Teacher Candidates’ Use of Critical Literacy to Shift Thinking about Texts and Social Justice

It is essential to support teacher candidates in becoming culturally responsive and learning about social justice in the classroom as schools across the country become more culturally and linguistically diverse. In this qualitative study, the author looked at children’s literature as a way to support teacher candidates’ learning about critical literacy and social justice. Teacher candidates constructed an annotated bibliography of children’s texts centered around a topic of their choice. Findings suggest teachers increased their understanding and use of a critical literacy lens on the literature they selected and developed a deeper understanding of the potential connections between children’s texts and social justice

“It’s just too sad!”: Teacher candidates’ emotional resistance to picture books

The use of critical literacy with children’s books that focus on social issues and disrupt the status quo can be a powerful way to create spaces for conversations with students about social justice and empowerment. Teacher candidates in a semester long children’s literature course were asked to respond to a range of children’s texts that dealt with many social issues and disrupted the commonplace. Despite an explicit emphasis on critical literacy and social justice, the candidates were very resistant to using many of the texts in their own future classrooms. They had strong emotional reactions that prevented them from consideration of how the texts could foster opportunities for students to uncover power relations in texts or to discuss ways that texts either maintain or disrupt the status quo. Data from three picture books that were cited the most frequently are shared in this paper, as well as a discussion on the implications for teacher educators who work with teacher candidates in the area of children’s literature

Interrupting Teachers\u27 Assumptions and Beliefs About English Learners Using Culturally Relevant Literature and Poetry Circles

Although classrooms across the United States continue to become more diverse, teachers are often underprepared to support the learning of immigrant students and students labeled as English learners (ELs). In the current investigation, we turn toward literature discussion using bilingual poetry with teachers to learn how participants recognize their assumptions and beliefs related to language and culture. In this phenomenological study framed with sociocultural and transactional theories, we present data related to teachers’ discussions of one bilingual poetry picture book. We share findings related to teachers’ understandings about their own assumptions, as well as personal connections to challenge those assumptions. We contend that teachers’ individual transactions and connections with literature led to interruptions in their assumptions and beliefs about students

Using Texts as Mirrors: The Power of Readers Seeing Themselves

In schools across the country and world, students enter classrooms with rich diversity in backgrounds, identities, and experiences. They speak hundreds of different languages, come from countries around the world, espouse nuanced cultural and gender identities, and have an array of abilities and interests. But texts in school and classroom collections continue to reflect the so-called mainstream with primarily White, English-dominant, cis-gendered characters without disabilities. Efforts have emerged on social media to encourage resources with relevance to children\u27s lives, but teachers often struggle to make the case for their use in instruction. In this article, we provide a framework for teachers to incorporate texts to support their unique students, drawing from existing literature and our own research on using texts as mirrors in classrooms

Teacher Educator Identity in a Culture of Iterative Teacher Education Program Design: A Collaborative Self-Study

Faculty in the School of Education at our institution have collaborated to re-envision teacher education at our university. A complex, dynamic, time-consuming and sometimes painstaking process, redesigning a teacher education program from a traditional approach (i.e., where courses focus primarily on theoretical principles of practice through textbooks and University-based classroom discussions), to a model of teacher education that embraces teaching, learning and leading with schools and in communities is challenging, yet exciting work. Little is known about teacher educators’ experiences as they either design or deliver collaborative field-based models of teacher education. In this article, we examine our experiences in the second implementation year of our redesigned teacher education program, Teaching, Learning, and Leading with Schools and Communities (TLLSC) and how these unique experiences inform our teacher educator identities. Through a collaborative self-study, we sought to make meaning of our transformation from a faculty delivering a traditional model to educators collectively implementing a field-based model, by analyzing the diverse perspectives of faculty at different entry points in the TLLSC development and implementation process. We found that our participation in an intensive field-based teacher preparation model challenged our notions of teacher educator identity. In a culture of iterative program design this study documents the personal and professional shifts in identity required to accomplish this collaborative and dynamic change in approach to teacher education

Language Matters: Developing Educators’ Expertise for English Learners in Linguistically Diverse Communities

The population of English learners (ELs) continues to grow in schools across the United States and around the world. In this article, we share one urban university’s collaborative approach to building educational capacity for cultural and linguistic diversity through professional development efforts that brought together stakeholders from classrooms, schools, communities, and districts. This grant-funded project aimed to build educator expertise to effectively support and positively influence students’ language development and disciplinary learning. Grounded in sociocultural theory, we used an apprenticeship framework of teacher development, strategically planning and implementing collaborative capacity building efforts to foster learning across individual, interpersonal, and institutional planes. In this paper, we share the results of professional development efforts across three years of this project, drawing from observation, interview, and focus group data. Findings indicate that classroom-, school-, and district-level educators developed knowledge of discipline-specific language development, pedagogical skills for effective EL teaching and learning, and leadership abilities to positively shape institutional responses to their culturally and linguistically diverse student populations. Implications focus on fostering teacher professionalism through bottom-up development of EL-specific expertise and expanded opportunities for leadership

Teaching Under Policy Cascades: Common Core and Literacy Instruction

Abstract Educational policies and initiatives significantly influence instruction in classrooms across the nation. This article presents data from a larger critical ethnographic study in an urban school in the United States during the school's first year implementing the Common Core State Standards. In this article, the author shares data from three teachers. The findings indicate a significant reliance of teachers on outside factors-in this case, the Common Core Standards and related Publishers' Criteria-for planning and instruction in literacy. The teachers' own professional knowledge base became eroded in the process of "policy cascades," and as a result, the teachers developed a learned dependency on outside influences for instructional decision making in the classroom