Teachers of reading: where new narratives in the virtual inform practice.

Latham, Gloria ; Faulkner, Julie

Preface: The following critical incidents suggest the pleasure literature brings within the company of others, and how the use of particular resources invite engagement and enhance capacity.

Author 1

Recently on a walk, I stopped at a local used bookstore to pick up a couple of pre-read novels. I found one by John Irving and another by Isobel Allende recommended by a colleague. I love reading pre-read books, often with the names of the previous owner(s) inscribed, pages that have been folded over and faded by sunlight or blurred by food or drink stains, some passages underlined and tiny reminders scrawled in the margins. When I took the two novels up to the counter the cashier looked down, smiled and told me she was reading her first John Irving novel and was finding it a hard go. We shared a bit of Irving together and I mentioned the author's need to write the last line of his novels before he begins crafting. Another salesperson at the store overheard this and joined our brief conversation telling of another author, Caiseal Mor, who gets all of his plots from dreams. I left the store with the name of that author, two novels and a highly satisfied feeling.

As I walked away, I realised that the books under my arm will continue to be read with the echoes of their authors and past readers and that they will alter and may well enhance my reading experience. That unplanned experience is what I want to be happening daily in classrooms; the sharing of stories, conversing with intentional thoughts; passing on knowledge and ideas that occur naturally within a reading community.

Author 2

I set up a book club for parents of children I teach. I thought it might serve two purposes: to stimulate talk among readers around a shared text and to encourage communication between teenage students and parents, using novels as the trigger.

The books were already chosen for us, and some were challenging. I read one particularly 'writerly' novel and struggled myself to finish it, or even make sense of what I had already read. I kept a reading journal which mostly reflected frustration over the elliptical and poetic style of the author. Certainly, I asked a lot of questions.

I tried to teach the novel to students as a mutual adventure ... well, I was trying to lure them into what they saw as alien territory. I spoke to my colleagues and we teased out some narrative connections over many staff room conversations. We had our book group and the parents looked flummoxed. At some point of the evening, however, someone altered the tone of the flat discussion. 'I wonder if ...'. Someone responded with 'and maybe ...', 'what did others think when ...' and 'when I read ... I felt like I ...'.

We left not feeling we had anything like a complete grasp of the novel, but rather that we'd ventured tentatively into a potentially exciting, fathomless space. To this day, that novel remains in my head in ways that more accessible writing has not. The individual and collective effort, over time, of unpeeling layers of figurative material left a lasting impression. The pleasures of reading are not just escapist, but are also about digging into parts of ourselves that daily life does not encourage.

Introduction

The two incidents above frame some of the pleasures and challenges inherent in teaching literature when experienced in a shared context. C.S. Lewis (1961) reminds us that

   Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences
   not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible
   or inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic or merely
   piquant. Literature gives the entree to them all. (p. 137)

Yet many teachers and pre-service teachers seem more focussed on adhering to pre-packaged programs and recipes for teaching the skills of reading and less on working with the power of the literature to engage, inform and transform lives. In many ways, we felt our pre-service teachers viewed the teaching of reading as utilitarian. They yearned to be told successful ways to teach as they have been taught to read using one of these, 'successful' methods. They wanted to be a teacher of reading rather existing in the far more fragile yet necessary state of being an informed reader responding to literature with other informed readers.

Mordechai Gordan's (2007) declaration resonates with our own. He states:

   During my tenure as a teacher educator, I have repeatedly
   noticed that many students come to us looking
   for recipes, for a bag of tricks that they can take with
   them and apply in their classrooms. They assume that
   if they can just acquire these techniques and skills they
   will be good teachers or at least survive in urban public
   schools. (p. 37)

The enduring use of the term teacher training and teacher training packages by educational bodies rather than teacher education also suggests the perpetuation of long held beliefs in merely adopting a prescribed set of skills as the best and only way to teach.

As two teacher educators, we felt provocation was required to help novice teachers unlearn that any single method can teach all children to read and to help novice teachers reclaim or discover the pleasures of reading and unlearn their quest for certainty. We wanted to help them understand themselves as readers and understand that teaching and the teaching of reading in particular, are highly complex enterprises that involve a personal and professional investment, a love, deep knowledge, risk-taking and a great deal of uncertainty.

