State-defined literacy and the disjointed discourses of literacy, knowing, and teaching

State-defined literacy involves official government actions that define what practices are allowable in literacy classrooms. In several US states, this involves high-stakes standardized testing in early elementary classrooms. Yet, as Kearns highlights, this testing is not neutral and is used to sort, select, and rank students in ways that declare them as literate or illiterate. This study examines state-defined literacy through the narratives of five elementary teachers of literacy engaged in discourses of school change and accountability. Grounded in empirical research that examines literacy teaching through a critical sociocultural lens, and in the scholarship of historical sociopolitical discourses of school change and accountability, this qualitative, narrative inquiry describes teachers’ narratives of lived experiences in teaching literacy in the context of school change and accountability. Results from the study suggest that teacher experiences in implementing state-defined literacy involve disjointed definitions and interactions with literacy, conflicting discourses of how teachers come to know students as readers and writers, and competing influences seek to orient the work of teachers toward normalized, government-sanctioned conceptions of elementary literacy teaching.