Why Should Students Want to Do a Close Reading?

This article explores the issue of student interest in close reading. In particular, it raises questions about the limited focus on student engagement in much of the current discourse about close reading and considers how teachers might build and sustain the student interest necessary for literacy activity, especially close reading. Specifically, we draw on sociocultural perspectives on literacy and emerging findings from our own research on teachers\u27 work with the Common Core Standards to describe a set of classroom practices we believe hold promise for facilitating engagement in close reading, particularly among students from historically underserved communities

Exploring Freirean Culture Circles and Boalian Theatre as Pedagogies for Preparing Asset-Oriented Teacher Educators

Background/Context: Teacher educator development remains an undertaking that is both understudied and underavailable as an explicit professional path, despite scholarship suggesting that teacher education’s transformative potential hinges on teacher educators’ pedagogical work. Purpose, Practice, & Participants: This article reports on a qualitative study that explored the development of teacher educators who expressed deep commitments to educational equity for minoritized youth. Fifteen current and prospective teacher educators participated over three years in situated adaptations of two critical pedagogical approaches: Freirean culture circles, where participants engaged in critical dialogue around conflicts encountered in their teacher education work that involved issues of inequity, particularly deficit-based ideas of P–12 students and their families, and Boalian theatre (or teatro), interactive role-play where participants dramatically re-enacted these conflicts and imagined potential responses to them. This study examines the ways in which these critical pedagogical spaces facilitated participants’ development as asset-oriented teacher educators. Research Design & Data Collection: This research represents an ethnographic self-study, as the authors engaged in culture circles and teatro as participant-researchers. To study these spaces of critical teacher educator development, the authors collected ethnographic data, which included semistructured interviews with each participant, field notes, and audio/video recordings of dialogue and role-play, as well as participant written reflections. Findings/Results: Through their engagement in culture circles and teatro, participants came to recognize some of the micro-pedagogies of asset-oriented teacher education, grappled with the relational dimensions of teacher learning, became familiar with possible tools of asset-oriented teacher education, and interrogated the social, political, and historical dimensions of the work. In doing so, they understood each area as linked both to specific settings and individuals and as connected to more common dilemmas that may play out across teacher education contexts. Conclusions/Recommendations: While cautioning against widespread, mechanistic implementation, the authors recognize culture circles and teatro as offering special promise for the development of asset-oriented teacher educators. In particular, findings suggest that these critical pedagogies support the conditions for learning—particularly spaces that center participants’ identities and experiential conflicts—that can cultivate complex understandings about, and tools for engaging, the contingent work of asset-oriented teacher education. Such spaces seem particularly well equipped to cultivate critical understandings deemed essential for transforming the field of teacher education

Exploring freirean culture circles and boalian theatre as pedagogies for preparing asset-oriented teacher educators

Background/Context: Teacher educator development remains an undertaking that is both understudied and underavailable as an explicit professional path, despite scholarship suggesting that teacher education\u27s transformative potential hinges on teacher educators\u27 pedagogical work. Purpose, Practice, & Participants: This article reports on a qualitative study that explored the development of teacher educators who expressed deep commitments to educational equity for minoritized youth. Fifteen current and prospective teacher educators participated over three years in situated adaptations of two critical pedagogical approaches: Freirean culture circles, where participants engaged in critical dialogue around conflicts encountered in their teacher education work that involved issues of inequity, particularly deficit-based ideas of P-12 students and their families, and Boalian theatre (or teatro), interactive role-play where participants dramatically re-enacted these conflicts and imagined potential responses to them. This study examines the ways in which these critical pedagogical spaces facilitated participants\u27 development as asset-oriented teacher educators. Research Design & Data Collection: This research represents an ethnographic self-study, as the authors engaged in culture circles and teatro as participant-researchers. To study these spaces of critical teacher educator development, the authors collected ethnographic data, which included semistructured interviews with each participant, field notes, and audio/ video recordings of dialogue and role-play, as well as participant written reflections. Findings/Results: Through their engagement in culture circles and teatro, participants came to recognize some of the micro-pedagogies of asset-oriented teacher education, grappled with the relational dimensions of teacher learning, became familiar with possible tools of asset-oriented teacher education, and interrogated the social, political, and historical dimensions of the work. In doing so, they understood each area as linked both to specific settings and individuals and as connected to more common dilemmas that may play out across teacher education contexts. Conclusions/Recommendations: While cautioning against widespread, mechanistic implementation, the authors recognize culture circles and teatro as offering special promise for the development of asset-oriented teacher educators. In particular, findings suggest that these critical pedagogies support the conditions for learning-particularly spaces that center participants\u27 identities and experiential conflicts-that can cultivate complex understandings about, and tools for engaging, the contingent work of asset-oriented teacher education. Such spaces seem particularly well equipped to cultivate critical understandings deemed essential for transforming the field of teacher education

From approximations of practice to transformative possibilities: Using Theatre of the Oppressed as rehearsals for facilitating critical teacher education

Rehearsals and other approximations of practice are often touted as effective pedagogies for preparing teachers to reproduce/replicate practices deemed universally beneficial. However, scholars have noted that reproducing practices across contexts risks undermining equity and justice. This article reports on a three-year project that examined the potential of Boalian Theater and Freirean culture circles to facilitate learning among justice-oriented teacher educators. Using an ethnographic approach, the article shows how, guided by these critical pedagogies, rehearsals can facilitate transformational learning by re-imagining responses to dilemmas of practice in equity-oriented and contextually sensitive ways

From the ground up: cultivating teacher educator knowledge from the situated knowledges of emerging, asset-oriented teacher educators

This article offers findings from a qualitative study of the development of novice, asset-oriented teacher educators in the U.S. who, over three years, engaged monthly in an informal learning space inspired by Freirean Culture Circles and Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed. The article outlines the dynamic knowledges, perspectives, and tools that emerged as central to participants’ understandings about facilitating asset-oriented learning among prospective and practicing teachers in school and university settings. The article then argues that learning arrangements designed to support the coconstruction of contextualized, embodied understandings of asset-oriented teacher education hold special promise for equipping teacher educators to transform teacher education from an enterprise that centers whiteness to one that advances equity and justice