In this paper we will defend an approach that teaches pre-service teachers to question, reflect, revise and further explore who they are as humans, as readers and as teachers of reading within a reading collective. We do this by moving away from the actual experience of schooling in order to share how a virtual school is allowing us entry into shifting ways of thinking and acting. We support Mayer's (1999) argument that preparation should focus on teacher identity as distinct from teachers' functional roles. Our novice teachers need to examine themselves as readers and discover what they bring to the teaching of reading.

The context

We argue that teaching must change in order to accommodate for the needs of new learners. Yet tensions occur around the two major roles of teacher educators. While responsible for preparing aspiring novices for the educational systems they will enter, they are also responsible for challenging the norms of those systems and providing alternative directions. There is recognition from many fronts (New London Group, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Christensen, 1997; Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski & Flowers, 2004; Papert, 2001) that changes in schooling practices are urgently required. Discrepancies between home and school literacies are being critiqued around ideologies, discourses, and identities of digital age learners and the creation of meaningful curriculum and desired sites of learning (Beavis, Nixon & Atkinson, 2007; Buckingham, 2005; Gee, 2010). Our schools are increasingly populated with 21st century learners who are adept at multitasking, sophisticated in their uses of electronic technologies, and used to trial and error approaches to solving problems, contrasting with a more logical, rule-based approach of previous generations (Oblinger, 2003; Oblinger, Martin & Baer, 2004). These learners are also reading texts in a wide range of genres and modes as well as creating their own new media. When the government cry is 'back to basics', how can teachers negotiate the 'new basics?'

In our School of Education, a small team of literacy educators was concerned that novice teachers were merely perpetuating an old model of teaching reading based on the models they had experienced, even when presented with more effective alternatives. Adopting new thinking can be problematic. Pre-service teachers have intimate knowledge of schooling and firmly ingrained images of the practices of teaching reading from direct experience and from the media. Common practices in schools and popular culture narratives tend to reinforce that their traditional beliefs are deeply connected to identity formations around teaching (Latham & Faulkner, 2007). As well, alternative theories and practices presented at university do not always conform to beliefs and practices in pre-service teachers' professional practice sites in the field. If there is no recipe to follow it is far more work for teachers. They must become the curriculum they teach; people whose ideas are framed around learners' needs. They are the teachers who break with tradition and understand why.

The new Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2012) addresses literacy with a much needed emphasis on literature and the recognition for new media. While recognising that texts are selected for the differing needs of emergent and developing readers, the literature in these texts and those read to children should invite opportunities for rich discussion, varied interpretations and become demonstrations of such features as purpose, audience and linguistic structures. For emergent readers, Rosie's walk by Pat Hutchins is an example of such a text where the language is kept simple and repetitious yet the illustrations reveal a far darker story. Popular and Multimodal texts like Websites, computer games, magazines and films should also be read critically.

If notions of the powerful role of reader are valued, perpetuating normative practice needs to be contested. Practices such as selecting, separating and levelling 'readers' or using pre-levelled readers for the express purpose of teaching reading skills and separating students into fixed ability groups are practices that could be considered antithetical to the spirit of the Australian Curriculum and to 21st century learners' needs. While aware that teachers need to explicitly demonstrate and help all readers (emergent, struggling, reluctant) to practise the mechanics of reading, we argue that these practices should co-exist within community that encourages the rich discussion of texts.

The study

Our ongoing investigation initially had its focus on pre-service teachers, lecturers and their pedagogy in a 4th Year Literacy subject. We had concerns around pre-service teachers effectively teaching reading if they are not devoted readers themselves. Moreover, we were troubled by novice teachers not being aware of the strategies they used when reading and how they have been changed by literature, as well as novice teachers perpetuating unexamined practices

Using an Action-Research approach we selected anecdotal evidence from a sample of students each year who had granted permission to be participants and then used our analysis to revise and reconsider ways to keep strengthening our direction. There were approximately 130-150 students each year the subject was delivered and approximately half of those were sampled. The data were analysed following each iteration and relevant adjustments made to teaching and learning. The key issues of our ongoing investigation were:

* How can the virtual be utilised to provoke new thinking about teaching reading for dramatically new learners?

* How can newly-constructed narratives alter pre-service teachers' practices in reading?

