“It Depends Where I Am in My Life, Whether I Love Reading or Not”: Challenges to Fostering Strong Personal Reading Lives and Why it Matters

Abstract

This article stems from a larger participatory action research study involving a 4-month investigation into the reading lives of myself and four other secondary English teachers. This study illustrates that even for teachers who value reading, there exists a recurring struggle to maintain strong personal reading lives; however, this study also provides examples of transformational teachers and texts that assisted teachers in overcoming these challenges. These transformational experiences led to teachers reading more, which led to changes in their views of reading and their pedagogical decision-making around reading. Specifically, having positive experiences with books inside and outside the classroom opened up opportunities for students to have more positive experiences with books. For this reason, this study calls upon teachers to resituate how they position the role of personal reading in their lives.