way terminally ill. for me to advocate for laws to be flexible for terminally ill students.”

How I Found My “I am convinced, Angela I recognize the disparity in Genius Maiers is the Miss Margaret education between children who to this generation of children are loved and nurtured in their who desperately need to hear the words, "you homes compared to children matter.” who do not feel loved and affirmed. Think about that one student who seems withdrawn, who has bags under their eyes from lack of sleep, and they’re only ten.

How to Bully-Proof “Taking a proactive and I understand how a proactive Your Campus preventative approach may stance rather than reactive stance not rid the world from can help stop bullying in bullies, but it can certainly help to stop them in their schools. I advocate for being an tracks! Be aware. Be active listener and believing proactive. Believe students children who say they are being when they tell you that bullied. someone is picking on them.

170

Table 12. Examples of Social Justice Text and Interpretation (continued)

Posts 2014-2015 Text Example Interpretation

How to Keep Your Keep your focus on our most I understand the importance of Sanity and Teach valuable commodity: our teaching students (and teachers) Kids Simultaneously! learners to learn to advocate for

It's okay to self-advocate but themselves. do so respectfully!

How to Bully-Proof “Taking a proactive and I understand how a proactive Your Campus preventative approach may stance rather than reactive stance not rid the world from can help stop bullying in bullies, but it can certainly schools. I advocate for being an help to stop them in their active listener and believing tracks! Be aware. Be children who say they are being proactive. bullied.

Posts 2014-2015 Text Example Interpretation

It's okay to self-advocate but themselves. do so respectfully!

171

Table 12. Examples of Social Justice Text and Interpretation (continued)

5 Things Bad I would cringe when I would I recognize ways teachers Teachers Do Very, see teachers like Ms. Fave unknowingly marginalize Very Well! Ortism give the best student award year after year to a students. Teachers tend to favor student who was white, students who have parents who middle class (or wealthy), and are actively involved in their had parents who were active in making sure their school. child had good grades.

A Thanksgiving "Charlie Brown is I think a I appreciate how alike we all are Tribute to Charles little bit like everyone. in spite of our skin color, age, Schultz gender.

Posts 2015-2016 Text Example Interpretation

The Ghost Plant and Assessments will come and I believe in the power of a teacher Other (Potentially) go...but valuing (or to make a child feel valued. Fateful Tales devaluing) a child's voice will When a child feels valued, they stay with them forever. When we give them a voice we are empowered. They have a empower them to make voice. changes in their own lives, their community, and the world.

Alien Matters: Unlike traditional I believe there are innovative Keychains, Bobble conferences put on by slick ways to provide all teachers with Heads, and marketers while charging fair access to quality professional Refrigerator Magnets financially strapped educators thousands of development. dollars to attend, Edcamps are free and rely on word of mouth and the generosity of others.”

172

Table 12. Examples of Social Justice Text and Interpretation (continued)

What's a Lug Nut? Building background I am passionate about providing (And Other Pertinent knowledge should not be an marginalized populations of Questions) option. It is only fair for our students, especially our ELs, with English Language Learners or economically strategies to help them have equal disadvantaged students to access to the curriculum. be supplied the prior knowledge most privileged students have.

Posts 2016-2017 Text Example Interpretation

Conference Burnout: “What if there was a new I recognize that power is unfairly Reviving Educators model? Not a top-down frame distributed in the education in a Most that elevates a few high system. I believe there are ways “Un”common Way profile speakers who hold the to shift the power from a top keys to the kingdom; but down structure to a bottom up rather a bottom-up frame framework to give all educators that distributes the power and equal voice. and knowledge equally among the attendees.”

Summer Slide Is No Summer reading loss is an I believe summer reading loss is Walk in the Park epidemic among poor an epidemic among poor children. By 5th grade, children. Without intervention the children in poverty may read gap will continue to grow. All as far as two to three years children need and deserve quality behind their economically summer reading programs. advantaged peers.

173

Table 12. Examples of Social Justice Text and Interpretation (continued)

No More Quiet Without a single word I understand that there are unfair Game: Inviting Talk spoken, the chosen student structures in the classroom and in into the Elementary becomes the new leader and schools between students. Classroom sits in the position of power I am knowledgeable of research Research conducted at the that reveals the disparity between Marzano Research Center children in poverty and children @MarzanoResearch found a born into professional families. significant gap between a disadvantaged child and a child born into a professional family.

Posts 2017-2018 Text Example Interpretation

Ready...Set...Play! In my opinion, there are far I see play during school as a way too many stresses our students to help students as a way help deal with outside of the school alleviate the stresses children deal walls. If play can bring some with outside of the classroom. reprieve from life's disappointments like parents getting a divorce, or worries over money for groceries, then it is worth doing.

Explaining the Seek out professionals in I understand the importance for Unexplainable to Kids your district to get support on working with school personnel how to communicate in ways and the community to support that are appropriate depending children based on their age and on the age and maturity of the maturity differences. child.

174

Table12. Examples of Social Justice Text and Interpretation (continued)

How to Not Beat a Students who come to us from I see the opportunities to Dead Horse when the different cultures have their celebrate students’ diversity. Sky Continuously own figurative language Rains Cats and Dogs (and other Worn-out expressions. I suggest giving Phrases) students who come to our school from other countries, the opportunity to share expressions unique to their culture (and in their first language).

I was not surprised that social justice was a reoccurring theme in my posts.

However, I was shocked by my frequent use of words, terms, and phrases associated with social justice across five years of posts.

Political Factor: The Rights of Farmers

I learned about fairness and social equity from my Papa. He would take every opportunity to teach me about what he called parity, meaning equality. I was sitting at the breakfast table with Papa with nothing out of the ordinary. Papa was talking and stopped in mid-sentence to point out a pair of blue jeans I was wearing. The topic quickly changed to the cost of my blue jeans and how little cotton farmers made from the cotton that was used to make them. He went on and on and on about how a company’s fashion designers were making eighty cents on the dollar, while American cotton farmers were making 20 cents (or less). I did not know it at the time, but Papa was part of a group of local farmers helping organize a trip to Washington D. C. to protest unfair wages for

175 farmers! Papa was so fed up that he wrote a letter to every top government office who needed a good “chew’n out!” (I am not sure if it was ever mailed). He was mad at the sitting president, President Jimmy Carter, who “should know better since he was a peanut farmer!” I recalled memories of the farm strike in my reflexive journal:

Papa was one of the leaders in a farmers strike. In 1977 he drove his John Deere

tractor to Washington D.C. and protested. I remember watching television at my

grandparent’s house and seeing the caravan of tractors on their way to D. C. and

feeling so proud when I spotted Papa’s tractor! That was one of my Papa’s proudest

moments. He loved to tell the story how he was made an honorary firemen of

“Prince George’s County” (and had the certificate to prove it when he and his farm

buddies helped clear the roads for after a blizzard). Today it is known as the

Blizzard of ’77 and can be found on Wikipedia. A John Deer tractor is in the

Museum of Science and Industry in Washington, D.C. with a gold plate listing all

the farmers involved in the strike…I learned from my Papa that one person working

with another person and another person can make a difference. (Journal Entry

2/14/18)

While looking through family keepsakes I found a letter hand written by Papa. He had drafted a letter to government officials in preparation for the farmers strike (see

Figure 36). As typical for Papa he did not believe in wasting paper, and wrote his draft on a blank space in his agriculture magazine (pictured front and backside of draft).

176

Artifact Transcription

“Mr. Cong. Sen. Sec. of ag. Or Pres. or Bureaucrat. If as some of you have said that 100% parity for ag. Comodies would be unfair to consumers. What about the price of U.S. produced steal? Allso the price of U.S. produced automobiles actually all U.S. produced industrial products? Are these prices fair to consumers? Allso what about your salary? Is it fair the consuming consuming tax payer? You seem to feel that the American farmer is the only U. S. business mon who should be fair to

consumers.

Figure 36. Papa’s draft to Congress and transcription.

Looking back, I can see how my granddad instilled in me social justice. The saying, “talk the talk and walk the walk” described Papa to a tee! He backed up his

177 beliefs with action. Over the course of his life, there were many, many examples of how his life exemplified fairness. He lived to be ninety-two years old. At his funeral, the small country church was packed with more people than the population of the town! In attendance were two elderly Hispanic men there to give condolences. They shook my hand, and when I heard their names, I hugged them. These men were the first two workers who Papa hired when he first started farming. He always treated them fairly.

Both men worked for Papa until he retired from farming. I later learned from my mom that Papa had set aside money made from the sale of a John Deere and had given it to these two men as a thank you for years of hard work. Papa had never said a word to me about his gift to his former employees. In ways including his fight for the rights of

American farmers, he taught me to value people.

The Pareto Principle: Fairness in Education

Like the inequities in farming, Gee (2017) believed that inequity exists in higher education. He blamed the inequity on what he called The Pareto Principle. The Pareto principle is also known as the 80/20 principal, or the law of the vital few. An Italian philosopher and economist named Pareto pointed out that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population and that 20% of the peapods in his garden contained

80% of the peas” (p. 80). Gee (2017) compared the Pareto Principle to iniquities concerning professional publication in higher education. Gee contended 20% of academics (himself included) published 80% of articles and books (and the 1% publish more than those in the top 20%). Whereas, 80% of academics contribute in others ways

178 and can be a source of “skills and knowledge that the 20% do not have” (p. 82).

However, publishing in academic journals is heavily weighted.

Gee (2017) explained:

As things stand, universities make publishing the core and status-giving activity

of academics. But there are academics who prefer to teach, read, and write more

slowly or outside the mainstream of their field. Academic institution could not

exist without these people, and once in a while, such people publish something

the big contributors’ have not, and could not have thought of (p. 81).

Like Gee (2017), I believe that affinity spaces are way to level the playing field for educators who do not have the academic language expected by editors in educational journals. I believe edublogging is one way to give fair and equal access to all educators who want their stories heard, their ideas shared, or the opportunity to simply interact with others.

The Learning Environment: Everybody Needs a Home

The learning environment surfaced as another central theme that influenced the messages in my edublog posts. I have written many posts that address the learning environment, including the 2015 post I wrote for the blog site: Teachers, Profs, and

Parents: Writers Who Care: A Blog Advocating for Authentic Writing Instruction. The learning environment descriptions in my posts not only describe a physical space (i.e. lighting, reading spaces, word walls, types of furniture) but also the emotional environment. Do students feel safe? Do they feel valued? Do they see themselves in the

179 stories they read? Do students feel empowered to voice their thoughts and opinions? I ask these questions myself when designing a lesson or when interacting with a child or their parent.

My post, The Importance of Classroom Environment: Lessons from a Colt Named

Carl (2015), is one of my favorites because it reminded me how teachers can create a positive learning environment in easy and inexpensive ways. I discovered how a

Goodwill purchase changed the environment in my classroom when I bought a very large over-stuffed horse. The horse had ink marks on the eyes and the tail was raveled. When I brought him into the room, I was surprised how this odd purchase changed the learning environment in my classroom. I wrote:

Since finding his way into my classroom, I've witnessed a reluctant 8th grader

who would rather play Call of Duty than eat or breathe, choose Carl as a reading

backrest and lose himself in a book. I've seen a stressed out eleven-year-old

whose parents were going thru a divorce, relax while fidgeting with the yarn on

his mane. I've even heard kids called "dibs" on him; which is the highest honor

when it comes to pre-teens' territorial nature.

The Confession Reflection questions for The Importance of Classroom Environment:

Lessons from a Colt Named Carl (2015) further revealed how important the learning environment is to me. I chose these questions to guide readers’ reflection.

180

 What are some characteristics of a positive learning environment?  Research shows that optimum learning happens in a safe environment. What does this mean?  How can teacher entitlement (my room, my rules) be a barrier to building a culture of learning?  Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Learners should have a voice in designing their learning space.

In the post 5 Things Bad Teachers do Very, Very Well and New Teacher Strategies to

Keep Them at Bay! (2017), I described a non-example of a positive learning environment describing a teacher who I named, Mr. N. Kuntroll:

Bad Teachers run their classrooms with military precision. Desks are in neat

rows. You can hear a pin drop. Not only are their classes in perfect order, the

Bad Teacher will be quick to point out to the principal (or even a School Board

Member or two) how the new, unruly teacher across the hall has let his/her class

run amuck. The Bad Teacher has no tolerance for students talking, moving

around, and using technology without the constant supervision of the all seeing

eye. Past performance records reflect their "well-run" classroom. Mr. N.

Kuntroll prides himself on being the Captain of his Ship!

The mention of “desks in a neat row” was a way I challenged the status quo.

Desks in rows are common in classrooms. However, I do not believe it is a good practice.

Desks isolate students and make it difficult for students to collaborate with others. The fact that you can hear a “pin drop” is indicative of students being forced to be quiet. The

181 idea of a class being in “perfect order” goes against the theory of learning by doing which can only happen in an environment that affirmed creativity. I organized my data and interpretations by creating a chart of posts from 2013-2017. In the first column, I share the name of the post using a live link. Next, I included texts from posts with bolded words and phrases I associated with the learning environment. In a third column, I described my interpretation of what the post meant to me (see Table 13).

Table 13

Examples of Learning Environment Themes and Interpretation

Posts 2013-2014 Sample Text Interpretation

How to Bully-Proof Taking a proactive and I am sensitive to the feelings of Your Campus preventative approach may not children who are being bullied rid the world from bullies, but in school. A safe environment is created when teachers are it can certainly help to stop proactive in stopping bullies. them in their tracks! Be aware. Be proactive. Believe students when they tell you that someone is picking on them.