By opening up a pedagogical space for these issues, we were encouraging ongoing dialogue and critical reflection. By engaging in role-plays, we (lecturers and pre-service teachers) became members of two different worlds simultaneously; the learner and the teacher. We wanted pre-service teachers to feel a degree of safety in order to expose and then interrogate their discomfort with change and risk-taking.g and mine its source together.

To assist our understanding, we collected and analysed our own and pre-service teachers' journal reflections, responses and conversations on our Blackboard Wiki site, informal conversations, questionnaires about unlearning, role-plays with pre-service teachers, and initial reactions to the virtual school, assessments and course evaluations over the eight years of the virtual school's history.

Alternative practices

Face to face and in a virtual school

In interactive lectures and tutorials we built theory and practice that supported new ways to teach reading. We also explicitly demonstrated a range of multimodal, critical reading strategies to entice readers and build new and deeper understandings. Our focus was on asking why. 'Why would they use a particular activity with the virtual students at that time? 'What students might be advantaged? 'What students might be silenced? We also had the novice teachers experience many of the strategies that were demonstrated. For instance they acted out a scene from the novel they were studying (The boy in the striped pyjamas by John Boyne) while a pre-service teacher stood behind each of the characters voicing the possible subtext. We watched the film adapted from the novel and compared the content and approach to the two narratives. Mirroring a cafe culture, in tutorials, small groups of pre-service teachers met together each week to feed off, extend and debate one another's ideas about the shared novel they were reading. The book talks were orchestrated by the groups. Members brought with them their varied abilities, ages, interests, knowledge, socio-cultural selves, copies of the novel, their response journals containing connections they were making, questions that were raised by their reading, interpretations, observations, sketches, predictions and opinions. Many were coming to terms with inferential meaning. They discussed ways they might bring this text and higher order thinking to their virtual students. One pre-service teacher, Susan referred to the novel's dimension of writing as 'silently detailed'. For instance, she made comment that, 'we are never told that Pavel and Bruno die'.

There were no worksheets, drills, 'right' answers to literal retellings or correct interpretations. There were no ability groupings or competitions for rewards. This culture of sharing ideas was generative and pleasurable. Yet it required deep thinking and disrupted some of their known practices of reading instruction. For instance, visual and oral representations of text to self, text to world and text to text connections were encouraged and valued as much as written ones. Susan visually mapped Bruno's life against her own, making text to self connections. Text to world connections were made by Lauren when she spoke about

   Thinking of the war I wondered how it might have
   affected children in Germany--not just Jewish children
   but the children of German aristocrats.

Lia spoke about and used colour (as emphasis) to write about the text's subject making text-to-text connections and text to self connections.

   This book reminds me of a text I read in Year 9 when
   we were studying the holocaust. I remember being
   mesmerised by the story and completely overwhelmed
   by the concept that something like this could occur
   only 14 years before my mother was born!

Yet even with the thoughtful reflections above, anecdotal evidence showed that far too many of our pre-service teachers admitted to being non-readers or reluctant readers. They had some knowledge of picture books and novels from their childhoods but little knowledge of the range and substance of current literature. To address this, we exposed them to rich, engaging literature, writerly texts, as Roland Barthes (1975) describes them. We read to them in every tutorial and shared a wide and engaging variety of genres. By bringing our pre-service teachers these rich texts we were inviting speculation and inviting them to produce and justify their interpretations. After the reading, we used the texts to explicitly demonstrate some focus such as linguistic features, layout, characterisation, voice, overall design and visual impact. For instance, we spoke about the ways we noticed patterns in the structure of a text making it easier to read and then explained how we have used those text structures in our writing. We taught skills in inference by sharing examples of how we go beyond the literal meaning of a text, connecting what is read, seen, or heard with our background knowledge and experiences (Urquhart, 2008; Harvey & Goudvis, 2007; Tovani, 2000; Keene & Zimmermann, 2007). Then we asked the pre-service teachers to search for inferences in their shared novels. As well, each year we asked an author or illustrator in to talk about their processes. Over the years we have had visits from Shaun Tan, Gabrielle Wang, Morris Gleitzman and Tony Wilson among others. We have also had the authors we read in class join us online for added back story conversations. We were dialoguing with Jackie French when we studied Hitler's daughter and Carole Wilkinson when we studied Dragonkeeper. We also exchanged ideas with a group of Year 5 students also reading Dragonkeeper.

