Abstract
This thesis examines reading, writing, and their teaching as practices of meaning making, set against current literacy policy debates in the United States. Using self-study methodology across four modes of inquiry—literary theory, autoethnography, poetic inquiry, and phenomenology—it explores what it means to live and teach language as a writer, reader, and pre-service elementary school teacher. Drawing on Toni Morrison's conception of reading and writing as art, the author's original poetry, and journals kept during student teaching in a bilingual elementary classroom, each chapter investigates a different dimension of the literate self and its relationship to pedagogy.
Taken together, these chapters argue that the current crisis in literacy education is not merely one of skill or attention, but of definition. Where dominant policy frameworks treat reading and writing as measurable cognitive technologies and teachers as implementers of validated curricula, this thesis offers an alternative: that reading and writing are irreplaceable practices of meaning making, and that teachers' literate lives constitute a form of professional knowledge that no external research can replace. The thesis advocates for the kind of self-study it enacts, making a case for the teacher-writer as essential to a more humane approach to literacy education.