Exploring the material-discursive relations in literacies and language instruction: A state-wide view of binary logics at work

This article discusses the current Missouri (U.S.) socio-political landscape of literacies and language education pedagogies across PreK-12 settings. Specifically, our research focus explores the binaries that educators in schools experience which a/effects material-discursive relations of literacy teaching and learning. We understand how literacy education policies, initiatives, and practices as well as socio-political climate can produce unique conditions that shape schooling and how many of these can impact learning and teaching conditions as generative and/or paralysing spaces for educators and their students. We conceptualize pedagogies through material-discursive philosophies that shift away from humanist logics and present our research inquiry to foreground the conditions that produce our current U.S. literacy landscape. This paper draws on state-wide data from 1,550 surveys and 113 interviews with PreK-12 teachers. We employ two theoretical concepts as analytical tools: thresholding and eventicizing. These tools help us to explore how teaching and learning are dynamic constellations of material-discursive relations that put the current socio-political literacy education climate in conversation with the materials and texts teachers select and share. We discuss what is produced within these material-discursive binary conditions noticing how teachers resist and persist within the binaried worlds they find themselves in as educators.