Additionally, we began each semester by getting the pre-service teachers to study themselves as readers and to share their findings with a group of peers. We asked:

* How was reading viewed and practised in their childhoods?

* What was their attitude to reading?

* What do they currently read and why?

* What don't they currently choose to read and why?

* What problem-solving strategies do they employ when they read a complex unfamiliar text?

* What are their strengths and weaknesses as readers?

* How would they extend readers?

Pre-service teachers were invited to bring in and share their treasured childhood texts with one another. We recognised the powerful role peers had in articulating reading practices. When one pre-service teacher shared the following thought online, a flurry of responses followed with the desire to articulate what a great book does for them.

   Does anyone get post good book blues like I do? I
   mope around for a day or so after I have finished a
   great book. A great book takes you places you cannot
   otherwise go and gives you experiences you cannot get
   outside its pages.

With respect to the teaching of reading and because pre-service teachers tend to reproduce, rather than transform what they have experienced in their teaching, reverting to what they know, the lecturing team repeatedly asked 'Why'. Bachelard (1969) argues that 'why' is the most important of all questions. The questions asked about themselves as readers made them far more aware of what they bring to the teaching of reading and also the complexities of reading that need to be explicitly taught. Questions about their pedagogy raised additional awareness: 'Why would they use that approach, teach that skill, select that text, and adopt that form of data collection over others?' Questioning why and what if required our pre-service teachers to think about the traditional practices they fostered and defend their new thinking with sound pedagogical literacy theory.

The virtual school as provocation

To further provide alternative ways of thinking about teaching, we created a virtual school. This school, Lathner Primary, https://www.dlsweb.rmit. edu.au/education/lathnervirtualschool/index.htm, is a dynamic environment, full of surprises aimed at disrupting normative expectations of school while reflecting ideas around what whole school change for 21st century learners might become in response to new challenges.

Utilising Boler's (1999) pedagogy of discomfort, our pre-service teachers have a placement in the virtual school while witnessing and enacting some of the new responsive practices. Boler believes we need to be pushed to experience unease in order to 'unlearn'.

Brazilian educator Augusto Boal (1995) describes the state of being we were after as 'metaxis'. In this state the participant can better understand 'real life' through the nexus between the imagined and the real. Pre-service teachers role-played critical incidents in the virtual classroom and in the school and then replayed them, allowing spectators to suggest effective changes they could make as they left the spectator role to become the change that might better the outcome of the scenario. For instance, after interviewing one of the virtual children, about their reading habits, the spectators provided suggestions for how the pre-service teacher could further question the child's responses in order to better understand the child's thinking. Then the role-play was replayed with this suggestion. By employing a spectator role a dialogical space of possibilities opened for change to occur from routine, unexamined practices. Ryan (2001) describes the power of theatre saying: 'When performing becomes synonymous with living, the theatrical experience inherits the immersive and interactive qualities that define our experience of being-in-the-world' (p. 35).

We understood that a virtual school can never replicate the dynamics of an actual school. Yet, to foster our belief that teaching should start with the needs of learners, we needed children to talk about, think upon, learn from, plan for, have conversations with and celebrate successes (albeit virtually). Lathner Primary is a school of ideas where novice teachers are able to practise teaching for change. The children at the virtual school are based on actual children we know or have known with all their complexities. Their interests in reading, self esteem, their abilities, and choice of texts and modes are as varied as those of our pre-service teachers. Each child in the Year 4/5 classroom has a learning folder with varying degrees of information from work samples reading interviews, attitudinal information and family information. A virtual school allowed our pre-service teachers opportunities to:

* Experience and practise new possibilities:

* Experience a school, classroom life and a supportive community responding to 21st century learning.

* Be involved in a shared experience: All pre-service teachers and lecturers were discussing the same school, the same principal, teachers, parents and children.

* Contribute to the School: The pre-service teachers were building the School's present after studying its past. They created designs for the new play site, found portfolio examples for the children's files and extended the day to day observations and insights.

* Take risks: The pre-service teachers coulddo no harm to the virtual children.

* Build community: While sharing ways of overcoming challenges, pre-service teachers learned from one another and started to rely on one another more than their lecturers.

