The Text Selection Ecosystem: Investigating the Factors that Influence the Book Choices of Upper High School English Teachers in Pennsylvania Public Schools

Abstract

In recent years, communities across the country have organized to demand more transparency about the texts used in schools, sometimes resulting in district-wide book bans. These debates have highlighted that little is known about the factors that affect classroom text selection. Such data may inform school, district, and state policies and practices that influence text selection. This thesis aims to identify the individual and contextual determinants of text selection in upper high school classrooms. Using a sampling frame of Pennsylvania high schools, I randomly sampled 25 schools and recruited upper high school teachers for interviews. The data analyzed in this thesis comes from interviews conducted with 10 eleventh and twelfth grade teachers in Pennsylvania public schools. These semi-structured interviews were transcribed and coded according to themes established based on previous literature about teacher text selection and in vivo codes derived from the interviews themselves. My analysis of interview data identified six features that most influence teacher text selection: the standards of the state and other professional organizations, teacher philosophies, community input, financial factors, department, school, and district policies and politics, and teacher capacity. Furthermore, my analysis also emphasized that none of these factors operates alone but, instead, in conjunction with the other factors identified to influence text selection. This finding expands on the work of Darragh and Boyd to emphasize that text selection factors do not just “overlap” but rather interact with each other (Darragh & Boyd, 2019, p. 68). Taking each of these factors and the complicated relationships between them into account, this thesis provides a conceptual model of text selection as a complicated ecosystem that is applied to policy recommendations at the state, district, school, and teacher levels.