Accidentally on Sitting in my pj’s downing my I believe I benefit from online Purpose morning java, I had the best of professional @edcamphome both worlds: #PD and I could development/distance learning get up and let my dogs out or from home. toast a bagel without missing a beat.

How I Found My The year was 1969. The stage I compare my living room to a Genius! was my living room, gold shag “stage”. (symbolizing a place to carpet and an untouched play a part or to perform) peanut-butter-jelly sandwich.

182

Table 13 Examples of Learning Environment Themes and Interpretation (continued)

Posts 2014-2015 Text Example Interpretation

The Importance of Carl has taught me the I believe a teacher has control Classroom importance of designing a over the learning environment in Environment: learning environment that the classroom. Kids learn best Lessons from a Colt feels safe and taking risks are when they feel safe and can take Named Carl encouraged risks.

Paint By Number One perk was that our I am aware of the importance of and Run! basement was light and airy. physical environment. Natural The tip of the basement had a lighting is important to me. (I high window that let in sunlight covered the fluorescent lights in from the front of the house, but my literacy classroom), in the back there was a full size sliding glass door that made the room full of natural light.

Christmas in the We had fans blowing and I am aware of the importance of Great Outdoors/ chilled lemonade and enough the physical environment (both Christmas in July watermelon to feed an army. negative and positive effects)

Posts 2015-2016 Text Example Motivation

Rules of Your principal will most likely It is as important to create a Engagement: allow you to dress down and positive learning environment Administering State wear your most comfortable for teaches as it is for students. Assessments and shoes. Living to Tell About It

Fleas in Room 212! My students would have spent I am passionate about the need the rest of the year sitting in for diversifying instruction to desks, coloring work pages and meet the individual needs. living in a "one size fits all" classroom.

183

Table13. Examples of Learning Environment Themes and Interpretation (continued)

The Art of Speaking The smell of fried corn dogs; I notice both the physical Texan corn-on-the-cob, and cotton aspects of the learning candy will greet me and my environment, as well as the family when we step on to the relationships that need to fairgrounds. I will proudly be nurtured. choral my children and grandchildren as Big Tex greets us with a Texas "Howdy!"

Posts 2016-2017 Text Example Interpretation

Hack in Action: An As part of my reading I understand that some Excerpt from intervention class, I decided to students come into the Hacking Homework dedicate the first Monday of classroom without the every month to teaching home support to help them organization. (If I had a new with their homework. student, I would schedule time to meet with him/her one-on- one).

Students who are learning to organize often do not have the skills to prioritize what is or isn’t important.

Summer Slide Is No Adults and children stood in I use religious Walk in the Park line waiting for the doors of connotation, sanctuary, as Bethlehem Center to open its a metaphor for a safe and nurturing learning arms. environment. The doors opened and I grabbed my notebook and headed into the summer reading sanctuary.

184

Table 13. Examples of Learning Environment Themes and Interpretation (continued)

No More Quiet And so I began to ask "what if" I recognize the value of Game: Inviting Talk questions. What if...teachers talk and play in learning. into the Elementary created opportunities for Kids need opportunities to unstructured talk and play talk freely, initiating their Classroom during the school day? What own conversations. if...we replaced a game that rewarded silence and celebrated talk?

Posts 2017-2018 Text Example Interpretation

The Future is Unlike traditional schools that I see the value of school Calling: Are We had desks in rows and subjects design. Flexible schedules, Listening? segregated by topic, my school learning from different was round and had walls teachers, movement between “classes” that open in support a productive the day to allow my class to learning environment. move to different stations to be taught by different teachers.

Ready...Set...Play! Inviting play into the I recognize the importance classroom is as easy as of the teacher’s attitude supplying a few board games toward play. Teachers’ purchased at a Goodwill, have to have buy in. playdough, and Legos. Different textures and activity choice support a positive learning environment.

Heart Maps under Color coding would often be I believe students need to Construction: A interrupted by a story or feel valued. Listening to a Lesson on Learning memory in a student's heart. student shared stories or and Relationships Students were engaged in memories are ways to learning and listening to one build positive another. relationships.

185

To better understand my beliefs about the learning environment, I copied and pasted all of the confession reflections questions during 2013 and 2017 to confirm that the learning environment was evident. I created word clouds using Wordle.net to identify theme (see Figures 37 and 38). The word cloud in 2013 reflection questions had fewer posts since it was started in the summer. The word students is the most frequently used word, followed by the words classroom, learners, educators, experience, and learning.

My interpretation is that a positive learning environment should be student-centered. The classroom should be a place where students can learn from experience. Since the words learners and classroom are both large, I believe this speaks to my understanding of the importance of the classroom environment for learning to take place.

Figure 37. Word cloud of Confession Reflection 2013-2014.

186

This word cloud from 2017-2018 is much larger and filled with more words than the word clouds from 2013-2014. This is because there were more posts written between the years 2017-2018. I wrote one each month, so there were twelve post in all. However,

I started my edublog in 2013 during the summer and so I had fewer posts. In addition, I began writing four or five reflections question in 2017, instead of only three or four as I had in prior years.

There is not one word that stands out as with the word cloud from 2013-2014. The words most used in 2017-2018 are teacher(s), student(s), support, and learning. These are used the same amount of times in the reflection’s questions. This difference aligned with my teaching experiences as an adjunct instruction and teachers’ assistant. The word

NanoWriMo is equally as large. The NanoWriMo stands for National Writer’s Month which highlights the emphasis on creative writing within the context of my blog.

Figure 38. Word cloud of confession reflection 2017-2018.

187

A Place to Call Home

I grew up in houses called parsonages, a term meaning a house or living quarter owned by a church. We never paid rent and the costs for upkeep, like the yard and appliances, were covered by the church. While that may sound like a good deal, there was a catch. Living in a parsonage reminded me of the Open House events when homeowners are trying to sell a house. The houses are often staged, meaning to make a home appealing to potential homebuyers. The staged homes I have attended are spotless. There are no dirty dishes in sight. Pillows are color coordinated and placed in strategic positions on the couch and chairs. There is also the absence of family photos, and clutter like keys, pens, and receipts is nowhere in sight.

In my experience, the parsonages were similar to staged homes because the pastor and wife are expected to entertain visiting guests or host get-togethers (a Baptist term for parties) at the drop of a hat. I do not remember a time when we had an empty spare bedroom. Sometimes an overnight visitor might be someone who was down on his luck and needed a place to sleep. Sometimes a special guest speaker stayed with us. Another downside is when a Pastor changes churches, the family has to uproot and move to a new city. I once heard my dad compare being a preacher to being a coach. He said something to the affect, “If the church membership doesn’t grow, the pastor will be asked to leave, like a coach who loses too many games.” Thankfully, my family was able to stay in one church during my early teens and into early adulthood. But there was always an

188 underlying fear that we would have to pick up and move if the church attendance dropped.

Parsonages are houses, not homes. They are like a staged house on the market.

During post analysis and reflective journaling, this insight was very difficult for me to process. But it was true. In the post, How I Found My Genius, (2013) I wrote a description of my home. I was around five years old and watching a popular show called

Romper Room. I had written a fan letter to Ms. Margaret, my television teacher, and hoped she could see me in her magic mirror. One sentence in my post read:

The stage was my living room, gold shag carpet and an untouched peanut-butter-

jelly sandwich within reach.

Unintentionally, I used the metaphor stage to describe my living room where I watched television. As an insider, I know that I was an only child at the time, and my parents were hoping to adopt a second child, preferably a boy. As part of the process we had to be ready for an adoption agent to examine our home to make sure we were a good family. The living room was, indeed, a stage as we fostered children and had caseworkers come in and out. I knew to always be on my best behavior! This may have been why I enjoyed summers with my maternal grandparents who I called Memaw and Papa.

In my reflexive journal, I recalled fond memories:

My grandparents had a home, and not a house. There were pictures of family

everywhere. In their bedroom Memaw had completely filled up the wall above

their headboard with pictures (mostly of her four grandchildren). I never realized

189

how small their farmhouse was at the time. There was always cooking, dishes

either being used or being hand washed and dried. Vegetables from the garden

were picked and then “canned” which was a process to preserve food for winter. I

loved sitting on my porch with Memaw holding a big plastic bowl and shelling

peas. I remember the West Texas sunset going down as we kept shelling. It was a

home, the type of home I wanted to provide for my children and grandchildren.

There were no collapsing stages. (Journal 5/5/18).

In my literature review on teacher identity, one theory described the ways a teacher’s personal history and identity were central to identity construction (Cole, 1990;

Holt-Reynolds, 1992). One study in particular caught my attention. A qualitative study by

Butt and Raymond (1989) studied the autobiographies of two teachers. One of the participant teachers, named Loyd, was a sixth-grade teacher working in a low socioeconomic school district. Research suggested that it was Loyd’s intent to create a classroom where students experienced feelings of “survival, safety, and success” (p. 408).

Based on the content of Loyd’s autobiography, the researchers theorized that the teacher’s practices were rooted in his personal life experiences.

I latched onto this theory and wondered if I would see a similar outcome in my autoethnography. I have always arranged my classroom and the environment to nurture feelings of security and foster creativity. In fact, I had all of the desks removed in my literacy classroom. I put tables together and added beanbags and throw pillows for places students could learn. I never assigned seating. I kept a puzzle going at all times and

190 games stacked on shelves. A brightly colored sign over my door read, The Zone. I had posters on the walls. I even had a life-size cut out of the character Gandalf from Lord of

The Rings book series. Learning was messy at times, but I loved seeing construction paper on the floor and having to replenish markers and glue.

I had a couch for reading, which created many paper-rock-scissor battles to determine who would sit there. After school ended or during my planning period I would often have teachers come to my room to talk or to “chill out” after a stressful day. It became an inside joke when teachers were pregnant and battling morning sickness.

Teachers would come to my room and lay on the couch. One year I kept a box of saltine crackers for this purpose. In retrospect, I created a learning environment that became a safe haven for many of my students. I had a homeless student, several refugee students, and many students who came to my room to eat cereal before the first period bell rang.

Maybe it is the personality I was born with, but I felt like a mother to many of my students who went home to an empty house. Or maybe it is because I am recreating a home environment I did not have. Or maybe it is both.

Poverty and the Environment

Poverty is another motivating factor that influences the message of my posts.

Although poverty is associated with social justice, I am motivated by creating a learning environment that supports children from low-income families. I rarely share books as resources, but I have promoted two books by Erik Jensen, Teaching with the Brain in

Mind and Teaching with Poverty in Mind (2000). When I was a literacy coach, I attended

191 a workshop Jensen conducted on poverty, and it changed the environment of my class. I learned how movement and games could actually change the way our brains are wired. I began including games during the first ten to fifteen minutes of my reading intervention classes. The post, Ready...Set...Play! (2017) was based on my experiences when adding a time for play in my reading intervention class. My sleepy heads came in ready to get out chess boards, or play a competitive game of Pictionary. I saw improvements in my students’ reading and writing as a result. Researcher and author, Dr. Richard Allington, was a keynote speaker at a literacy conference I attended. His research on the impact of summer reading loss and the reading achievement gap between students from middle class and students from poverty (2016) influenced the ways I approached literacy instruction in my classroom.

I wrote the post, Summer Slide is No Walk in the Park! (2016) after working alongside a professor while researching a summer reading loss program in a large, urban city near me (see Figure 39). We used Dr. Allington’s research to support our own inquiry on the influence of a summer reading loss program and the reading. I was driving through the neighborhoods where students lived who attended the program. I noticed that the houses I drove past had bars on the window and there were no toys or bicycles in the yard. There were no children playing outside or morning joggers, which were typical in my neighborhood. I learned that the one of the draws for children attending the summer reading loss program was that they would get to eat breakfast and lunch. In my post, I

192 describe the summer reading loss program as a “Summer Sanctuary” where children felt safe and loved.

Figure 39. Example of post on summer slide. Although the post includes both themes of social equity and the learning environment, I focused more on the learning environment where the summer literacy intervention program was held.

Religiosity: Shame and Redemption

Another theme that emerged during analysis of posts was religiosity. This was an unexpected theme even though it was staring me right in the face. In fact, the title of my edublog Confessions of a Literacy Coach in and of itself is a telltale sign that religion is factor that influenced the message of my posts. In fact, my first published post, To My

Principal...I Must Confess (2013) was essentially a confession to my principal for a lie I had told her. The story was about a promise I had made to students in my reading

193 intervention class that I would eat a chocolate covered cricket if they passed the reading and writing portions of the state assessment. I got the idea from my cousin who ate a live worm for her fifth grade students when 90% of her students passed the state assessment.

She was named “Super Teacher” and even made the local paper which included a still shot of the unfortunate worm dangling above her open mouth. When the scores came back and all of my students had passed, I realized that I did not have the stomach to fulfill my promise to eat a cricket, even a chocolate covered one. So in the secrecy of my kitchen, my husband and I concocted fake crickets, which were raisons dipped in chocolate. The lie ate at me for years. Before I published my post, I reached out to my principal to tell her about the lie and apologize. To my relief she laughed and told me she couldn’t wait to read my post!

During post analysis I noticed how I had republished To My Principal...I Must

Confess (2016), three years later. I republished the post because I had attended a family reunion, and my cousin and I had our picture taken together to add to my blog. Since my first posting did not include pictures, I thought a picture with my cousin would make the story authentic (see Figure 40). However, I no longer felt guilty or felt fearful because I had already confessed the lie to my principal three years earlier.