* Disrupt school norms: A virtual school allowed more possibility for surprises in the environment (an outdoor staffroom, children in charge at the reception desk, dinosaurs appearing out of nowhere) heightening what is taken for granted.

The construction of a virtual teacher/mentor

Our pre-service teachers had a virtual placement with Anna Jones in her Year 4/5 classroom in Lathner Primary School. As with all placements, novice teachers are generally required to adopt the practices and teaching philosophy of their teacher/mentor during the duration of their placement even when those practices and beliefs differ from their own. We used this unspoken requirement to our advantage in order to construct and have pre-service teachers enact some of Anna Jones's teaching practices for 21st century learners using new media. We became the authors of the new narratives about teaching reading, carefully crafting each story so that our pre-service teachers would become central characters in the unfolding dramas.

Anna Jones, their virtual site mentor, was constructed as a teacher we hoped our pre-service teachers would aspire to become. Anna is an avid reader who shares aspects of the texts she reads with her students. As a highly reflective teacher, Anna Jones also recognises her limitations as a reader. While she feels out of her depth with some technological skills and new media texts, she is working to strengthen these gaps in her learning. She also recognises that she reads a limited range of genres. Anna Jones draws upon the wisdom and experiences of other readers in the classroom and in the school community and beyond as they talk texts together. She learns from other teachers at the school and with and from her students, often getting her children to recommend books for her to read. Anna strongly believes in harnessing the strengths of each learner in the classroom and extending them. The children in her class form Book Talk groups based on their interest in the texts or with whom they want to learn. Each text brought into her classroom is introduced before it is put on the shelves or on the screen. Anna gives students a great deal of responsibility for their learning while supporting and monitoring their progress. She admits to slipping back from time to time to habitual modes of teaching. In these instances, she takes back the control she extended to her students. Anna recognises these undesirable times and writes about them in her professional journal (housed in a folder online) in the virtual school in order to try and resolve them.

Just as the virtual teachers in the school reveal their back stories that harvest tentative decisions, reflections and learning, as lecturers we also revealed our meta-cognitive thinking during our face to face interactions. We understand that proficient readers draw from and adapt a range of strategies to their purposes for reading. This required them to know how they read; to have meta-cognitive knowledge.

Throughout the semester, we made our reading processes explicit on two levels; one for the pre-service teachers as readers and the other for the pre-service teacher as teachers of reading. We talked out loud and shared the problem-solving strategies we draw upon, the decisions we make, the reasons behind our planning and the questioning and reflecting we engage in (Tovani, 2000). As readers, we shared relevant entries from our Response Journals; the connections we made and the questions we posed. As teachers of reading we revealed why we revisited a particular idea. For example, we shared that after debriefing with other staff teaching the subject we felt many of our pre-service teachers were still unclear about critical literacy. Therefore, we decided to get them experiencing this thinking firsthand with a series of engaging and purposeful activities.

For assessment, the pre-service teachers were required to draft and defend curriculum for teaching a whole class novel to the Year 4/5 virtual students while embracing the beliefs and the principles of the virtual school. The focus of the assignment was on why they would teach particular content and strategies in the way they intend. Their curriculum proposal was written in the form of a letter to their virtual site teacher, Anna Jones. The task was demanding and a number of their online comments over the years reflected their concerns.

I honestly believe this has been one of the most challenging assignments I have had to face.... I am constantly questioning why, or what If? (Katherine)

Every decision I'm making seems to have the word WHY!?, screaming behind me.(Alice)

Our team of literacy educators rewarded curriculum that defended the needs of the learners, new learning theory and that demonstrated their meta-cognitive knowledge and how and why they moved outside their comfort zones.

Newly constructed narratives about teaching

There are many competing discourses about teaching and about teachers that make learning how to teach reading problematic. Narratives often portray the teacher as a saviour. Tassoni and Thelin (2000) explore replacing the teacher as hero narrative with blundering narratives. The blunderer, the authors argue, disrupts the hero plot to allow greater learning possibilities around becoming a teacher. We were anxious to adopt new narratives; to not paint Anna Jones as a hero or a blunderer. We wanted to resist stereotyping her but rather give her the qualities that made her strong and thoughtful, thinking and questioning in the ways in which reading was taught yet also vulnerable to her past (not always able to enact her beliefs).

