Flowing Toward Understanding: Suffering, Humility, and Compassion in Literacy Coaching

Abstract

Literacy coaches are in the business of helping to create some kind of change—change in teaching practice, change in school policy, change in curriculum, or change in teachers and children themselves. But the social interactions necessary for change to happen, such as in-classroom consultations conducted by a literacy coach, are often fraught with the challenges embedded in all social interactions. These challenges can include unequal status, differing priorities, and other situations that produce what we call power relations in social interactions. In this article, we present findings from a research project on literacy coaches' interactions with teachers, and we use 3 distinct theoretical orientations toward power (poststructuralism, Bourdieu's sociology, and Eastern philosophies) to (a) conduct nuanced analyses of power and interaction in the data and (b) suggest that analyses of power can lead to compassion and humility in the practice of literacy coaches.