194

Figure 40. Sample post of second publication of first post. In retrospect, not only was I guilt free, I actually felt proud of my story! It was only by stepping back and looking at my experiences and motives for posting at a new angle that I was able to understand my motives and the ways my edublog was a confessional, of sorts. By confessing to my principal the first time, my shame had been removed. The 2016 posting was evidence of a redemption. Jones (2005) argued,

“Autoethnography requires that we observe ourselves observing, that we interrogate what we think and believe, and that we challenge our own assumptions, asking over and over if we have penetrated as many layers of our own defenses, fears, and insecurities as our project requires” (p. 10). There are many layers to peel back and it would take a lifetime to interrogate my thoughts and beliefs.

195

After interpreting the ways my first post and its reposting were a confession and evidence of redemption, I looked across five years of posts from 2013-2017 to find other posts that were similar. I discovered the post Rules of Engagement: Administering State

Assessments and Living to Tell About It, (2014) was similar in that I used my edublog as a confessional. The post takes a satirical look at the state assessment and five ways teachers can “live to tell about it.” Through self-reflection, I recognized that I wrote the post after a blunder on my part when I read portions of the state assessment to a student who did not have oral administration in their accommodations. Unknowingly, the graphic

I used on my post depicts a teacher chastising a student, who appears to be cheating, with a rod (see Figure 41).

Figure 41. Sample post of chastisement.

196

When I realized my mistake, shame engulfed me. Not only was I a literacy coach,

I was part of the Response to Intervention (RtI) team who had helped write the student’s accommodation! Without knowing it at the time, I intentionally wrote the post as a way to redeem myself. Interestingly, the post has remained in my top ten all-time favorite posts and is routinely shared by superintendents, principals, and other administrators when our state assessment rolls around each year.

Another post that follows a similar pattern of shame and redemption is Christmas in the Great Outdoors! (2014). The post is about a Christmas in July party I threw in the summer to support a mission. Entry into the party was an unwrapped gift for a child. The gifts would be handed out to families at Christmas who could not afford gifts for their children. During post analysis, I recognized that I included a story about a time I seared a new blouse while ironing out the wrinkles. The silk blouse was a gift from a close friend.

I had never told her the truth but I believe I subconsciously included the story as a confession within my post. In the fourth paragraph, I wrote:

Okay, I admit it. I have an overreacting problem. Like the time I was getting

ready for a college sorority party and I set the iron too hot and seared and singed

a hole in my favorite purple silk blouse. What did I do? I threw the singed iron

away and swore to never iron again. I kept my favorite silk blouse with a triangle

shaped hole for weeks hoping I’d wake up and it would have all been a terrible

dream. As for ironing, I kept my promise.

197

I wrote the post, Paint by Number and Run! (2014) and included my one-year-old brother, Brad, in the storyline. The post was a story describing an event in my childhood when I destroyed a map created by a widow’s Sunday school class that was held in our basement. (The same basement that served as my pretend classroom). The class was made up of older women who were studying the Holy Land as a precursor for an actual trip to Jerusalem. I decided to help paint the map and ended up with paint everywhere! It basically looked like a calico painting of a hodge-podge of colors. I placed the blame partially on Brad. In the end, I was forgiven and the women brought me back a necklace containing a small mustard seed representing faith.

I believe Confessions of a Literacy Coach is a confessional, of sorts, a private sanctuary where I am able to come to terms with my faults and admit to events I have kept hidden. The guilt I originally felt when writing is purged on some level.

Religious Cultural Factor: A Poem, Five Points, and a Prayer

I heard my dad say on many occasions that a good sermon consisted of “a poem, five points, and a prayer.” As a child, I would occasionally watch televised preaching with my dad. He loved to watch Billy Graham crusades on our black and white television. My dad would mimic Billy Graham’s mannerisms, like the way he would emphasize certain words and wipe his brow with a handkerchief. My dad would tell me that great men like Billy Graham would begin with a story, or what he called a poem, deliver a five point sermon, and conclude with a prayer. I listened to my dad preach into my early twenties. To this day, I can hear my dad’s voice telling the church congregation,

198

“Get out your Bible and your notepad. Today I am going to share five important steps to following Jesus” or “five principles to follow to live victoriously...”

Analysis of edublog posts from 2013-2017 confirmed my use of five points (see

Table 14). While I do not start with a poem and end with a prayer, per say, I intentionally use five steps as teaching points. I believe this comes from my dad’s sermons.

Table 14 Examples from Posts Using 5 Points

Posts Five Points

How to Keep Your Sanity and Teach Kids 5 Survival Tips Simultaneously (2014) 1. Stay focused! 2. Stay connected. 3. Gear check! 4. Honor those in authority over you. 5. Be professional...always!

Rules of Engagement: Administering the 5 “go to” set of rules State Assessment and Living to Tell about It (2015) 1. No cell phone. 2. Monitor closely. 3. Keep your eye on the test. 4. Control your bladder. 5. Stay calm and breathe.

199

Table 14. Examples from Posts Using 5 Points (continued)

Alien Matters: Keychains, Bobble Heads Proof Aliens Exist: and Refrigerator Magnets (2015) 1. iPads (Intergalactic Planet Augmented Device) 2. Unidentified Fruit Objects (UFOs) 3. Augmented Reality (AR) and 3 D Printers 4.. Ionosphere Surveillance Program (ISP) 5. Edcamps 5 Safeguards to Grinch-Proof Your Class 5 safeguards: During the Holiday Season (2016) 1. Expand your heart. 2. Collaborate don’t isolate. 3. Be realistic. 4. Be kind. 5. Be thankful. Emoji’s, Selfie’s and Memes: Innocuous Who are millennials? Terms in Today’s Classroom (2016) 1. All things abbreviated. 2. Emoji’s 3. Meme 4. Mash-up 5. Selfie or Snap 5 Post-Holiday Strategies to Thwart the 5 Strategies: Infamous Double Dog Dare! (2017) 1. Know the players. 2. Get the whole story. 3. Don’t be an enabler. 4. Be approachable. 5. Teach students to self-advocate. Five Things Bad Teachers to Very Well 5 Bad Teachers and what they do well! and New Teacher Strategies to Keep Them at Bay! (2017) 1. Mr. Ima N. Kuntroll: Ultimate Disciplinary 2. Miss Clair Itty: The Lecturer 3. Mr. Wunsize Fitzall: The Lesson Designer 4. Ms. Fave Ortism: The Affrimer 5. Mr. Smartie: The Know-it-all

200

Interestingly, I noticed that I began using the 5-point strategy in 2014 and the pattern became more obvious in 2015 after I left the classroom to attend graduate school full time.

Oppression and Religious Discourse

From the time I could walk and talk, I was groomed to never question authority and to speak only when spoken to. I was not allowed to question the Bible, my parents’ authority, and the decisions made for me. I did not have a voice in decision making, down to the types of clothes I wore or the amount of make-up I could put on when I was a teenager. I was not allowed to go to dances like other teenagers, so I missed my senior prom. When I asked my parents if I could try out for the high school drill team with my friends, they emphatically told me no because “the outfits were too skimpy.”

I believed the decisions made for me were made out of love. I never once questioned my parents’ decisions more out of fear than respect. I believed God showed his love towards me when I was physically reprimanded with a rod to cleanse me of my sin. I described the rod and subsequent discipline in my reflexive journal:

A rod (actually the hard cardboard rod-like part of a hanger) was used on me

behind the knee caps or slightly above. The chastisement (called spankings)

would only stop when I learned to cry a certain pitch that sounded repentant. If I

screamed I sounded stubborn, and I would continue to be hit. If I whimpered I

would continue to be spanked because I was not repentant. After spankings I had

red welts that would bruise and sometimes bleed. I lived in constant fear of being

201

chastised and did everything possible to be on my best behavior. Spankings

continued into well into my teens. (Journal entry, 2/8/18).

The silence enforced upon me is described by Freire as a culture of silence (Freire, 1970).

According to Freire, individuals who are dominant in society silence and suppress the self-image of the oppressed. The only way to overcome a culture of silence is to recognize how the culture of silence is created to oppress individuals. Freire’s teaching aligns with standpoint theorists who believe that society is a hierarchical social construct of power where individuals and groups are situated based on a variety of factors

(Littlejohn & Foss, 2005). Standpoint theorists believe a shift in power relationships begins when marginalized individuals use their unique vantage point, or standpoint, to ask critical questions and provide insight on ways to challenge the group in power.

However, as long as a culture of silence is enforced, the individual remains in a state of oppression.

Today, I am able to understand the ways I was oppressed within a religious hierarchy. Unlike my dad’s Discourse, which is Dominant, my religious Discourse is non-dominant. Through post analysis of written text, I recognize the ways I purposefully positioned myself in a non-dominant position just as the members of the church would have been positioned. Non-dominant Discourses are marginalized members who may belong within the social network but do not benefit from the wider benefits and privileges

(Gee, 2004). Analysis of edublog posts from 2013-2017 confirmed my use of religious

Discourse as a non-dominant identity I created (see Table 15).

202

Table 15 Examples of Religious Discourse and Non-Dominant Discourse

Posts 2013-2014 Religious ‘discourse’ text Non-dominant Discourse To My Principal I Must To My Principal I Must Confess I am the one in need of Confess (Title) repentance. SpongeBob SquarePants I’m standing outside the Pearly I am waiting to be allowed to the Rescue! Gates to enter heaven. How I Found My Genius But unlike Miss Margaret, there I do not carry the message is no magic mirror, or final of hope and inspiration. I episode, because Angela is am referencing a person carrying her message of hope who has this ability. and inspiration to the heart of educators who then, in turn, can take this message onto their campuses and into the classrooms. Posts 2014-2015 Text Example Non-dominant Discourse Creating a New I was sitting on the front row I am a child listening to the Structure to Grow 21st next to my mom. As my dad Sunday sermon, about to get Century Learners reached the pivotal point in his into trouble. Sunday sermon, my foot began an involuntary swinging motion. How to Keep Your but there is a hidden gem in this I have learned to listen to Sanity and Teach Kids wise saying wisdom. Simultaneously Who Moved My Cheese? For this reason, the wise little I am telling a story about mice continue to wake up early what I have learned. every morning How to Survive the Dog There is no shame in feeling a I have overcome feelings of Days of Summer sense of jubilation for having shame. time away from your classroom.

203

Table 15. Examples of Religious Discourse and Non-Dominant Discourse (continued)

Posts 2015-2016 Text Example Non-dominant Discourse

Fleas in Room 212! I also gleaned wisdom on how I have learned to listen to to be a leader who encourages wisdom to lead, take risks, and others to take risks and that overcome failure. (I am failure is part of the pathway to imperfect). success. The Ghost Plant and In one swoop of her evil pen, I am a child who has lost other (Potentially) Mrs. Killjoy had squashed my excitement and confidence. Fateful Tales excitement and confidence. Rules of Engagement: STAAR is a necessary evil. I am subjected to evil. Administering State Assessments and Living to Tell About It Posts 2016-2017 Text Example Non-dominant Discourse Summer Slide is No The doors opened and I grabbed I am positioned as a learner. Walk in the Park my notebook and headed into the summer reading sanctuary. Merry Christmas in Outside of my church and I am a member of a church. July! weekly Saturday morning coffee time with a few girlfriends, my social life has much to be desired. How to Survive the Dog There is no shame in feeling a I have overcome feelings of Days of Summer sense of jubilation for having shame. time away from your classroom. Posts 2017-2018 Text Example Non-dominant Discourse How to Not Beat a Dead Lo and behold, one of my I am using the biblical Horse when the Sky students, Jared (not his real expression “lo and behold” in Continuously Rains Cats name) did something so creative! surprise.

204

Table 15. Examples of Religious Discourse and Non-Dominant Discourse (continued)

The Future is Calling: I confess that I think about the I am in need of confessing. Are We Listening? future probably more than most people. It may have been predestined. A Teacher's Summer I prayed that whatever IT was, I pray to overcome my fears. Tale: The Trade Secrets that IT wouldn't be able to climb to Creating Stories that the ladder. Teach!

The use of non-dominant Discourse is purposeful in Confessions of Literacy

Coach. I believe this would support my interaction with the reader as equal. I write as

though I am talking to a friend and not from a position of authority.

Concepts of Self and Teacher Identity

During my review of literature on teacher identity, the theory of concept of self

caught my attention. According to Chang (2008), a person’s concept of self can be traced

back to his or her culture. The family and social culture I was immersed in as a child and

up until my early twenties was a strict Christian fundamentalist culture. I grew up

hearing Bible verses situating the concept of self in a negative light. Scriptures from the

Bible by Apostle Matthew quoted Jesus as saying “If anyone would come after me, let

him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). I was taught as

a small child that I was sinful by nature and the only way to God was to deny myself and

follow him. I believe that concept of self in theory is something I want to continue to

explore.

205

Tone of My Posts

This section will describe the external factors that influenced the tone of my posts.

Analyzing my posts, I discovered two tones that are most common: humorous and inspirational. Through reflexive journaling, personal reconstructed memories and artifacts identified people and literacies that shaped the tone of my posts. I conclude the section with insights on the reason I write the Confession Reflections and what it means to me.

