This review of literacy education scholarship examines the ways that children’s literature is used as a resource within literacy methods courses in the preparation of preservice teachers (PTs) as transformative intellectuals. The research indicates that the use of children’s literature in literacy methods courses has served two distinct purposes: (a) to engage PTs in learning literacy instructional practices and (b) to engage PTs in building sociocultural knowledge and learning transformative (e.g., culturally relevant) pedagogies. This review is framed by Giroux’s call for educators to disrupt technocratic approaches to instruction. The findings emphasize the importance of using children’s literature with PTs to broaden PTs’ understandings of their future student’s lives, so they might engage in transformative pedagogies as future K-12 literacy educators.
Although the call for teachers to address the demographic imperative has existed for decades, recently, there has been an uptake of frameworks of multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogies, critical literacy, and others into literacy teacher preparation. In this study, we examine connections that pre-service teachers make as a result of experiences focused on sociocultural knowledge and literacy and barriers they face in building these connections. Areas of connection include examining one’s past; recognizing students’ lives and resources in literacy teaching; considering race, racism, and students’ racial identity; drawing on multilingualism as a strength of students for literacy learning; and engaging actively and inquiring into literacy.
This study is part of a larger longitudinal, multiphase study on the development of literacy mentoring practices that seeks to bring attention to the learning of cooperating teachers. In this paper we concentrate on how cooperating teachers (CTs) engage in responsive Critical Discourse Analysis while viewing and discussing videos of their coaching conversations with their preservice teachers (PTs). Our research was guided by the following question: In what ways do teachers engage in responsive CDA while watching videos of post-conferences between CTs and PTs with their colleagues? For our analysis, we examined the discourse turn by turn; focusing on interactional coaching moves and discourses of coaching using Fairclough's (1993, 2013) framework of genre, discourse, and style. Across the examples of responsive CDA the teachers used in Retrospective Coaching Analysis (RCA) for coaching, a process we developed based on Goodman's RMA, we found examples we identified as either deconstructive or reconstructive/positive discourse analysis. Thus, engaging in the work of both deconstructive and reconstructive CDA, teachers are developing tools to generate and rehearse new possibilities for their practice, both as teachers and as coaches. As a result, this collaborative work supports CTs as they become more integrated members of the university teacher preparation program.
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