Abstract

Book banning is becoming an increasingly prominent and contested issue in the United States. The focus usually lies on school and district policy, banned book lists, and state legislation, but the impact on the daily lives of teachers is often overlooked. Their decision-making processes are key to determining the books that make it into classrooms, and self-censorship often occurs prior to formal book bans (Watkins & Ostenson, 2015; Woo et al., 2023). This study examines how teachers experience book banning in their individual lives through the way they navigate competing pressures and values when selecting books to teach. Utah teachers were invited to participate in literary response groups to discuss two texts, The 57 Bus and You Should See Me in a Crown, and evaluate how they would or would not use the texts in their classrooms. This analysis focuses primarily on the first discussion regarding The 57 Bus, exploring how teachers negotiate competing perspectives as they consider incorporating the text into their classrooms. Dialogical Self Theory (Hermans, 2001) was used to identify the internal and external voices shaping teachers' decisions, revealing how experiences with pushback become internalized and lead teachers to be more risk-averse in their decision-making. As these voices become more dominant, they reorganize the teachers' priorities and make it more difficult to balance advocacy with self-protection. This often results in self-censorship, a prevalent yet largely invisible element of contemporary book banning.

Degree

MA

College and Department

Humanities; English

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2026-04-17

Document Type

Thesis

Keywords

censorship, teacher identity, dialogical self theory, book banning, diverse reads, text selection

Language

english

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