Our pre-service teachers learned about their virtual teacher Anna Jones through her professional journal entries, in conversations with children and parents, in planning meetings and through other teachers in the School. All of this information is contained in folders in the virtual school that pre-service teachers can run their cursor over and read, and listen to, download and print if needed. Pre-service teachers also learned more about the virtual teacher in lectures and tutorials.

Carefully constructed narratives allowed the literacy team opportunity to interrogate Anna Jones's approaches to teaching reading in some depth. The novice teachers were asked to compare and contrast these approaches with more traditional approaches of a far more traditional teacher in the virtual school or ones they may have experienced during their field placement. Anna Jones's focus is on getting children to want to read; to share and take pleasure in a range of texts. In this regard, she searches for engaging texts that meet the wide range of students' learning needs. Through involvement with these texts, new reading skills such as inferential and critical understandings are introduced, demonstrated, shared, questioned and strengthened.

Keene and Zimmermann (2007, p. 31) reflect Anna Jones's beliefs arguing that

   Current political fashion cannot kill commonsense. We
   must have the goal of educating children to become real
   readers, not simply students who answer test questions
   correctly but leave school with no interest in picking up
   a book ever again. If we want engaged, active readers
   and citizens, we must make reading a joyful adventure.

While we continue to act as provocateurs, the teacher educator team is aware that new ways of conceiving and enacting reading instruction may not occur or will occur years later as traditional ways of teaching reading are so ingrained in novice teachers' consciousness. Yet our first step was to get them reading and hooked on reading and many self-confessed non-readers and reluctant readers became hooked bringing in novels they had read to share.

Over the years of teaching this subject we have enacted many changes to our teaching and to the virtual school based on our reflections, feedback from staff and pre-service teachers.

We added more far more information to the students' learning files such as reading surveys and teacher interviews and data about their standardised test results. But most importantly, we have increased the tensions around what is and what could be possible in a classroom reading community.

Returning to the issues first addressed in the study, what has been discovered?

How can the virtual be utilised to provoke new thinking about teaching reading for dramatically new learners?

While we cannot and would not wish to quantify the change in thinking of our novice teachers or quantify how many non-readers or reluctant readers are now willing readers, we know that the virtual school has provided them with an ideal platform for provoking change. Many of our novice teachers became or hopefully will become engaged readers. We have planted seeds for future thinking and taught them to see and respond to practice differently.

A portion of the diverse cohort of pre-service teachers we have worked with was eager to contest normative teaching practices and enact more informed and effective ways of teaching reading. Yet they were fearful they would 'step on the toes' of their site teacher and fearful that their practice would 'not be compatible with the School's policies or with other teachers.' (Katie)

I have always wanted to take risks but feel worried and nervous in doing so as there is always someone watching over my shoulder. I want to give students more ownership. (Tim)

I want to teach in new ways but feel pressured into planning the way my mentor does because he/she doesn't like change. (Megan)

At the end of each semester another portion of preservice teachers continued to be resistant to change. They wanted their teaching to be comfortable and they wanted to teach reading in similar ways to how they were taught. They often equated change with failure expressing feelings that things might not work, they will let children down and they will let themselves down professionally. Comments like the following were representative of their fears.

It is not easy for me to move out of my comfort zone. (Lisa)

I start to feel a sense of insecurity and doubt if things start to go wrong. (Roberto)

I need structure and I need to know that something is going to work. (Nito)

The possible consequences do scare me. (Zoe)

A final request at the end of each semester was to ask pre-service teachers to dialogue with one another online and share what they had learned from Anna Jones and the virtual experience. Many expressed that the virtual school and Anna Jones's classroom experience afforded them the opportunity to teach and plan for reading differently and they felt they have been supported in their efforts.

Anna [Jones] is pushing herself and her students to take risks. By being in her classroom I have also had the opportunity to push myself in teaching reading. I have done this by allowing students to have more opportunities to work independently and discover things on their own. (David)

I have been able to go beyond the normal boundaries of curriculum planning. (Liz)

I have found that working with the students in Anna's class has forced me to think outside the usual realms of planning. So much of teaching is frameworked and set and planned. (May)

We are aware that purposeful change won't always be popular or come about when its beliefs are located solely in one subject at university or with one teacher in a school. We have held staff workshops and seminars to inform others in our School of Education about the beliefs inherent in Lathner Primary and we have encouraged other staff to use Lathner Primary as their resident school. At present there is a subject at every year level that makes explicit use of the virtual school of ideas. This is allowing our novice teachers a far more consistent belief about new learning. A common thoughtful and pedagogically sound belief in teaching reading is what is needed at the school level as well.

