Reading Beyond the Last Page: Understandings of Teachers' Experiences in Book Clubs and Pedagogical Links

Abstract

The study explores teachers’ experiences in book clubs and how these experiences inform their pedagogical practices. Framed by a social constructivist epistemological stance, grounded in the work of narrative inquiry, and conceptualized by transactional reader-response theory, this study explores why teachers join and sustain book club membership, the ways books clubs are used to create meaning, how participating in a book club influences pedagogical practices, and ways in which clubs are used to negotiate aspects of their teaching identities and subjectivities. Through a multifaceted qualitative research design, I worked with thirteen teachers who belong to (or have recently belonged to) a book club as a separate entity from their teaching lives. I conducted interviews with thirteen teachers; attended three meetings of three separate book clubs to contextualize the study; and administered written reading profiles to explore participants’ reading practices. This research argues that teachers join and remain in book clubs for social interaction, intellectual stimulation and motivation to read ‘quality’ literature. Knowledges are created and validated by a community of readers capable of such recognition in a forum that does not otherwise exist. Club meetings are used in different and complex ways to negotiate teaching subjectivities and push back against fixed notions of the teacher identity. Further, this study showcases a myriad of ways that teachers’ experiences in book clubs enter the classroom both explicitly and implicitly.