Thesis advisor: Patrick Proctor / How children understand reading and who they are as readers comprises children’s reading identities. Reading identities can have very real effects on the reading outcomes of children, and may support the development of foundational reading skills and the process of learning to read (McCarthey & Moje, 2002). Despite the potential importance of reading identities to early reading, research on young dual language learners (DLLs) comprises only a small portion of the overall research on reading identities (Castro, 2014; Moje & Luke, 2009). This study explored the potential interplay between early reading, reading identities, and bilingualism to describe and understand how DLLs in prekindergarten classrooms understood reading and who they were as readers. Ten DLLs ages 4-5 participated in this study. Participants came from two prekindergarten classrooms in a public elementary school. The study design foregrounded child-centered methods that accessed children’s ways of constructing meaning through talk, activity, art, and play. Data collection processes included reading and drawing-based interviews with children, observations of children, interviews with teachers, a questionnaire for parents, and classroom observations. Findings from the study show how young children are actively constructing ideas about reading, language, and who they are as readers as they learn to read. Case portraits show the various ways that reading identities were constructed, taken-up, and expressed by the participants. These portraits show how reading identities emerge early, vary across children, are connected to context, and have varying connections to children’s bilingualism. A cross-case analysis identified four dimensions of reading identities: concept of reading, performance, self-awareness, and context. These dimensions are integrated into an emergent conceptual model of reading identities. Together, the data suggest that social, cognitive, and linguistic factors play a combined role in the early emergence of reading identities in young DLLs. The study points to the potential of new theory and child-centered research methods for considering the interrelationship between early literacy, bilingualism, and identity in young children. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Book Summary: Participatory performances have long been used to invite audiences to embody, voice, and imagine the perspective of different characters, values, and viewpoints. Performances of Research: Critical Issues in K-12 Education provides a collection of performative texts that retell the lived experiences of children and youth in meaningful and engaging ways, while providing readers with an opportunity to participate in the retelling. Performances of Research is for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students who are engaged in the study of social foundations in education, equity and social justice in education, and qualitative inquiry methods. This book is essential reading for pre-service teachers, classroom teachers, and faculties of education and works very well as a textbook for a variety of courses.

This thesis investigates young readers' reading practices in relation to social media, in an attempt to bridge the gap between students' own experiences and school librarians' reading promotion efforts. This has been done through an online questionnaire with school librarians concerning if, and how, they currently work with digital reading communities, combined with an interview study with seven high school students who identify themselves as readers and current, or former, users of BookTok.  The results from the survey show that school librarians mainly work with digital reading communities by displaying trending books and informing their book purchases. The results from the interview study show that young Swedish readers place high aesthetic value on the book as an object; they prefer to read in English, and they do not enjoy compulsory reading in school when they have no agency in what books to read.  The conclusions drawn are that the young readers have a strong sense of identity connected to their reading practices and that this "reading identity" is at least partly shaped by digital reading communities such as BookTok. Furthermore, there are potential areas for school librarians to develop their work with digital reading communities in order to meet their students' needs. Firstly, through involving the students in not only selecting and purchasing books, but also in norm critical discussions of themes that are present in trending literature. Secondly, through collaboration with teachers in their literature teachings. The implications of the study are particularly directed toward high school librarians, due to the demographic of the participants, but can be applied to other ages and other professionals who work with reading promotion.  This is a two-year master's thesis in Library and Information Science.