Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
Language, Literacy, ED.D., Exceptional Education, and Physical Education
Major Professor
Alexandra Panos, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Jenifer Jasinski Schneider, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Michael B. Sherry, Ph.D.
Committee Member
William Black, Ph.D.
Keywords
Education Policy, Ethnographic Methods, Literacy Practices, Narrative, P-12 Teachers
Abstract
Teachers are inundated with education legislation and the policy texts and discourses that surround them. Over nine months beginning in March 2024, I collaborated with three Florida P-12 teachers to explore their literacy practices and stories as they engaged with policy in a state that has recently passed an astounding amount of education legislation. This study explored how (1) teachers story the current policy context and their roles within it; (2) teachers use literacy practices to understand and respond to P/policies that impact their labor/working lives; and (3) teachers’ literate identities, agency, and collectivity intersect and shape one another. Guided by critical sociocultural theories of literacy, I conducted a narrative inquiry that centered the voices and actions of my teacher-collaborators. Their accounts reveal how neoliberal policies converge in practice, undermining public education, eroding professional agency, and restructuring teaching into a surveilled and devalued form of labor. An analysis of literacy events illustrated how teachers’ engagements with reading, writing, and multimodal composing functioned as purposeful responses to the policies shaping their professional and personal lives. Narrative analysis revealed that teachers’ literate identities are complex, situated, and dynamically shaped by context. By centering teachers’ everyday literacy practices in response to policy constraints, this study contributes to understanding teacher activism, literacy as resistance, and the evolving role of social media in professional life. It reframes teacher resistance as grounded, literate, and agentic, and offers implications for teachers, teacher education, unions, and additional stakeholders.
Scholar Commons Citation
Hull, Katharine E., "Literacies of Resistance: How Florida Teachers Story Policy Navigation and Response" (2025). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/11087