Not-So-Forgettable Influences

Humor is the primary tone I am intending for when I describe the “not-so- forgettable experiences in the classroom.” I realize that taken at face value, the “not-so- forgettable” events may seem self-demeaning, but as an insider, I know this is purposeful.

It is to make the reader feel safe and to help me be approachable. I am presenting myself as the kind of person I would want to spend time with. I naturally gravitate toward books and authors who make me laugh and feel good about myself. I read Ellen DeGeneres’ first book, The Funny Thing Is… (1996) when it first came out. It was one of the funniest books I have ever read! The book actually does not have an ending and she blames her editor. I fell in love with Ellen long before her talk show. Her wittiness and uncensored humor made me laugh so hard at times when I needed it most. After reading Ellen’s first book, I felt like I knew her, and would have felt comfortable if I met her in person.

Today, I watch Ellen’s talk show appropriately titled, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and find her opening monologues hilarious. Ellen will trail off into stories that seem random and disconnected, but then cleverly draw the reader back to her point. Author and

206 syndicated columnist, Erma Bombeck, is another early influence to the way I write. I was always intrigued by her choice of titles and her honest and hilarious stories about life as a mom. Examples of her titles are: The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, If

Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? and When you Look Like Your

Passport Photo, It’s Time to Go Home. I also have drawn inspiration from Christian women comedians like Jeanne Robertson, who I saw live in a concert in Dallas, Texas a few years ago. Like Bombeck, the titles to Robertson’s acts intrigued me. Some titles are:

Don’t Go to Vegas without a Baptist and Don’t Bungee Jump Naked. Another more recent influence is Chonda Pierce, author and standup comedian. I love her act, Weird

Things Happen to Me.

Titles of my posts are similar in style and humor to the ones of the women I admire. I go for quirky titles that may take me months to create. Here are a few of the most outrageous titles from the top 10 most popular posts determined by Google analytics: What’s a Lug Nut? (And Other Pertinent Questions), Alien Matters: Keychains,

Bobbleheads, and Refrigerator Magnets, SpongeBob SquarePants to the Rescue! and

Rules of Engagement: Administering the State Assessment and Living to Tell about It. I strive to make my posts entertaining and funny, but then bring home a strong message that is positive and gives people hope. I want to leave my readers with the feelings I have after reading or listening to the women who influenced my writing over the years.

207

Inspirational Tone and Influence

Inspiration is another tone I want to convey to readers. Growing up, I found my own well of inspiration by reading The Reader’s Digest. I enjoyed reading true life stories of people who overcame trials and emerged with an inspirational message of hope and faith. I also find inspiration when I attend woman’s conferences that are sometimes hosted by churches. This is not to be confused with religion or motivational speaking!

Inspirational speakers are strong woman who encourage me and lift up my spirit. They are not there to “pump you up” as if you were in a workout class. These women share personal stories that are funny and are relatable to anyone.

One of my favorite authors and speakers is Priscilla Shirer. I was able to hear her speak at a local woman’s conference. She shared down-to-earth stories of raising three teenagers and the challenges and keeping up with laundry. While some of the stories are humorous, her intended message is one of inspiration and hope. I also enjoy reading

Daily Devotional type books that are short stories that lift my spirits. I wrote a post, God

Winks and Other Serendipitous Moments (2018) based on a devotional book about the little ways God shows us that he is involved in our lives. Sometimes I will post a poem or include inspiration quotes in my posts as well. I want readers to walk away feeling better about themselves and about life. I am not inspired by hell, fire, and brimstone sermons. I am inspired by people who give hope.

208

Confession Reflection: The So What?

The Confession Reflection is a staple of my edublog; reflection questions at the end of each post are intended to be a guide for self-reflection. It is not enough to write a humorous or inspirational story. Without reflection the post is just that...a post. Unless the post sparks change or raises questions, I would not be motivated to write. A few years ago, a teacher stopped by my classroom, and told me how much she looked forward to my posts. I was surprised because I had no idea teachers on my campus were even aware that I had an edublog! She told me how much she liked the Confession Reflection and asked, “Do you write questions for every post?” I answered, “Yes! It is the heartbeat of the blog. It is the so what?”

It is my personal belief that self-reflection is essential for learning and change.

Reflection was a habit I used daily with my students. After a lesson, I would have students turn and talk to a partner and say one thing they would do differently as a result of a lesson. When I was a campus literacy coach, I reflected on lessons as a guide to improve future lessons. It only seemed fitting to make self-reflection a constant feature in my edublog. When collecting artifacts, I found a book my dad had written shortly after his resignation from the church he pastored. I thumbed through his book looking for written discourses patterns similar to mine. At the end of every chapter, my dad had written reflection questions bulleted and in italics identical to the questions in Confession

Reflection! I began to find more of his books and every one of them had reflection questions at the end of a chapter. The importance of self-reflection came from my dad. I

209 had never given any thought to why reflection was so important to me and why I was motivated to include them at the end of every post. I have come to realize how the

Confession Reflection is the heartbeat of my blog. Without it, the words would be nothing more than words.

Summary and Insights

Through analysis of posts, reflexive journaling, and personal memories supported by artifacts, I discovered four themes that influence the message in my edublog. These are (1) The Future: Possibilities in Education; (2) Social Justice: Doing What’s Fair; (3)

The Learning Environment: Everybody Needs a Home, and (4) Religiosity: Shame and

Redemption. I used pictures and reconstructed memories from my childhood to understand childhood events and memories that influenced my writing. I was surprised by the ways political factors that marginalized women were insightful. I had never realized how growing up believing that America needed a “man on the moon” shaped my thinking about what a girl could grow up to do. I could only see myself as a teacher who prepared boys to be astronauts or aerospace engineers. America’s farm strike that my grandfather was a part of was also a political motivating factor. I learned at an early age the importance of an economy that was fair. Gee’s (2017) explanation of the Pareto

Principal, the law of 80/20, helped me to understand the ways edublogging is an equitable way for educators to contribute to the field of education.

Using post analysis, reflexive journals, and artifacts, I identified external factors that influenced the tone of my posts. I discovered that my primary influences have come

210 from female comedians such as Ellen DeGeneres and Erma Bombeck, as well as humorous books published by women whom I think are funny and who inspire me. The titles of my posts are influenced by titles of books with original titles that have a hint of humor like: The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, If Life is a Bowl of

Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? I enjoy creating and naming my posts with similar titles like: Lost in Translation: When Lesson Plans Go Wrong, Fleas in Room

212, and 5 Things Bad Teachers Do Very, Very Well! I had never stop to think about the reasons I enjoy creating original titles for posts that I find humorous and quirky. Now I understand why.

211

CHAPTER IX

REFLECTIONS ON TWITTER AS A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

“Following others is a beginning. Tweeting each other is progress. Learning together is a success” @cybrarymanl, Posted on Twitter

In this chapter, I describe the way my social interactions on Twitter have created a

Community of Practice (CoP). I begin by defining Twitter and explaining in detail how social identities are created and the ways users interact with one another. Next, I define

CoP and describe how the two online affinity spaces, Twitter and Confessions of a

Literacy Coach, are intertwined to create a Professional Learning Community (PLN).

While exploring these interactions, I describe how I have learned to network by forming relationships with Twitter Gatekeepers. These insights add another dimension to my autoethnography because of the way Twitter relationships created a virtual community for me. My findings are supported by screenshots from Twitter and links to related posts.

I conclude with a summary and insights gleaned from these findings

What is Twitter?

In recent years, Twitter has taken social media by storm. Founded in 2006, this microblog has ballooned to over 320 million active users monthly, sending over 500 million tweets each day (Twitter, Inc., 2016). What makes this social media platform unique is that it enables users to create and share their thoughts, ideas, and information without barriers and in real time simply by embedding a “hashtag” or “#” in front of keywords. The 280 character-limit (which includes letters, spaces, and punctuation),

212 keeps tweets, or messages, concise and visually uncluttered as it streams through a “feed” along with tweets using the same hashtag such as #MondayMotivation, #AERA18, and

#Earthquake. Unlike other types of popular social media, the “following” feature makes it possible for Twitter users to respond and compose messages and send tweets to virtually anyone from the President of the United States to their next-door neighbor if each has a

Twitter account. Each user name is preceded with the “@” sign – for example,

@rickwormeli2, @digitalalvermann, and @gcouros. My username is @tamradollar. If the words follows you appear next in the username, direct messages may be sent privately, similar to an email. A notification appears next to a small envelope indicating when a message has been sent.

Twitter users display an avatar, or picture, along with their interests and professional affiliations on a profile page. The user has the option of making their content public or private; however, most Twitter users elect to make their content public.

Accounts are verified with a blue check next to the username if the user associated with the account is famous in a field like politics, entertainment, or education (see Figure 42).

Verified accounts are also given to organizations. Such accounts prevent Twitter users from mistaking parody or false accounts with actual persons.

213

Figure 42. Sample of a Twitter verified account. Because of the power of social networking, Twitter has attracted hundreds of thousands of educators around the world who engage in social networking communities called PLNs. A Twitter PLN is created by “following” like-minded educators in order to exchange working knowledge, share educational resources, and create a sense of community. PLN’s are initiated on Twitter and then are sustained in a myriad of ways including weekly online Twitter chats or face-to-face interactions such as Edcamps.

Chats are identified by using a hashtag i.e. #LitChat, #TMchat, or #NTCEchat and are led by a moderator. Chats take place weekly and typically last one hour.

Twitter as an Affinity Space

Examples of virtual affinity spaces are social media platforms such as Facebook,

Twitter, Pinterest, blogs, and video games. Social media affinity spaces allow individuals to have different levels of participation. Unique to affinity spaces, individuals may apprentice themselves to a group of people who share common interests and practices.

Since individuals use their online secondary Discourse to participate, a person’s race,

214 gender, age, disability, or social class does not have a bearing on the level of his/her participation (Gee, 2017). As a result, online affinity spaces may support individuals who may have been marginalized when interacting in physical spaces. Everyone has a voice.

I stumbled upon Twitter in 2011 while attending a professional development for instructors in my district, called Edcamp. It was my first year in the district as a literacy coach, and my principal strongly encouraged me to attend a full day conference because my technology skills were not up to par with expectations in my district. I knew that administrators in my district held professional twitter accounts, as did most campuses.

For me, joining Twitter was out of necessity and self-preservation rather than by choice.

It was a campus expectation to have a professional Twitter account. During the summer months, away from my classroom, I began to “lurk” and watch others on Twitter. I nervously practiced sending tweets. As my confidence grew, I jumped into Twitter chats when I saw an author I respected or I was intrigued by the chat topic.

In 2014, the technology instructional coach on my campus told me she read my edublog and looked forward to my posts. This surprised me because I didn’t realize people from my district were reading. She offered to help me embed a Twitter feed into my edublog so people could access my feed. The same year I began learning about

Twitter analytics, a free feature, to allow me to track followers including people who

“unfollowed” me. I was surprised to see that people from around the world were following me! Most recently, Twitter analytics confirmed that my followers, which

215 surpasses 9,000 people, are from around the world. The majority are from the United

States (see Figure 43).

Figure 43. Analytical map of Twitter followers.

Twitter Chats as an Online Community of Practice (CoP) Researchers and theorists, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), coined CoPs.

CoPs are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor. A band of musicians who write music together, a group of engineers working on similar problems, or a clique of students who get together after school to participate in a club all comprise CoPs. In a nutshell, CoPs are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly (Wenger, 2007).

In 1998, Wenger extended the concept of CoP to apply to online domains over the internet. As a result, CoPs became more accessible and extended collaborative learning

216 over networks such as email, chat rooms, and blogs. When participants in a CoP interact during Twitter chats on a given topic and/or by following one another, learning happens in communities. The guiding principles of a CoP practice are for knowledge to be presented in an authentic context and for learning to happen through social interaction and collaboration. According to Lave and Wenger (1991), there are three essential components that make up an online CoP: (1) the domain; (2), the community; and (3) the practice. For the purpose of my study, I describe how these components relate to Twitter.

The domain. The domain refers to the virtual space created online and is identified by a shared interest. Members of a domain do not necessarily know each other

(although they may). On Twitter, educational domains are public and open to anyone interested in joining. This may be an organization, a college or university department, a book club, or school district. By virtue of social media, domains are not private and are accessible on the internet for anyone with an account to join

The community. The community is the members who come together online as active participants and build virtual relationships around common interests. For educational purposes, members on Twitter build online communities by following like- minded educators and are called a personal learning network or PLN. Members of a

Twitter PLN stay connected through weekly Twitter chats, back channeling (sending private messages), or by extending the community beyond Twitter by meeting face-to- face at conferences or by using digital communication tools like Skype, Google docs,

Voxer, or Facetime. Members in the Twitter community may not know each other

217 individually, but are brought together by similar interests. Weekly chats are one of the most popular venues for forming PLNs.

The practice. Members of a CoP engage collectively in a common practice surrounding a shared interest or passion. During Twitter chats, members of a PLN come together weekly to engage in a mutual practice of responding to a series of questions about a topic. During Twitter chats, educators practice by sharing their thoughts, beliefs, and ideas, as well as resources such as digital infographics or links to their personal blogsite.

What Twitter Chats Mean to Me

Today, I participate in weekly Twitter chats with my PLN. Chats continue to be a reservoir of innovative ideas, resources, opportunities to collaborate, and avenues to share what I am learning with others. I look forward to weekly connections to my PLN by participating in and moderating weekly educational chats. I only moderate chats by invitation by the person or persons who started the chat. As moderator I choose the topic and design the questions in collaboration with others. Collaboration is a back and forth, give and take process. I have moderated five chats since belonging to a PLN (see Table

16).

