Taking Our Seats: The Consequences of Positioning in Reading Assessments

Abstract

ested in the social politics of reading regard readers, texts, and the particular social situations that involve reading as highly interdependent. We want to know what texts are used and why, what we assume about the fit between readers and texts, and how readers interpret texts as representations of social norms that guide immediate and longterm relations among self, others, and society. Across these interests, the concept of positioning provides a useful tool for understanding the ways readers interpret the text, themselves, and others in the midst of school life. Positioning (Davies & Harre, 1990; Langenhove & Harre, 1999) is associated with speakers in particular settings who assume they can know one another and act on their taken-for-granted relations of power and status, like the relations between students and teachers in classrooms. As we interact with one another