Volunteer Tutors’ and First Graders’ Literacy Learning: Navigating Assumptions, Social Positions, and Phonics

This qualitative study offers an examination of volunteer literacy tutors’ developing complex relationships with their first-grade students as they negotiated literacy teaching and learning over the course of seven months. It assumes that literacy is created, shaped, and maintained by social groups, yet social groups are then influenced by the literacies they have created (Street, 1995). The context was an urban elementary school in which the researcher was asked to develop and implement a volunteer tutoring program to work with at-risk first graders. The tutoring program was based on the Book Buddies (Johnston, Invernizzi, & Juel, 1998) tutoring model, and the volunteers were trained, supervised, and supported throughout the program. The three first-grade students in this study were identified by their classroom teacher and assigned to volunteers with varying levels of tutoring experience. Tutors met with the first-graders for thirty minutes, twice a week. Research questions focused on how the volunteer tutors interpreted and applied their training, what assumptions the volunteers had about teaching and learning and how those assumptions were evidenced in the tutoring relationships, as well as how the volunteer tutors and students negotiated understandings within their unique dyads, particularly in terms of positioning themselves and each other with literacy. The article proposes that volunteers can have a positive impact on young students’ literacy learning. When provided training and ongoing support, volunteers are quite capable of tutoring.

Prior assumptions were strong factors, but not necessarily deciding factors in how they approached their students and tutoring. Histories and assumptions were subject to scrutiny and revision. Students at this age displayed agency by negotiating with tutors as they co-constructed understandings of how to “do” literacy when they worked together. The researcher proposes that practitioners – whether teachers or tutors – should develop language and interactions that support students in positioning themselves as inquisitive, capable readers and writers.