218

Table 16 Twitter Chat Topic and Artifacts

Chat Topic Associated Post Artifact

Reading Comprehension Strategies Comprehension Message about Thinking Maps Part 1

Reading Game On! Building Comprehension Comprehension with Video Part 2 Games (2015)

Playful Learning Ready...Set...Play!

English Learners Heart Maps Under Construction: A Lesson on Learning and Relationships

Homework Hack in Acton! (from Hacking Practices Homework)

219

A Surprise Discovery

Anyone who knows me well understands that Twitter was the last thing I wanted to include in a dissertation, especially as a topic for an autoethnography. I did not recognize how I had become a member of a CoP by participating in weekly chats. I had seen Twitter and Confessions of a Literacy Coach as two separate entities. Through ongoing reflection and combing through Twitter data, I discovered how my edublog and

Twitter had a symbiotic relationship, meaning both affinity spaces have a mutually and beneficial relationship.

As moderator, I choose the chat topic based on a post, or I write a post in response to a chat I have moderated; however, I collaborated with other members of my PLN to design the questions. For example, in the chat called #Hacklearning, I chose the topic of

English Learner and collaborated with a member of my PLN through direct messaging through Twitter (see Figure 44).

220

Figure 44. Screenshot of collaboration with PLN. Research by Carpenter and Krutka (2014), found how chats supported relationships when “the elements of resource sharing, networking, and emotional support” are in synch (p. 424). Gee (2017) described these types of interactions within affinity spaces as collective intelligence (pg. 84). The interactions between members of my PLN during the planning phase of Twitter chats and during Twitter chats demonstrate collective intelligence. Furthermore, when posts become a focus of Twitter chats, a new teaching and learning space is created (Gee, 2017) where I am able to connect, learn, and grow within an online CoP (Lave & Wenger, 1991).

221

Finding My Voice with Gatekeepers

As a literacy leader, I have never lost my voice on Twitter. It was there all of the time. What I did manage to do was to build a relationship with Twitter Gatekeepers. My definition of a Twitter Gatekeeper is the person or persons who manage the Twitter account for an entity such as a teacher who has a classroom Twitter account, a district administrator who manages a school district website, or a social media director of a publishing company. It is important to understand that Twitter people operate Twitter, however, there are some Twitter accounts that are called bots which are operated by programmed computers. (I compare Bots to the scam phone calls I receive telling me I need student loan forgiveness, even though I have never taken out a student loan). To build relationships I have to follow and be followed by the Gatekeeper. This relationship is not happenstance; it happens over time.

The key is knowing the Gatekeepers.

Publishing Company Twitter Gatekeepers

In 2013, I created both a classroom account @tamra_dollar and a personal account @tamradollar because of a district mandate. Every teacher on my campus was expected to have a Twitter account. It was not until 2015 that I managed to catch the attention of Twitter Gatekeepers. For example, when I was a reading intervention teacher

I used the reading curriculum Read 180 by Scholastic from my classroom account

@dollar_classroom (see Figure 45). I would frequently send classroom Tweets to both the Read 180 @READ180 and to Scholastic @Scholastic. In time, both READ 180 and

222

Scholastic followed both my classroom and personal accounts. Basically, I learned to network in a virtual affinity space.

Figure 45. Screen shot of classroom tweet. However, although both READ 180 and Scholastic followed me, if I were to send an email or walk into their company headquarters, I would not be recognized. This is because I would not have a relationship with an administrative assistant or the editor.

I recognized the magnitude of my voice on Twitter and subsequent relationship with Gatekeepers as recently as this past summer. I was reading the Newberry Award book, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) by Mildred Taylor for a summer book club.

While reading, I spotted a missing period. I closed my eyes believing that my eyes had played a trick on me. I opened them and did not see the period. I even checked with a friend to make sure I was seeing the page correctly. What could I do? Apart from Twitter

I could do no more than ignore the error, pretend I did not see it, or if I had the patience of Job, I could write a letter to the editor that would most likely be tossed. However,

223 since Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was published by a subsidiary of Scholastic, I had a connection! So I took pictures, added some humor by using a Bitmoji (an animated picture of myself), and sent it through private messenger to @Scholastic.

Less than an hour later, I received a response from the Twitter Gatekeeper through private messenger. The Scholastic Twitter Gatekeeper thanked me and said a notification of the error was going straight to the editor. I may never receive credit, which is fine with me. What was important to me was that the error will be corrected for future generations of readers. I have a similar relationship with the Twitter Gatekeeper of Harper Collins

@HarperCollins publishing company. I was reading the Young Adult fiction book The

Hate U Give (2017) by Angie Thomas and found several grammatical errors. I sent a message using Twitter to the Harper Collins Twitter Gatekeeper with similar results (see

Figure 46).

224

Figure 46. Screenshot of book edit. These relationships are virtual and with a person I will never come across in any other social network. I wondered about other virtual relationships where I have connected with a Twitter Gatekeeper and found many more. However, just because someone follows me and I follow them does not mean there is a relationship! Relationships with

Twitter Gatekeepers happen overtime just as with any relationship.

School Administrator Twitter Gatekeepers

A simple search through my Twitter followers showed that I am followed by a slew of administrators including district superintendents, curriculum directors, principals,

225 and assistant principals. Overtime I have built relationships with some of the Twitter

Gatekeepers. I believe these relationships were formed by participating in weekly Twitter chats and through my Confession of a Literacy Coach posts. I am frequently retweeted when I post what I describe as tweets that challenge the status quo. Tweets that are written in a dominant Discourse, give me an equal voice to individuals to whom I would speak differently if I were to meet them in person. I tweeted out a post challenging the status quo with a photo of a school wall with the phrase “The most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘we’ve always done it this way.’ (see Figure 47).

Figure 47. Screenshot of retweet. I tweeted the photo out because I have noticed how difficult it seems for some educators and educational leaders to change. For example, there are teachers who resist letting students work in groups over working in isolation. The post was originally tweeted by

Lee Araoz @LeeAraoz, Coordinator of Instructional Technology from Long Island New

226

York. Lee is also the Twitter Gatekeeper of the website called the Golden Age of

Education: Highly Effective Tools and Strategies. I have never met @LeeAraoz, but I have a relationship with him on Twitter that was formed during a Twitter chat I participate in weekly. Even though I have never met Lee personally, if I were to run into him at a conference, there would be a connection.

After tweeting out “The most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘we’ve always done it this way,’ to my more than 9,000 followers, I was quickly retweeted by the

Twitter Gatekeepers of 1) a literacy program @eKidz_eu based in Munich, Bavaria; 2) a district ELA high school teacher @Mrs_Gilliland; and 3) the president of the school board @AA147 where I formally worked as a literacy coach. This meant that my profile and tweet were visible to all of their followers and could be viewed on their profile pages.

One of the most noticeable Twitter Gatekeepers who follows me is Wade

Stanford @wadestanford, the superintendent of a large school district near Houston,

Texas. He does not participate in weekly chats, but is a monthly promoter of Confessions of a Literacy Coach. In a recent tweet he promoted my post Ready...Set...Play! (2017)

(see Figure 48).

Figure 48. Screenshot of post retweet by follower.

227

What is notable about Wade’s tweet is that he created a new link using what is called a Bitly, or shortened web address. My original web address for this post is: http://dollarliteracy.blogspot.com/2017/04/readysetplay.html However, Wade purposefully created a new link address that places his profile face on the tweet. In many ways, this is a compliment, speaks of the respect and trust he has for my edublog because he basically has created a new link, and gives me credit. Although the link is different, all of his followers will go to the Confessions of a Literacy Coach home page. As an administrative Twitter Gatekeeper, I have a relationship with Wade. However, if I were to send an application to the district where he leads, I would most likely not be able to get my foot in the door. This is because I do not have a connection to other employees or

Human Resource Gatekeepers. Ironically, I could reach out directly to Wade through

Twitter private messaging and would get an immediate response. Just as in the physical world, relationships with physical Gatekeepers are key.

PLN Twitter Gatekeepers

Within my PLN, I have close connections and routinely network with others. The connections form during weekly Twitter chats and through independent projects both online and offline. For example, I have interacted both face-to-face and through Twitter some members of my PLN. Examples of PLN members who I connect with in both places are other graduate students, professors at my university, and people whom I have presented with at conferences. My Twitter PLN has been nurtured by meeting weekly for a discussion, or chat, around a topic. Face-to-face interactions at my university campus

228 also strengthen my relationships on Twitter. One PLN Gatekeeper is Mark Barnes, creator of the bestselling educational books series Hacking Learning where I contributed to a chapter. The Gatekeepers of the #hacklearning chat are Mark Barnes

@markbarnes19 and Connie Hamilton @conniehamilton. Recently Mark Barnes sent me a video through Twitter expressing his gratitude to me.

(Transcription of video)

Hey Tamra! It’s a beautiful day here in Cleveland and I was doing some things

around the house and trying to get outside, so I was just scrolling through the chat

and saw some of your content and I just wanted to say thank you in this way for a

long time. I appreciate all you’re doing. Your contribution, your insight. What

you do for education for kids, well, I just appreciate you. Have a great Sunday!

I collaborate with Connie Hamilton @Conniehamilton when designing questions for Twitter chats. While I have not met PLN Twitter Gatekeepers, Mark or Connie face to face, collaborating on a book, moderating #hacklearning chats, and interacting through other mediums like Google Hangout, Voxer, and video messaging, have built a professional relationship.

Just as with any profession, being an effective online literacy leader requires that I have the respect and relationship with Twitter Gatekeepers in the physical and virtual affinity space. The relationships I have with Twitter Gatekeepers have strengthened my voice and reached people that would be inaccessible apart from Twitter.

229

Summary and Insights

When I began my autoethnography, I believed the social media sites, Twitter and

Confessions of a Literacy Coach, were two separate entities. However, in the course of my autoethnography, I began to understand the symbiotic relationship between the affinity spaces. When I share links on Twitter to connect to a post I have written, both spaces are supported. When a person visits my edublog, they are able to see my Twitter feed and are invited to “follow me on Twitter.” I became of member of a community of practice (CoP) with members of my professional learning network (PLN) through weekly chats. When I am the moderator of chats, I am collaborating with others to improve educational practices. When I interact with Twitter Gatekeepers, I develop professional relationships as a literacy leader. This epiphany is relevant to my study because I am able to understand how secondary Discourses between two affinity spaces are shared and are not mutually exclusive. Through Twitter chats, I have created an online community where I belong.

230

CHAPTER X

REFLECTIONS ON FINDINGS AND FUTURE IMPLICATIONS

“There is no teaching without learning.” Paulo Freire

In this final chapter, I reflect on educational blogs and literacy leadership. I examine the prospect of further research on edublogs based on recent interactions with two researchers: Dr. James Gee and Dr. Donna Alvermann using the social media sites

Facebook and Twitter. Next, I define Web 2.0 literacies and describe ways these literacies support edublogging and future educational opportunities for collaboration through distant teaching and learning. In addition, I synthesize my new understandings and motivations for using Web 2.0 literacies as they relate to the themes I identified in my studies: The Future: Possibilities in Education and Social Justice: Doing What’s

Fair. I do not reiterate or summarize specific examples of the ways I address Web 2.0 literacies in the titles and contents of my posts.

In the next section, I describe in more detail a synthesis of my new understandings of the ways Heath’s description of the Roadville community is reflected in my edublog. Furthermore, I describe epiphanies, or AHAs, in my reflection on

Roadville and the ways early literacies shaped my online identity. I make clear ties between reading and writing behaviors in the Roadville community that were similar and dissimilar to mine. More importantly, I describe how these early literacy experiences translated to written discourse in my edublog.

231

Next, I use standpoint theory to describe the outside-within perspective I have today on the ways I was marginalized as a female, as a child, and as a woman. I support my new understanding with an example from my edublog. I conclude this chapter and my study with a section titled “Final Thoughts.” I describe how the study has impacted me as an online literacy leader and how I approach Confessions of a Literacy Coach. I purposefully use informal language to close my study to remind me of who I am and that my voice is valued.

Reflections on Educational Blogs

I believe the insights I have personally gleaned from my study may contribute to conversations on online identity construction through edublogging (Rankin, 2001). Given the number of teacher bloggers and educational blogs available, I believe a space for honest and open dialogue is needed to support and encourage new and veteran edubloggers. Efimova and Fiedler (2004) confirmed that an edublog provides its author with “personal space for learning that does not impose a communal learning agenda and learning style. At the same time learners are not alienated and can benefit from a community feedback, validation, and further development of ideas” (p. 493). Paramount to my study is the idea of identity construction and change through edublogging, or educational blogging. However, key to becoming an educational blogger is the understanding of how to construct an online identity. It is my desire for this study to become a catalyst for conversations on identity construction within online spaces.

232

Since the beginning of my study, I have reached out to two experts: Dr. James

Gee and Dr. Donna Alvermann. I reached out to Dr. Gee using Facebook. I hoped he would help me understand how identity could be constructed and exist in social media

(Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest). Before my study, I had accessed Dr. Gee’s blog and felt somewhat confident that he might have an answer to identity construction in a blog site. I have used Dr. Gee’s theory of identity Discourse theory to understand identity in a physical space, such as the example of the biker in the bar. However, I did not know how identity Discourse theory could be applied to identity within my edublog. After reading his book, Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-risk High-tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human, and understanding affinity spaces, I was more confident as I approached my study.

