Tactical Negotiations and Creative Adaptations: The Discursive Production of Literacy Curriculum and Teacher Identities Across Space-Times

In this article, the researchers use the theoretical constructs of Bakhtin and de Certeau to examine how a fourth-grade teacher negotiated multiple and competing ideologies of literacy and teaching, and how these negotiations related to her professional identity. Data for this case study were collected during a two-year qualitative study investigating multimodal literacies, multilingualism, and teacher development. The researchers used constant comparative analysis and microethnographic analysis of talk and visual data to investigate how the teacher positioned herself with respect to four different space-times impacting her literacy instruction (i.e., standardization, bilingual education, writers' workshop, novice teacher status). Findings demonstrate how her positioning involved the tactical recontextualization and creative adaptation of discourses across these space-times as she poached off institutional powers to refashion curriculum, classroom spaces, and her teacher identity. These negotiations illustrate the microscopic and everyday dimensions of power and how literacy instruction and teacher identities are coconstructed in the particulars of everyday practice. In tandem with the analyses, the researchers argue for a syncretic theoretical framing and micro-level analytic approach to literacy research to account for the particularities of discourse and classroom practice, and their potential to both reproduce and contest dominant ideologies of literacy and teaching.