We are about to embark on an interstate collaboration using the virtual school getting novice teachers at The University of Queensland and The University of Sydney to interact. Increasingly, practising teachers and consultants are using the virtual school for professional learning opportunities for their staff. They share ways staff at the virtual school talk and exchange books, films, plays, video games and professional reading with one another. They hold reading groups with parents that model the book talk groups with students and demonstrate ways teachers should make their reading strategies explicit.

How can newly constructed narratives begin to alter pre-service teachers' practices in reading?

Most of our pre-service to be consistent teachers have felt the need for schools to change to meet the needs of 21st century learners but lacked the confidence to try and enact the change in traditional settings. By narrowing the focus to learners' needs and having a placement in a virtual school that rewarded risk-taking, it was far easier for these new teachers to look beyond pre-packaged programs for the teaching of reading. Inroads into novice teachers interrogating the norms of teaching are beginning. The experience of living these new narratives has provided many pre-service teachers with the courage to enact these narratives as beginning teachers. Many of our graduates stay in touch and we bring some of them back into our tutorials to share their changing practices. For instance, Michelle argued that her teaching is respectful of '21st century learners who are thinkers and investigators; agents of their own learning'.

Ashley shared:

You would have been proud of me. My 6T class was full of many disenchanted readers; readers who pretended to read but were fiddling or sleeping, even in a trance. So remembering your pearls of wisdom, I became a saleswoman and brought in many of my books from home for them to read. It was amazing after I gave them a tantalising piece of the book or a short review how they would eagerly seek it out.

Small rewards such as these help us know new narratives of teaching reading must be experienced. The alternative narratives we provided are carefully constructed to focus more on deepening meaning in the literature and thus raising the pleasures inherent when reading deeply in the company of others.

We deliberately created virtual teachers who keep facing their traditional pasts, slipping back to traditional modes of operating but most still desiring change. To encapsulate depth in the representations, the inner thoughts of the teachers were exposed in their professional journals which can be opened and read. These were an attempt to make sense of the daily reflections, questions, paradoxes, frustrations and insights each teacher is presented with daily (Faulkner & Latham, 2010).

Where to next?

We hope to follow and further support a small number graduates who embrace the desire to read and are attempting new, more effective ways of teaching reading. We also hope to construct new narratives that tell alternative ways of teaching reading to be read from the perspectives of students, parents and teachers. In small yet grounded ways, we hope to shift and better inform and disrupt the traditional culture.

The two incidents shared at the start of this article serve as reminders of what reading and the teaching of reading can become in a reading culture built with significant others. These encounters are living reminders of the possibilities, challenges and foremost pleasures reading can promote; reminders that linger in our memories. Rather than support an existing orthodoxy or create a new one, we are advocating for knowledgeable, responsible teachers who embrace uncertainty; teachers who are eager learners and avid readers. Teachers such as these, focus on the inherent challenges and pleasures that literature provides.

Literature cited

Boyne, J. (2006). The boy in the striped pyjamas. David Hickling Books, UK.

French, J. (1999). Hitler's daughter. Harper Collins: Australia.

Hutchins, P. (1970). Rosie's walk. UK: Picture Puffins.

Wilkinson, C. (2003). Dragonkeeper. Black Dog Books: Melbourne, Australia.

References

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Gloria Latham

RMIT University Melbourne

Julie Faulkner

Monash University

Gloria Latham is a Senior Lecturer in Literacy at RMIT University in Melbourne. Her desire for educational change for 21st century learners has fostered a virtual school, Lathner Primary, along with editing a book Learning to teach: New times, new practices. Her research interests are in purposeful feedback practices and authentic learning.

Julie Faulkner is a Senior Lecturer in education at Monash University, Melbourne. She writes about literacy, popular culture, identity and digital reading and writing practices. She edited Disrupting Pedagogies in the Knowledge Society: Countering Conservative Norms with Creative Approaches (IGI Global), and has jointly edited Learning to Teach: New Time, New Practices (Oxford University Press).