I reached out to Dr. Donna Alvermann using Twitter. She is a researcher and teacher educator with a focus on digital and media literacies, especially as they relate to youth-initiated engagement with texts both in and out of school. Dr. Alvermann's Twitter username is appropriately, @digitalalvermann. I was fortunate to have her follow me on

Twitter! I did not contact her, but I was able to learn from “lurking” in her postings and interactions on Twitter. I discovered that Dr. Alvermann has shifted her focus to social media and blogging. I found her edublog on her professional web page: BECOMING

3LECTRIC: A journey beyond and between the planes of “reality” – a journey of

Becoming. I found it ironic that her most recent post is titled: The many phases of dissertation revision http://www.becoming3lectric.com/blog/. Another educational blog I

233 have accessed, the official blog of the U.S. Department of Education https://blog.ed.gov/, encouraged me that educational blogs are here to stay.

As an online literacy leader, I want to help educators navigate the ever-changing landscape of new literacies (New London Group, 1996), especially in terms of educational blogs. It is my belief that change begins with a broader definition of what reading is and how it looks in school. In fact, the International Literacy Association

(ILA), formally called the International Reading Association (IRA), recognized the social implications and purposes of reading. On their website they situated reading within a social context, saying “The ability to READ, WRITE, and COMMUNICATE connects people and empowers them to achieve things they never thought possible.”

https://literacyworldwide.org/. My theoretical perspective of the act and purposes of reading clearly align with Gee’s theory of an edublogs as “teaching and learning spaces

(Gee, 2017). I want to use my global platform to encourage and support teachers who want to learn to blog.

Reflections on Web 2.0 Literacies

Confessions of a Literacy Coach and Twitter have given me a global platform to share my beliefs with others. When readers comment on my posts, I am able to see the impact my posts have far beyond what I could have imagined. The little girl who told stories to an invisible audience has grown up to become a literacy leader to educators from around the world. Had it not been for Web 2.0 literacies, my stories could not be told further than a piece of paper or digital document would allow. (I learned about Web

234

2.0 literacies at a reading conference. The keynote speaker, Frank Serafini, captured my attention on the ways Web 2.0 literacies could support reading, specifically using the reading workshop teaching model).

What are Web 2.0 literacies? Web 2.0 literacies are digital literacies that allow users to interact, collaborate, and generate new content within a virtual community. Blogs are an example of a Web 2.0 literacy. Web 2.0 literacies afford the author of the document and the audience to interact with both the text and each other to learn from one another (see Figure 49). Web 2.0 literacies align with Gee’s (2017) definition of affinity spaces as teaching and learning spaces. Teachers move from content sharers to facilitators and co-learners with their students.

Figure 49. Web 2.0 tools vs. content sharing tools. I foresee a shift happening in education as our schools and universities engage in distance learning instead of being limited to a physical setting. Examples of Web 2.0 literacies are blogs, social networks, and video sharing sites like YouTube, wikis, Google

235 documents, and audio/visual live applications like Google Hangouts, Zoom, Skype, and

FaceTime. Many sites and applications are free and accessible to any student regardless of income. These new literacies support collaboration efforts without limitations in regards to a physical space or place. Today there are a plethora of Web 2.0 tools free to support distance learning and collaboration in real time between the instructor and student, as well as student to student.

Although blogging is one of many Web 2.0 literacies, I believe this application would be beneficial for educators, like myself, who did not grow up with the academic

Discourse expected in higher education. A paradigm shift to value educational blogging would support educators and aspiring educators in finding their voice in a competitive publication field. Gee (2017) argued that online affinity spaces, like edublogging, helped make publishing equitable for the majority of teachers who are doing new things or old things in new ways.

Reflection on Roadville and Early Literacies

Throughout my study, I drew comparisons between my childhood community and upbringing to the community of Roadville (Heath, 1983). I chose to include this comparison based on a collaborative research project while taking a course on Critical

Literacy and Diversity. One of our required texts was Way with Words: Language, Life, and Works in Communities and Classrooms by Shirley Brice Heath (1983). My group was assigned to describe the home literacies and practices of the children from the

Roadville community. The Roadville community was a white, working class community

236 of families in the Piedmont Carolinas. As I began studying Roadville, I saw parallels between my own family customs and traditions. This activity planted a seed inside of me to one day explore the comparisons in more depth. I had no idea just how similar my childhood compared to the children of Roadville.

In order to compare my early childhood literacies and connections to the written discourse in my edublog, I used standpoint theory as a lens. As stated in my methods section, who I am is a product of all of my lived experiences (Behar, 1993). As an insider, I am the only one who is able to identify similar and dissimilar features using strong objectivity. I used identity Discourse theory (Gee, 2015) to describe the ways my primary and secondary Discourses (to include lower case “d” discourse for written text) shaped the types of discourses in my individual posts. While looking at my own emergent literacies, it is evident that I understood writing was a way of sending a message. I learned that letters and drawings sent a message that made sense.

Similar to children in Roadville, I attempted to write from right to left and in a straight line. The underlined words for TAMRA, PAPA, and MAMA and the backwards candy cane like figures at the bottom of my letter are an example (see Figure 50).

Similarly to Roadville community, notebook paper was a common medium for writing letters using a pen or pencil. My parents would write a letter on the opposite side to model for me the directionality of print. This surprised me because in many ways I learned the basic concepts of print in a non-traditional way. As I grew older, I drew pictures to add to my letters, just as my Bible had illustrations. I wrote letters using

237 markings that resembled letters before I drew pictures. Most importantly, I learned that my letters had the ability to transcend a physical place in the same way my edublog is read globally. If it had not been for systematically analyzing my early literacies, I would not have recognized the ways letter writing contributed to my beliefs today.

Figure 50. Sample writing with pen and straight lines. Similar to the Roadville community, conversations (both spoken and written) used informal language or implicit language. There was an expectation for the sender and the reader to understand the hidden nuances in the message. However, I have learned in my graduate studies that the language of school is explicit. Like the children in Roadville, the written and spoken language that surrounded me was implicit. An analysis of five years of posts showed that I used implicit language throughout my posts as if I were

238 writing to a friend. One example is my use of family colloquialisms, or sayings in written discourse. In fact, Heath noted that residents of Roadville referred to memos or brief messages as “chicken-scratchings” (p. 219) which is an exact phase I use in my edublog.

There were some differences to the children of Roadville. I did not have a bedtime routine of being read to. My brother had books read to him when was two years old and older. I was never read to before bed. This is not to blame my parents because this is most likely how they were raised! Also, babies born to the Roadville community came home to a furnished nursery with decorations. My parents were too poor to buy any furniture for themselves, much less a new baby. My first bed was a dresser drawer and I was carried in a cardboard box. However, both of my brothers did have colorful nurseries that were decorated because my parents were able to afford these items.

Like children in Roadville, I was raised in a fundamentalist church and taught right from wrong. The pastor, who also happened to be my dad, was respected as the authority in the community. As a child, I was taught to sit quietly like a young lady, pay attention to adults, and to not question authority. Learning the books of the Bible was as important (or more so) than learning my A, B, C’s. Just as children sing the A, B, C song,

I learned my books of the Bible (both Old and New Testament) by singing to the tune of the religious hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

As with the children of Roadville, I was taught to believe the literal interpretation of the Bible. Except for parables, the Bible was to be taken literally. Adding to or taking away from God’s word was considered a sin. Like the children in Roadville, children’s

239 conversations about the Bible were well monitored. Questions that could not be answered by pointing to a Bible verse were discouraged. My Sunday school teachers did not welcome my questions, “How did Noah get ladybugs onto the Ark?” or “How did Noah keep the birds from eating the worms?” My parents and Sunday school teachers discouraged my hypothetical questions and I eventually learned to stop asking questions.

This may be why I describe myself on Twitter by saying "I'm always asking, what if?"

Similarly to Roadville, I grew up immersed in a culture of storytelling at church and within my family. A good story told by adults often involved telling on themselves.

Everyone around the table would get a good laugh. I did not grow up hearing stories read to me from a book. Stories were told to me sitting on the lap of an adult, at the Sunday dinner table, listening to my Sunday school teacher, or while visiting my grandparents.

Like the children in Roadville, I would wait until I was invited to tell stories to an adult, but I never initiated storytelling on my own. For example, I would be told, “Tam, tell

Grannie Annie about what you learned in Sunday school.” I was corrected if I ventured off too far from what actually happened. I could write pages describing the similarities of being a girl. By all accounts, I could have been a child living in Roadville!

These similarities and differences are critical to understanding how my online identity was formed. It also explains to me why I struggled with understanding the language of school, or explicit texts. As a literacy coach, I created multimodal texts to support the intended message of my posts instead of using the language of school typical in academic journals or curriculum guides. For example, I was able to include pictures of

240 work samples and videos to support comprehension for someone who needed a context.

When I participated in teaching a summer literacy institute, I included photographs of the

Heart Maps we used. I also used a picture of the book, Heart Maps: Helping Students

Create and Craft Authentic Writing (2016) by Georgia Heard. I could have written descriptions or used an APA citation of the Heart Map text, but I chose to make the message visual.

My study aligned with Flick’s (2014) description of autoethnography as a way to

“systematically analyze the researcher's personal experiences in order to understand social and cultural experiences” (p. 534). I did this by systematically analyzing my posts using discourse analysis to identify the ways early literacies shaped how I wrote. I also analyzed my primary Discourse as a way to understand how cultural experienced shaped my online identity. As the researcher (autoethnographer), I described and systematically analyzed (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand my cultural experiences (ethnos) (Ellis, 2004).

Reflections on Autoethnography

One of the purposes for conducting an autoethnography was because I wanted to contribute to a wealth of scholarly papers that incorporate creative and innovative ways to conduct and report research. As I defined early in my study, literacy is “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, compute, and communicate using visual, audible, and digital materials across disciplines and in any context” (ILA). Gee (2015) argued that literacy is “more than the ability to read and write” but should be defined in social terms

241

(p. 30). Likewise, a characteristic of being a literacy leader is to model new literacies, which is what my dissertation will do. For example, I was able to share data using word clouds created with the free web application Wordle.net. This is a far cry from traditional data tables. Most recently International Literacy Association (ILA) posted on their

Twitter account at @ILAToday, “Teaching students how to weave a story around data visualizations is a great way to help them translate concepts learned through both data interpretation and the writing process” (Twitter, 2018). As our classrooms become more and more diverse and language barriers become more pronounced, visual data representation and narratives would be readily accessible.

The process has been difficult as well. I hit roadblocks at the proposal stage because I did not understand how or what an autoethnography looked like at the dissertation level. I spent a semester searching for mentor autoethnographies. I read books on autoethnography which left me more confused. This is because I did not understand how many different types of autoethnographies existed. Another roadblock was the tension I felt internally to make my research explicit and at the same time stay true to the narrative and let the story be the data. I solved this quandary by beginning and ending every chapter using formal (explicit) discourse. The body of each chapter read like a story using informal or implicit language.

My experience using autoethnography was both a personal and professional risk.

On a personal level, I had to go into the darkest crevices of my soul as I explored memories associated with my posts. The memories dredged up were painful, but there

242 was also a healing element through writing (Gee, 2017). On a professional level, autoethnography was a risk because it challenged canonical ways of conducting research.

However, as a literacy leader I have a natural tendency to lead and take risks. I am willing to venture out and clear the rocky pathways if I know my efforts will pave the way for others to come after me.

Reflection on Memory

During the course of my study on primary Discourses, a memory returned to me after my adoptive brother’s passing. I was telling my mom about portions of her book I had referenced. I do not remember prior conversations about Brad’s death. As we talked, it was like light penetrated a part of my brain. For the first time since my brother's death,

I remembered a church library built in Brad’s memory. It was called the Richard Bradly

Memorial Library. I had heard stories of the library and had seen pictures but did not have the memory myself. Today, I can vividly remember the smell of paint, book- shelves, and carpet added to a room adjacent to the church sanctuary. I recall a large framed picture of Brad hanging in the library. He is wearing a light blue outfit, sitting up and holding a blue and red ball, but that is all I remember.

During a comparison of childhood literacies to Roadville, another memory returned of my mom reading books to my brother Rod before bedtime when he was two or three years old. Similarly, Roadville parents routinely read to their children before bedtime. Memories of reading what I called “baby books” to Rod are returning as well.

However, I have no memory of anyone reading to me before bed. I am not a

243 psychologist or have any training in psychology, but I am aware of the power of our mind to block painful memories. I am hopeful that in the coming weeks, months, and years I will begin to recover memories I lost after my brother passed away.

As I reflected on these new memories, I noted a variable that may have triggered memories beyond my study. I have a grandson who is terminally ill and is the same age as my brother Brad when he passed away when I was a child. My grandson also has a big sister who loves him very much and does not understand the concepts of death, as with any child her age. When I was analyzing posts and writing in my reflective journal, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room unsure if my grandson would survive surgery or not. I am certain that these factors contributed to my emotional state and heightened my sensitivity concerning the loss of my brother.

I am hopeful that the memories I have may return some day. Maybe this is why

Holocaust survivor and author Corrie Ten Boom has such a special place in my heart. I remember the story she told of her father asking her to carry a heavy suitcase filled with watches and other items off the train for him. She pulled and tugged, but she was unable to lift it off the floor of the train. In response, her father explained how some knowledge was too heavy for a small child. When she grew older, she would be able to bear it, but not then. I have never forgotten the truth behind her words.

