Considering Collective Motivation to Read: A Narrative, Inquiry

Research into literacy education often explores cognitive or sociocultural understandings, with the former shaping how curricula and assessments understand readers. This focus on cognitive processes is one of many ways that reading is imagined as an individual pursuit. Through a lens of post-human subjectivity, I consider a narrative of a key moment of collective motivation in the classroom as situated in a larger context. While I draw upon empirical evidence in the form of interviews, narrative inquiry takes me toward questions that evoke. Notably, I find that the ubiquity of collective endeavors appears as solo achievements. As a result of my narrative-inspired thinking-through-theory, I argue that collective motivation is a feature of post-human subjectivity, and that we might generate new possibilities for learning as assemblage in our teaching. To elaborate, I weave together narrative and diagrammatical modes of thinking, storytelling and description of my analytical process, to evoke questioning.