ABSTRACT
This chapter explores literacy teaching as an act of worldbuilding—a coming-together of instructor, students, materials, and histories to shape and reshape a shared classroom world. It considers the classroom as a cosmogram, a social world that materializes teachers’ ideas and beliefs about students, literacy, and learning. The chapter shows that these cosmograms are powerful but not uncontested: students, administrators, local and national policies each graft additional layered worlds onto those imagined by the teacher. The process of worldbuilding reframes the classroom as a space of possibility, where humans and non-humans, materialities and immaterialities, work with and against one another to shape a shared world for learning. An early-career teacher in an under-resourced school may not have the same leeway to reshape outside pressures in the image of the world they envision with their students as a veteran teacher in a similar situation.
