Searching for Mirrors: Preservice Teachers’ Journey Toward More Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Culturally relevant text selection and pedagogy support students’ motivation, engagement, literacy outcomes, and positive identity formation. Nevertheless, there is limited research on teacher preparation that fosters these outcomes. We explore 17 preservice teachers’ challenges and successes with culturally relevant text selection and pedagogy for their students’ literacy instruction. Data sources include reader responses, lesson plans, and reflections. Emergent coding and constant comparative analysis yielded four categories of challenges (resistance, limited view of culture, lack of knowledge about students’ cultures and identities, and lack of opportunities for students to develop critical consciousness) and three criteria for successes (knowledge about the students’ culture and identity, attention to multiple dimensions of text selection, and use of culturally relevant text selection and pedagogy in combination). Professional development should focus on supporting teachers’ learning about their students’ cultures and identities, applying this knowledge to text selection and pedagogy, and explicitly guiding this development over time

Video-Based Discussions About Literacy Pedagogy: Face-to-Face Versus Online Formats

This study evaluated the similarities and differences in 50 preservice teachers’ (PTs’) literacy pedagogy learning outcomes when they engaged in videobased discussions that were both face-to-face (F2F) synchronous and online asynchronous. Across PTs’ response sheets, 396 idea units were collected and coded to identify their reports of learning about literacy pedagogy and application of this learning to their subsequent literacy instruction. Multivariate, multilevel, cross-classification logit regressions were used to compare outcomes across formats. Findings include that PTs reported learning similar total numbers of ideas across both video-based discussion formats but reported applying significantly more ideas from learning in the F2F format. Across both formats, PTs reported learning the greatest number of ideas about literacy methods/ materials but learned significantly more methods/materials ideas in the online asynchronous format. PTs also reported applying more literacy methods/ materials than all other kinds of ideas learned. They reported applying ideas about students’ processing the least. However, the differences across formats may not be practically significant. Thus, for a semester-long course, either F2F or asynchronous online formats could be used with similar learning and application outcomes for PTs