Practicing Imagination and Activism in Literacy Research, Teaching, and Teacher Education: I Still Don’t Know How to Change the World With Rocks

Abstract

This address focuses on research and practice in the preparation of preservice teachers in literacy. I begin with an examination of the constructs of practice, activism, and imagination from an historical perspective. Next, I report on two initiatives in field-based literacy teacher preparation. The first initiative engages preservice teachers with inquiry as a curriculum stance. The second initiative engages preservice teachers as researchers with attention to research as too both for professional knowledge and for resistance to contentious policy environments that constrain teacher decision making. Finally, I argue for the need to become more inclusive within our community and to shift our stance from teachers as receivers of knowledge to teachers as participants in the sense-making process around practice.

“Always Trying to Dig Deeper”: The Enactment of Teaching Expertise as an Emotion-Laden Continual Learning Process

“…This angle positions asset-based views of students as central to conceptions of teacher expertise and extends work on culturally relevant, asset-based teaching that focuses on the content of curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 2009;Muhammad, 2020). This conjoined emphasis on asset-based perspectives and continual learning aligns with recent equity-oriented critiques of initial teacher preparation that have highlighted the need for teachers, if they are to disrupt oppressive pedagogical traditions, to experience inquiry-oriented learning in relation to their practices, rather than approximating established methods (Hoffman, 2020;Nash et al, 2021). Sophia's work brings this teacher education literature, developed with a focus on beginning teachers, into conversation with research on expert teachers.…”

Bringing Refutation Texts Back to Their Literacy Roots: What do Critical Literacy and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Have to Teach us About Students’ Conceptual Change?

“…Just as we have posited ways for students to build toolsets in support of becoming critical readers, we should think about how teachers, themselves, are building their own toolsets. Recent critiques from teacher educators have pointed to the more didactic elements of pedagogical practice intended to support culturally responsive teaching (Hoffman, 2020), calling for classroom structures in teacher preparation programs that more effectively model and embody the tenets of culturally responsive teaching. One relevant means by which this shift can occur is through pedagogical structures in which teachers’ perspectives and work with students are invited to function in conversation with established understandings of best practices (Nash et al, 2021).…”

“…This brings us to critical literacy, with its emphasis on the importance of reading against the grain, questioning the positionality of authors, and examining the power relationships in which each text participates. As Luke (2012) defined it, “the term critical literacy refers to use of the technologies of print and other media of communication to analyze, critique, and transform the norms, rule systems, and practices governing the social fields of everyday life” (p. 5). Although there are important distinctions among different perspectives on critical literacy (Aukerman, 2012; Muspratt et al, 1997), scholars in this tradition share the assumption that all texts, authors, and representations of reality exist within sociocultural and historical contexts that inherently involve power relationships (Lankshear et al, 1996; Luke, 2013).…”

“…In this view, the role of the teacher is to bring together clear and persuasive presentations of explanations, making explicit how these explanations are better than the learner's preexisting knowledge or beliefs. From perspectives representing critical literacy or culturally responsive pedagogy, which build on epistemological traditions that reject positivist and rationalist assumptions about human interpretation (Gutiérrez, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Luke, 2012), this positivist attitude is both ineffective and ignores the vast wealth of cultural knowledge that readers bring to reading transactions or literacy events.…”

Ways of Being in Community: Centering Preservice Teachers’ Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Field-Based Literacy Teacher Education

“…It may be that literacy teacher education needs a new kind of practice turn to decenter Whiteness and recenter being in community. Hoffman (2020), like Haddix, proposed that researchers and teacher educators have gotten in their own way by overemphasizing "oppressive and deprofessionalizing" (p. 83) lists of practices and behaviors. Hoffman's critique is that literacy teacher educators' own experiential knowledge can get in the way of real change when we come into our literacy courses with these lists.…”