Reflection on the Outsider-Within: Female Oppression

According to Sandra Harding, a researcher’s lived experiences will be a lens through which they view the world, and subsequently their research. She uses the term

244 strong objectivity to explain how research starting from the lives of women has stronger objectivity because it takes into account the researcher’s bias, which can never be removed (Harding, 2005). The strong objectivity I bring to this study emerged during my examination of how I was marginalized during the Race to Space years and is based on standpoint theory. Harding, used the term “outsider-within” to describe ways women could use their marginalized position to change power relations (Harding, 1993, 1998,

2004). Harding argued that only marginalized individuals, also called insiders, are able to recognize the patterns and behavior of the white, middle-class men who were the group in power. Therefore, only women, having both an outsider's and insider’s perspective, could create change from the inside-out. I am beginning to realize that my edublog, written from the outsider and insider perspective, promotes change from inside out.

During analysis of posts, I ran across a post in draft form titled, Why I Blame My

Second Grade Teacher (2013). The post was never published because it never felt completed even though I grappled with it for years. In the final paragraph I wrote:

Well, today I still have a driving passion for shaping today's learners to become

world leaders and problem solvers. Just as during the "Race to Space" years, our

nation needs schools and fresh new leaders who are equipped to solve problems

to save our planet and our economy, and to be leaders in our community. I hope

that someday, a student will blame me for teaching them to dream big!

While the post entry sounds empowering, it really is not. As I reflected on the post, I was comparing myself to my second-grade teacher who could only imagine going

245 to space. Society limited her to a job of teaching boys to grow up to be astronauts, or aerospace engineers, or even the president of the United States! I became irritated because for the first time I recognized the political, cultural, and social barriers for girls from my generation. Unlike boys, I could only see myself growing up to be a teacher who taught boys to “dream big.” The blinders fell from my eyes. For the first time, I saw myself as marginalized because of my gender, bound by social and cultural norms over which I had no control. As I reread the post today, I asked, “Why not me?

Final Thoughts

I have successfully written a highly personalized description of my journey to understand my online identity as a literacy leader as reflected in my edublog, Confessions of a Literacy Coach. But my study does not end here. I will continue to explore ways I grow and change in the years to come. In fact, I have already noticed changes in the topics and the ways I approach writing since beginning my autoethnography. For example, my most recent post to date, Are You an Educational Hoarder? 5 End-of-Year

Tips to Declutter Your Classroom (2018) was not a story. I wrote the post solely through the standpoint, or point of view, of a literacy coach. My focus was on the learning environment (which is one of my internal motivations). I did not think twice about coining my own term “educational hoarder” when I was not able to find the right word. I have never done this before. (I wonder if this is a subtle shift of writing from a non- dominant Discourse to a dominant Discourse). I also did not rack my brain to find a story to write about or include a “not-so-forgettable” experience in the classroom. As an

246 insider, I know this is because I recognized the importance of evolving and changing.

This is not to say I will abandon stories! I will always be a storyteller at heart! However, I am not boxed into telling stories or including backstories in every post.

In 2018, I began including Bitmojis, comical picture representations of myself to reflect my personality (see Figure 51). I am confident I will continue to share my stories and “give my two cents worth if people will listen.” And most certainly, my sense of humor will remain intact.

Figure 51. Bitmoji sample.

My autoethnography has been a journey of exploration and self-discovery of the ways people, places, and events have contributed to my online identity construction and change as reflected in my edublog, Confessions of a Literacy Coach, http://dollarliteracy.blogspot.com/. I have discovered that my online identity as a literacy leader is not defined by a hyperlink, a webpage, an avatar, or picture representation of

247 myself. Rather I am a real person who interacts with real people, in a real place, and in real time. My voice extends far beyond the four walls of a school. The little girl who spent hours telling stories to her invisible classroom has now become a global literacy leader who has a voice that is heard around the world.

248

REFERENCES

Adams, T. E. (2015). Autoethnography understanding qualitative research. England,

UK: Oxford: University Press.

Adams, T. E. & Jones, S. (2011). Telling stories: Reflexivity, queer theory, and

autoethnography. Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies, 11(2), 108-116.

Adams, T. E., Jones, S. H., & Ellis, C. (2015). Autoethnography: Understanding

qualitative research. England, UK: Oxford University Press.

Alaniz, C. (2018) Librarian in Cute Shoes (Blog). Retrieved from

https://librarianincuteshoes.blogspot.com/

Allbon, C. (2012). Down the rabbit hole – curiouser and curiouser: Using

autoethnography as a mode of writing to re-call, re-tell and re-veal bodily

embodiment as self-reflexive inquiry. Journal of Organizational Ethnography,

1(1), 62-71.

Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography,

35(4), 373-394.

Anderson, T., & Kanuka, H. (2003). E-research: Methods, strategies, and issues. Boston,

MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Alvermann, D. (2017, June 13). The many phases of dissertation revision. (Blog post).

Retrieved from http://www.becoming3lectric.com/blog/

249

Atkinson, P. (1997). Narrative turn or blind alley? Qualitative Health Research, 7(3),

325-344.

Baird, J. R, Fensham, P. J., Gunstone, R. F, & White, R. T. (1991). The importance of

reflection in improving science teaching and learning. Journal of Research in

Science Teaching 28(2), 163-182.

Behar, R. (1993). Women writing culture: Another telling of the story of American

anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 13(4), 307-325.

Bochner, A. & Elllis, C. (1992). Personal narrative as a social approach to interpersonal

communication. Communication Theory, 2, 165-172.

Bochner, A. & Ellis, C. (1996). Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative

writing. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

Bochner, A., & Ellis, C. (2002). Ethnographically speaking: Autoethnography, literature,

aesthetics. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

Bocher, A., & Ellis, C. (2016). Evocative Authoethnography: Writing lives and telling

stories. New York, NY: Routledge Press.

Bryman, A. (2004). Social research methods. Oxford University Press.

Butt, R., & Raymond, D. (1989). Studying the nature and development of teachers’

knowledge using collaborative autobiography, International Journal of

Educational Research, 13(4), 403-419.

250

Burke, P. (1985). Teacher’s career stages and patterns of attitudes toward teaching

behaviors. Education, 105(3), 240-248.

Carpenter, J. P. & Krutka, D. G. (2014) How and why educators use twitter: A survey of

the field, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 46(4), 414-434.

Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Cole, A. (1990). Personal theories of teaching: Development in the formative years.

Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 36(3), 203-222.

Connelly, F., & Clandinin, D. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry.

Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2-14.

Coulter, G. & Ray, B. (2008). Reflective practices among language arts teachers: The use

of weblogs. Technology and Teacher Education, 8(1), 6-26.

Creswell, J. (2013). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods

approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Crossland, H. (1998). From pieces to peace. Little Rock, AR: Journey Press.

Crow, N. (1987). Socialization within a teacher education program: A case study.

University of Utah.

Darling-Hammond, L., Wei, R., Andree, A., Richardson, N., & Orphanos, S. (2009).

Professional learning in the learning profession: A status report on teacher

development in the United States and abroad. Washington, DC: National Staff

Development Council.

251

Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York,

NY: Routledge Press.

Delpit, L. (1998). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people's children. Harvard Educational Review, 58(3), 280-296.

Denzin, N. (2006). Analytic autoethnography, or déjà vu all over again. Journal of

Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4). 419-428.

Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. (2000). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative

research. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Publications.

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the

educative process. New York, NY: Heath and Company.

Dollar, T. (2018). Confessions of a literacy coach (Blog). Retrieved from

http://dollarliteracy.blogspot.com/

Dollar, T. (2015, June 22). Environment matters in creating confident writers: A pledge

to my students (Blog post). Retrieved from

https://writerswhocare.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/environment-matters-in-

creating-confident-writers-a-pledge-to-students/

Duncan, M. (2004). Autoethnography: Critical appreciation of an emerging art.

International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 3(4), 1-14.

252

Echevarria, J. Short, D., & Powers, K. (2006). School reform and standards-based

education: An instructional model for English language learners. Journal of

Educational Research, 99(4), 195-2010.

Efimova, L., & Fiedler, S. (2004). Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks. Web

Based Communities, Lisbon, Portugal: IADIS Press.

Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography.

Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Ellis, C., Adams, T., & Bochner, A. (2013). Autoethnography: An overview. Historische

Socialforschung, 36(4), 273-290.

Ellis, C. & Bochner, A. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity:

Researcher as subject. In N. Denzin & Lincoln (Eds.). The Handbook of

Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Ellis, C. & Bochner, A. (2016). Evocative autoethnography: Writing lives and telling

stories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Echevarria, J., Vogt, M., & Short, K. (2012). Making content comprehensible for English

learners: The SIOP model. London, UK: Pearson Publication.

Irvine, J. (2001). Style as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic

differentiation. In P. Eckert & J. Rickford (Eds.), Styles and Sociolinguistic

Variation (pp. 21-43). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Flick, U. (2014). An introduction to qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Publications.

253

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum.

Fuller, F. (1969). Concerns of teachers: A developmental study of teacher concerns

across time. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational

Research Association, Boston, MA.

Fuller, F, & Brown, O. (1975). Becoming a teacher. In K. Ryan (Ed.), Teacher

Education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling.

New York, NY: Routledge.

Gee, J. P. (2014). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces in the age of mythology.

Today’s Schools, 215-232.

Gee, J. P. (2015). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (5th ed.). New

York: NY. Routledge.

Gee, J. P. (2017) Teaching, learning, literacy in our high-risk high-teach world: A

framework for becoming human, Teacher’s College Press.

Gergen, K. J. (1991). The saturated self: Dilemmas of Identity in contemporary life. New

York, NY: Basic Books.

Greenleaf, D., Jimenez, R. & Roller, C. (2002). Reclaiming secondary reading

interventions. Reading Research Quarterly, 37(4), 484-496.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the

privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(13), 575–599.

254

Harding, S. (1993). Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is “strong objectivity”?

Feminist Epistemologies, New York, NY: Routledge

Harding, S. (1998). Is science multicultural? Postcolonialisms, feminisms, and

epistemology. Bloomington, IN: University Press.

Harding, S. (2004). The feminist standpoint theory reader. New York, NY: Routledge.

Harding, S. (2005). Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is “strong objectivity?”

Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

Hartsock, N. (1997). Feminist standpoint theory revisited: Truth or justice? Signs, 22(2),

367-374.

Heath, S. (1983). Ways with words: Language life and work in communities and

classrooms. Cambridge University Press.

Holt-Reynolds, D. (1992). Personal history-based beliefs as relevant prior knowledge in

course work. American Educational Research Journal, 29(2), 325-349.

Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

International Literacy Association (n.d.) retrieved from

https://www/literacyworldwide.org

Irvine, J. (2001). ‘Style’ as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic

differentiation in P. Ecker and John Rickford, eds., Style and Sociolinguistic

Variation. University Press. pp. 21-43.

255

Jones, S. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. The Sage Handbook of

Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Katz, L. (1972). Developmental Stages of preschool teachers. The Elementary School

Journal, 73(1), 50-54.

Knowles, J. (1992). Models for understanding pre-service and beginning teachers’

biographies. Studying teachers’ lives. New York, NY: College Press.

Kokushkin, M. (2014). Standpoint theory is dead, long live standpoint theory! Why

standpoint thinking should be embraced by scholars who do not identify as

feminists? Journal of Arts and Humanities, 3(7), 8-20.

Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of

Pennsylvania. Press.

Lather, P. (2006). Paradigm proliferation as a good thing to think with: teaching research

in education as a wild profusion. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in

Education 19(1), 35-57.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LeCompte, M., & Schensul, J. (1999). Designing and conducting ethnographic

research. London: Alta Mira Press.

Leu, D. (2000). Literacy and technology: Deistic consequences for literacy education in

an information age. Handbook of Reading Research. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

256

Leu, D., Corio, J. & Cammack, D., (2004). Toward a theory of new literacies emerging

from the internet and other IT. Theoretical models and process of reading (5th ed.)

Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Lincoln, Y, & Guba, E. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. London, UK: Sage Publications.

Littlejohn, S., & Foss, K. (2005). Theories of human communication (8th ed.) Belmont,

CA: Wadsworth Press.

Luehmann, A., & Tinelli, L. (2008). Teacher professional identity development with

social networking technologies: Learning reform through blogging. Educational

Media International, 45(4), 323-333.

Lyons, C. (2002). Becoming an effective literacy coach. Learning from teaching in

literacy education: New perspectives on professional development. Portsmouth,

NH: Heinemann.

Mairs, N. (2008). Trying truth, Truth in Nonfiction Essays, 89-92.

Mantzavinos, C., "Hermeneutics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter

2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Retrieved from

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/hermeneutics/

Martin, P., Reynolds, J. & Keith, S. (2001). Gender bias and feminist consciousness

among judges and attorneys: A standpoint theory analysis. Signs, 27(3), 665-701.

Maxwell, J. (2012). Qualitative research design. An interactive approach. Thousand

Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

257

Meyerowitz, J. (1994). Not June Cleaver, women and gender in postwar America.

Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Merriam, S. (2009). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. San

Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Mitra, A. & Cohen, E. (1999). Doing internet research: critical issues and methods for

examining the net. London, UK: Sage Publications.

Mohanty, C. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing

solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Morse, J. (1994). Emerging from the data: The cognitive processes of analysis in

qualitative inquiry. Critical Issues in Qualitative Research Methods, 23-43.

