Reading identity of novice teachers and digital literary mediation: crossroads between trajectories and competences

Abstract

This article is linked to research arising from the need to investigate the interaction of novice teachers with digital tools to mediate literary reading. Chilean program’s literary corpus consists of mostly classics and teaching them requires various strategies. Novice teachers have to teach this type of literature when they start to work in a school, and they have to fulfill a series of requirements that make their mediation complex. Considering this problem, our aim is to analyze the reception of a digital educational hypertext on a group of six Spanish teachers in Santiago de Chile during the 2017 academic year. The purpose is to find their needs, perceptions, and beliefs related to the mediation of this literature through digital use on secondary classroom. Methodological approach used has a qualitative focus on a Grounded Theory systematic design. The instruments applied were interviews, stories of reading life, and a digital multimodal hypertext designed for this purpose. Resulting categories were consolidated through content analysis. Findings reveal that when these novice teachers take on their institution’s mediation practices, they are apprehensive with using digital means to teach literature and their incipient teaching practice deepens their digital educational literacy lack. It is concluded that their relationship with literature and their perceptions to teach it affect mediation and interaction with educational hypertext, hence, reading identity and multimodal digital hypertext should be taken into consideration in basic teacher training