Resisting Positionings of Struggle in "Science of Teaching Reading" Discourse: Counterstories of Teachers and Teacher Educators in Texas

Reading teachers and teacher educators are the latest to blame in public discourse for reading failure in the United States. In March 2019, Pearson Education released the draft of the Science of Teaching Reading Examination Framework for Texas, and the state's teachers and teacher educators were called on to revise courses and programs in alignment. In this article, the authors provide an overview of the narratives drawn on to position teachers and teacher educators as struggling and the partiality of these narratives from our perspective as both professionally responsible and anti-racist educators. The authors present three counterstories that exhibit how teachers and teacher educators are exceeding the expectations of the framework by foregrounding more complex, social justice-focused perspectives on readers and reading. The authors argue for the inclusion of professionals using anti-oppressive and contextualized professional knowledge and practices to move the field forward.