A letter to teacher candidates at the dawn of the Trump Presidency

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to describe a letter written to undergraduate students before their enrollment in a required foundations course, Service-Learning in English Education, taken before admission to the English education program at [the university]. The course, offered in the spring of 2017, came on the heels of Donald Trump’s election to the US Presidency, an event that followed from a campaign that raged against “politically correct” social developments that respect the dignity of people historically marginalized in US society. Design/methodology/approach The letter lays out the perils of teaching a diversity-oriented course in an era of disdain for diverse people and cultures. The letter explains how the course design attempts to give all interpretive authority to the students through their selection of course books and the book club design of promoting discussion outside professorial surveillance. Findings The paper includes the comments of three students regarding their response to the letter and course, and concludes that teaching a politicized course in a tempestuous time is risky yet possible. Originality/value This paper looks at one teacher educator’s approach to introducing diversity-related ideas in a Red State during an anti-diversity presidency.

Our students are watching: navigating heightened polarization during class discussion

“…Yet, schools might be a good site to push back, a place to teach students how to deliberate effectively across and beyond differences of opinion (Smagorinsky et al, 2017). Schools are useful because of curricular opportunities to address difficult issues, the presence of teachers acting as experts in deliberation and the ideological diversity among students: "Classrooms are one of the most promising sites for teaching the skills and values necessary for deliberative democratic life" (McAvoy and Hess, 2013, p. 19) because "Political tolerance is best built through engaging in discussion with people who hold different opinions from your own" (Hess and Gatti, 2010, p. 22).…”

“…Despite this avoidance of political discussion in the classroom, research showed this type of discourse was vital to the development of students as active civic participants (Baker et al, 2016;Smagorinsky et al, 2017), particularly as the classroom is often a student's first introduction to diverging political opinions (Costello, 2016). Costello described the necessity for the inclusion of politics in the secondary classroom as preparing students for their most important job: allowing their voices to be heard as citizens.…”

“…When considering discussions, teachers need to frontload pertinent information that is necessary for success in discussion of any given topic. This can appear as selecting a text around which students will base their discussion or providing essential questions that will guide the discussion, or even laying out a teacher's explicit goals for the class (Smagorinsky et al, 2017). Glazier and Seo (2005) encouraged Grade 9 teachers to choose multicultural literature, as it lends itself to modeling voices who are often silenced through canonical curriculum and pedagogy.…”

“…(McAvoy and Hess, 2013, p. 26) The world is experiencing such a moment and indications are that things will not be getting better any time soon. Thus, effective political discussion in the classroom is under threat in an age when we need it most to counter the effects of polarization (Smagorinsky et al, 2017). While there is much to adapt from well-known and regularly practiced discussion strategies of the ELA classroom, overcoming polarization requires something more.…”

A critical multimodal framework for reading and analyzing pedagogical materials

“…Together, these images seem to suggest that even though white people may be the majority in American societies, minorities have been seamlessly integrated. The extent to which this can be argued to be true is questionable, and it is important for educators to complicate the portrayal of harmonious racial relations in this text by incorporating not only media texts but also nonfiction materials about the polarizing views of race and immigration in the current American society, some of which are discussed in the works by Daniels and Hebard (2018) and Smagorinsky et al (2017). Issues of race are important to the consideration of a critical perspective and should be foregrounded in interpretive and pedagogical practices in both L2 and L1 contexts, particularly during discussions of multimodal texts that represent racial tension as non-existent.…”