What matters to teachers about literacy teaching: exploring teachers’ everyday/everynight worlds through creative data visualization

This article reports on a project designed to learn from teachers about their personal experience of literacy teaching through collecting and discussing data presented as creative visualisations in postcard form. Drawing on the work of Dorothy Smith, it argues that engaging with teachers' experience of the localised activities constituting their ‘everyday/everynight worlds’ in such ways can generate important counterpoints to technicist accounts of teachers' professional work. The project highlighted five interwoven aspects of professional experience – personal commitments, material realities, external pressures, time/workload and professional support – which illuminate the complexity of teachers' professional lives.