This paper examines the oral responses of four retired content-subject teachers. It explores the teachers’ personal narratives as dialogic stories of how specific literacy sponsors and experiences helped challenge their ideologies, which in turn developed and transformed their teaching beliefs and activities. The teachers’ stories show evidence of the mediational role the combined voices of literacy sponsors and experiences played in their teaching experiences. A common theme found in all the experiences was the teaching affordances in their lives, where people and artifacts were used as mediational means in their activities, which drove their identity processes and narrative reflections. We argue that these mediationally driven experiences were the impetus for continuity and positive transformation in their pedagogical experiences and identity.

For years literacy educators and researchers have worked within a narrative for content-area literacy that insists that content-area teachers provide instruction in their classrooms that allows their students to use literacy to learn content. Despite resistance from content-area teachers, this literacy-for-learning narrative has remained fairly consistent. For this study, the authors engaged in a dialogic content analysis in order to offer a critique of the current narrative surrounding content-area literacy as exemplified in the Common Core State Standards for English language arts (CCSS-ELA) and to offer a counternarrative. The critique of the current content-area literacy narrative focuses on definitions of text and literacy and the instructional roles placed on teachers. The counternarrative proposed by the authors is predicated on an expanded notion of texts and literacy and on the expectation that teachers engage students in activities that approximate authentic disciplinary practices.