Booth one at the bistro

Abstract

This is the story of a small group of teachers who came together as a book club to talk about writing, reading and living stories. It is, essentially, a re-storied dissertation. Grounded in the traditions of qualitative narrative research and expressed through multigenre writing supported by poetry as analysis, this dissertation is as much about the researcher as it is about the researched. As in most stories, our group faced both the expected and the unexpected; we rose and rested as we chose the words and expressions to represent our experience. There were only seven of us, but we were a dependable seven. We stayed together as a group exploring the intersections between our lives and the text worlds we entered, living our literacies from month to month, from September 2006 through September 2007. Using Rosenblatt’s (1994, 1995) work with transactional theory and aesthetic and efferent reading, I began building a theoretical foundation for my interests in studying teachers as readers and teacher reading groups. While Rosenblatt wrote of the transaction that takes place between a reader, a text, and a cultural time and place, I found myself using these same basic concepts as I created a study that might allow me to examine and participate in a transactional experience with multiple readers and multiple texts.