Muncey, T. (2005). Doing autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative

Methods, 4(1), 69-86.

National Council of Teacher Quality (NCTQ) (n.d.) Retrieved from

Neuman, W. L. (1994). Social research methods: Qualitative and quantitative

approaches. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

New London Group (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.

Harvard Educational Review, 66 (1), 60 – 92.

Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms. Doing Feminist

Research. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

258

Pearson, P., & Hoffman, J. (2011). Principles of effective reading instruction. Rebuilding

the foundation: Effective reading instruction for 21st century literacy.

Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: how the mind creates language. New York, NY:

William Marrow.

Rankin, E. (2001). The work of writing: Insights and strategies for academics and

professionals. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Raudenbush, S. (1994). Random effects models. The handbook of research synthesis.

New York, NY: Sage Publications.

Renyi, J. (1998). Building learning into the teaching job. Educational Leadership 55(5),

70-74.

Rodesiler, L. (2017). Sustained blogging about teaching: Instructional methods that

support online participation as professional. Tech Trends, 61(4). 349-354.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1969). Towards a transactional theory of reading. Journal of Literacy

Research 1(1), 31-49.

Santa, C. M. (2006). A vision for adolescent literacy: Ours or theirs? Journal of

adolescent & Adult literacy, 49(6), 466-476.

Shank, G. (2002). Qualitative research: A personal skills approach. Upper Saddle River,

NJ: Prentice Hall.

259

Short, K. G. (2009). Critically reading the word and the world: Building intercultural

understanding through literatures. Book bird: A Journal of International

Children’s Literature, 478(2), 1-10.

Sparks, A. (2000). Autoethnography and narratives of self: Reflections on criteria in

action. Sociology of Sports Journal, 17(1), 21-43.

Sprague, J. (2001). Against epistemological chasms: The science question in feminism

revisited: Structured knowledge and strategic methodology. Signs 26(2), 527-536.

Spry, T. (2001). Performing autoethnography: An embodied methodological praxis.

Qualitative Inquiry, 7(6), 706-732.

Tolich, M. (2004). Internal confidentiality assurances inform relational informants.

Qualitative Sociology, 27(1), 101-106.

Tomkins, J. (1996). A life in school: What the teacher learned. Redding, MA: Perseus

Books.

Twitter Incorporated (2016). Retrieved from

https://about.twitter.com/en_us/company.html

Wall, S. (2006). An autoethnography on learning about autoethnography. International

Journal of Qualitative Methods 5(2), 1-12.

Watts, H. (1980). Starting out, moving on, running ahead or how the teachers’ center can

attend to stages in teachers’ development. National Institute of Education,

Washington, D.C.

260

Wolcott, H. (1991). Perspective and the acquisition of culture. Anthropology and

Education Quarterly, 22(3), 251-273.

Yuen, D. G. (2011). Towards a framework for educational affordances of blogs.

Computers & Education, 56(2), 441-451.

261

Appendix A

Autobiographical Timeline

262

Autoethnography timeline 2013-2014 (Beginning June 2013)

Literacy position Blogposts with links

1. first year teacher N/A

2. special education teacher SpongeBob SquarePants to the Rescue! To My Principal....I Must Confess! th 3. 6 grade ELA and SS co-teacher Lost in Translation

4. creative writing teacher N/A

5. literacy coach (campus) How I Found My Genius! Creating Global Citizens in a Digital Age 6. reading interventionist (campus) N/A 7. sheltered ELAR teacher/high school N/A ESL summer school teacher 8. District level roles and leadership (i.e. N/A DEIC; curriculum writer; evaluation committee) 9. Reading doctoral student; adjunct N/A instructor (Dept. of Reading). 10. ESL literacy teacher; Reading doctoral N/A candidate; ELLevate research assistant (present day) Accidentally on Purpose @edcampHome Other

263

Autoethnography timeline 2014-2015

Literacy position Blogposts with links

1. first year teacher N/A

2. special education teacher The Butterfly Effect (1)

3. 6th grade ELA and SS co-teacher N/A

4. creative writing teacher N/A

5. literacy coach (campus) How Not to Be A Grinch During The Holiday Season (2nd publication) 5 Things Bad Teachers Do Very, Very Well! Creating a New Structure to Grow 21st Century Lear... How to Keep Your Sanity and Teach Kids Simultaneously... 6. reading interventionist (campus) Paint By Number and Run! A Colt Named Carl 7. sheltered ELAR teacher/high school N/A ESL summer school teacher 8. District level roles and leadership (i.e. The Butterfly Effect (2) DEIC; curriculum writer; evaluation committee) 9. Reading doctoral student; candidate N/A adjunct instructor (Dept. of Reading). 10. ESL literacy teacher; research assistant N/A (present day) A Thanksgiving Tribute to Charles Other Schultz Christmas in the Great Outdoors! Who Moved My Cheese?

264

Autoethnography timeline 2015-2016

Literacy position Blogposts with links

1. first year teacher Fleas in Room 212! (2nd publication)

2. special education teacher N/A

3. 6th grade ELA and SS co-teacher N/A

4. creative writing teacher Building Creative and Confident 21st

Century Write... 5. literacy coach (campus) How to Not Be a Grinch This Holiday Season What's a Lug Nut? (And Other Pertinent Questions) Message about #TMchat (Thinking Maps) Chat 6. reading interventionist (campus) The Importance of Classroom Environment: Lessons f...

7. sheltered ELAR teacher/high school ESL The Art of Speaking Texan summer school teacher 8. District level roles and leadership (i.e. Rules of Engagement: Administering

DEIC; curriculum writer; evaluation State Assessment... committee) 9. Reading doctoral student; candidate; The Ghost Plant and Other adjunct instructor (Dept. of Reading). (Potentially) Fateful Ta... Game On! Building Comprehension with Video Games 10. ESL literacy teacher; ELLevate research assistant (present day) Other Alien Matters: Keychains, Bobble Heads, and Refrigerator. Secrets from the Crypt Message about #TMchat (Thinking Maps) Chat

265

Autoethnography timeline 2016-2017

Literacy position Blogposts with links

1. first year teacher N/A

2. special education teacher N/A

3. 6th grade ELA and SS co-teacher N/A

4. creative writing teacher N/A 5. literacy coach (campus) 5 Safeguards to Grinch Proof Your Classroom this H... Emoji, Selfies, and Memes: Innocuous Terms in Toda... How to Survive the Dog Days of Summer What's in a Name? To My Principal...I Must Confess (2nd updated) 6. reading interventionist (campus) N/A 7. sheltered ELAR teacher/high school N/A ESL summer school teacher 8. District level roles and leadership (i.e. N/A DEIC; curriculum writer; evaluation committee) 9. Reading doctoral student; candidate; "This I Believe" Experimental Study adjunct instructor (Dept. of Reading). Summer Slide Is No Walk in the Park No More Quiet Game: Inviting Talk into the Element... Conference Burnout: Reviving Educators in a Most "... 10. ESL literacy teacher research assistant N/A (present day) Other Hack in Action: An Excerpt from Hacking Homework Merry Christmas in July! Fostering Global-Mindedness in a (Seemingly) Linea...

266

Autoethnography timeline 2017-2018

Literacy position Blogposts with links

1. first year teacher N/A

2. special education teacher N/A

3. 6th grade ELA and SS co-teacher N/A

4. creative writing teacher NaNoWriMo: A Teacher's Best Kept Secret

to Inspire...

5. literacy coach (campus) 5 Things Bad Teachers Do Very, Very Well and New T... The Future is Calling: Are We Listening? A Teacher's Summer Tale: The Trade Secrets to Creating. How to Keep Your Sanity and Teach Kids Simultaneous... 6. reading interventionist (campus) Ready...Set...Play! Lost in Translation: When Lesson Plans Go Wrong 7. sheltered ELAR teacher/high school How to Not Beat a Dead Horse when the Sky

ESL summer school teacher Continuo... 8. District level roles and leadership N/A (i.e. DEIC; curriculum writer; evaluation committee) 9. Reading doctoral student; adjunct Literacy in the New Millennium: Finding a instructor (Dept. of Reading). Balance ... 5 Post-Holiday Strategies to Thwart the Infamous T... 10. ESL literacy teacher; Reading Heart Maps under Construction: A Lesson

doctoral candidate; research assistant on Learning... (present day) Other Explaining the Unexplainable to Kids

267

Appendix B Table of Leadership Discourses

268

Posts 2013 Author Practitioner Presenter Researcher Student To My Principal I X Must Confess Why I Blame My X Second Grade Teacher Accidentally on X Purpose SpongeBob X Squarepants to the Rescue! Creating Global X Citizens in a Digital Age Fleas in Room 212 X How I Found My X Genius Lost in Translation X How to Bully Proof X Your Campus

269

Posts 2014 Author Practitioner Presenter Researcher Student Alien Matters X The Butterfly Effect X A Colt Named Carl X X Deep in the Heart of X Texas How to Keep Your X Sanity and Teach Kids Simultaneously Who Moved My X Cheese? Paint by Number X and Run! The Ghost Plant and X X other (Potentially) Fateful Tales Creating a New X X Structure to Grow 21st Century Learners Christmas in the X Great Outdoors 5 Things Bad X Teachers do Very, Very Well A Thanksgiving X Tribute to Charles Schultz

270

Posts 2015 Author Practitioner Presenter Researcher Student Building Creative and X X Confident 21st Century Writers Secrets from the Crypt X X Rules of Engagement: X Administering State Assessments and Living to Tell about It Game On! Building X xx X Comprehension with Video Games Fleas in Room 212 X No Wifi? No Problem! X X Ipad Applications to Use When the Internet Goes on the Blink! Message about X #TMChat (Thinking Maps) Chat The Ghost Plant and X X other (Potentially) Fateful Tales Alien Matters: X Keychains, Bobble Heads, and Refrigerator Magnets The Art of Speaking X Texan What a Lugnut? And X X other (Pertinent) Questions The Importance of X X Classroom Culture: Lessons from a Colt Named Carl How Not to Be A X Grinch This Holiday

271

Posts 2016 Author Practitioner Presenter Researcher Student Fostering Global X Mindedness in a Seemingly Linear World Conference Burnout: X x X Reviving Educators in a Most "Un" Common Way To My Principal I X Must Confess What's in a Name? X No More Quiet X X X Game: Inviting Talk into the Elementary Classroom How to Survive the X Dog Days of Summer Merry Christmas in X July! Summer Slide is No X X X Walk in the Park The Future is X X Calling: Are We Listening? Emojis, Selfies, and X X Memes: Innocuous Terms in Today's in Today's Classroom Hack in Action: An X X Excerpt from Hacking Homework This I Believe x X Experimental Study

272

Posts 2017 Author Practitioner Presenter Researcher Student 5 Post-Holiday X Strategies to Thwart the Triple Dog Dare! Literacy in the New x X Millennium: Finding a Balance Between Video and Audio Texts Lost in Translation: X When Lesson Plans Go Awry Creating Global Citizens X X in a Seemingly Linear World Ready…Set…Play X X How to Keep Your X Sanity and Teach Kids Simultaneously Explaining the X Unexplainable to Kids A Teacher's Summer X X Tale: Creating Trade Secrets to Creating Stories that Teach! The Future is Calling: X X Are We Listening? How to Not Beat A X Dead Horse When the Sky Continuously Rains Cats and Dogs NanoWriMo: A Teacher's Best Kept Secret to Inspire Young Writers! 5 Things Bad Teacher's Do Very, Very Well and New Teacher Strategies to Keep Them at Bay!

273

Appendix C Leadership Identity Bar Graphs

274

275

276

277

Appendix D Example of Reflexive Journal

278

This is a sample. Not an actual journey entry.

Journal Entry

I sit in my office staring at the blank screen on my desktop computer. I feel nervous and insecure. My palms start to sweat and my heart beats faster. The same question taunts me every month and I think to myself What if I’m unable to think of a new blogpost? What if

I have not more ideas? I try to find inspiration by reading other teacher blogs to no avail.

My mind is a total blank. I scroll back through my own blogs and hope for a new idea to jump off the page and inspire me.

Nothing.

I pull out a writer’s notebook filled with pages and pages of journal entries. I’ve kept my writer’s notebook since my return to teaching over ten years ago. I flip through the well-worn pages. A sketch of the cartoon character Spongebob and notes that resemble chicken scratch more than legible print, makes me smile. I remember the day like it happened yesterday and the lessons on life and relationship. I recall the lessons I learned from a student who suffered from a rare and aggressive form of bone cancer. My thoughts take me back to my days as a Special Education teacher and the unusual lesson I learned from a special student. I feel teary as I begin to sketch out my blog story.

I play with the words of the title like putting together the pieces of jigsaw puzzle.

Slowly, the words fall into place and I draft the title: SpongeBob SquarePants to the

Rescue. The time is right to relive the life lesson taught to me by a terminally student on my caseload. I cringed as I remember recall the irreversible mistake I made during a

279 teacher student conference. The student excitedly described meeting the cartoon character

SpongeBob on vacation and he they were not “best friends.” I regretfully told him that

SpongeBob wasn’t real. Little did I know that he had met SpongeBob in Honolulu as part of his Make-a-Wish final wish? It is a difficult story to write and tears flow my eyes as I remember the lesson I learned the about the power of a teacher’s words.

280

Appendix E

Sample of Post Analysis

281

282

283