becoming a literacy teacher: approximations in critical literacy teaching
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Liverpool]On: 03 October 2014, At: 01:51Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Becoming a literacy teacher:approximations in critical literacyteachingMelissa Mosley aa Curriculum and Instruction , The University of Texas at Austin ,Austin, USAPublished online: 29 Oct 2010.
To cite this article: Melissa Mosley (2010) Becoming a literacy teacher: approximations in criticalliteracy teaching, Teaching Education, 21:4, 403-426
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Teaching EducationVol. 21, No. 4, December 2010, 403–426
ISSN 1047-6210 print/ISSN 1470-1286 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/10476210.2010.514900http://www.informaworld.com
Becoming a literacy teacher: approximations in critical literacy teaching
Melissa Mosley*
Curriculum and Instruction, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USATaylor and FrancisCTED_A_514900.sgm(Received 18 May 2009; final version received 7 January 2010)10.1080/10476210.2010.514900Teaching Education1047-6210 (print)/1470-1286 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis214000000December [email protected]
The new literacy studies (NLS) is a tradition of research that includesethnographic work on literacy that has many applications for classroom teachers.The NLS include explorations of local literacies and critical literacy as well as thenotion of literacy itself. When teachers draw on the NLS, students are able to drawon their practices in critical and transformative ways. However, NLS perspectiveshave not been used to examine how teachers are prepared in pre-service programsand the ways critical literacy practices develop. This paper examines how two pre-service teachers learn to take up definitions of local literacies in their work withstudents from racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse backgrounds inpracticum settings. They use approximations in literacy teaching to designpractices with students, demonstrating the process of becoming a teacher ofliteracy. I conclude with recommendations for teacher educators who areinterested in supporting such approximations.
Keywords: teacher education curriculum
Introduction
In the early 1980s, Shirley Brice Heath (1983) suggested ways in which schools mightbe more successful in teaching students who have diverse languages and cultures. Shedocumented how learning to read and write occurs as children are apprenticed into acommunity’s ways with words. Drawing on the tools of ethnography of communica-tion, Heath looked at patterns in the speech acts of several communities and also thecultural meanings associated with such practices. She found children in each commu-nity to have a range of practices that were not recognized or valued as literacy in school.She suggested that teachers could use knowledge of local literacies, both the languageand cultural meanings of language, to shape curriculum. And, she engaged teachers inimplementing this work. She described literacies as local, situated, and purposeful andstudying literacy as a practice used to build curriculum from the bottom-up.
For 25 years, researchers followed Heath’s work with explorations of literacy inlocal contexts, emphasizing the situated nature of literacy practices. Researchers haveexplored how local literacies are maintained by social groups and how newcomers(including children) are apprenticed into such communities (Luke, 1991; Street,1993). Researchers have drawn on theories from multiple disciplines to make sense ofthe cultural meanings of local literacies within relations of power, within institutions,and across time and space. Finally, researchers have explored how those practices are
*Email: [email protected]
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linked to identity formation (see Bartlett & Holland, 2002; Pahl, 2004). This body ofwork is known as the new literacy studies (NLS), a tradition of research that includesethnographic work on local practices of literacy.
Street (2003) describes NLS as a ‘tradition’ of looking at literacy as a local prac-tice and as a social practice. He writes:
This entails the recognition of multiple literacies, varying according to time and space,but also contested in relations of power. NLS, then, takes nothing for granted withrespect to literacy and the social practices with which it becomes associated, problema-tizing what counts as literacy at any time and place and asking ‘whose literacies’ aredominant and whose are marginalized or resistant. (Street, 2003, p. 77)
Two aspects to the new literacy studies are put forward in this definition. First,there are multiple local literacies within any context, and second, literacy is not polit-ically neutral. Researchers working in NLS not only document local literacies but alsoask questions about how those literacies are viewed by others, both in the presentmoment and historically (see Finders, 1997; Hicks, 2002; Jones, 2006).
Extensions, reactions, and critiques of NLS perspectives have emerged in the lastdecade (Brandt & Clinton, 2002; Grenfell, 2009; Street, 2003). For example, Brandtand Clinton (2002) pointed out the limits of focusing on the local when trying tounderstand communities and their literacies as opposed to focusing on the relation-ship between local literacies and global shifts in technology, communication, andpolitics and power in society (see Gee, 2000; Pahl & Rowsell, 2006). Heller (2008)and Grenfell (2009) point out that the field of literacy, in a Bourdieusian sense, hasbeen largely ignored (see Carrington & Luke, 1997). That is, studying literacy fromthe NLS perspective might extend our notions of what literacy is (multiliteracies, etc)but as a research community, NLS scholars have failed to problematize how literacyas a construct values particular practices and re-inscribes those practices throughsocial institutions such as schools (Heller, 2008). These critiques apply to an audienceof researchers and have implications for the preparation of teachers. If NLS is takenup as pedagogical perspective in classrooms, the result might be a set of practices thatare expansive in terms of definitions of literacy but not transformative for students orfor society.
This paper reports on a study of how pre-service teachers learn to teach in theirpracticum settings. The study is situated within NLS and inquires into the ways pre-service teachers begin to use critical literacy (see Freebody & Luke, 1990; Luke &Freebody, 1999) to not only extend but to shift the meanings of literacy in a literacypracticum. The NLS has not been applied to studies of teacher learning within teachereducation, and here, is explored as a framework to examine how pre-service teacherslearn to take up definitions of local literacies in their work with students from racially,linguistically, and culturally diverse backgrounds.
Teaching from an NLS perspective
When students’ own languages and practices are centered in the curriculum, they haveincreased chances to connect with texts and to make meaning of reading and writing(see Delpit, 1995; Godley, Carpenter, & Werner, 2007). Teaching from an NLSperspective has the potential to center the literacies students bring to classrooms.Beyond making connections to texts, the incorporation of local literacies into the curric-ulum can be very powerful for students and teachers. In the area of critical literacy,
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for example, teachers have considered how students and teachers can use literacies fromtheir communities to interrogate injustices and imagine solutions (see Ferreira & Janks,2007; Gutierrez, 2008; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002). These literacies are alreadypresent in communities, but often there are limited opportunities for students to drawon such literacies as part of their learning (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005).
Engaging with NLS requires shifts in how teachers view literacy and, particularly,how they imagine possibilities of literacy pedagogy. Most of the research that docu-ments this learning occurs in professional development settings where inservice teach-ers engage in critical literacy explorations with their students (see Comber & Kamler,2004; Lewison, Flint, & Van Sluys, 2002; McIntyre, 2003). Teachers have also beeninvolved in projects in which digital literacies are centered in the attempt to broadenstudents’ tools for constructing texts (see Hull & Schultz, 2002). A focus on technol-ogy and digital literacies often draws on students’ local literacies and provides spacefor students to look at the connections between their practices and sweeping shifts inhow we as a society communicate online (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). Both kinds ofexperiences as presented in the literature are powerful for classroom teachers, inparticular for the ways teachers begin to recognize literacy as political and literacyteaching as a political act. Many accounts of professional development programs illus-trate how teachers are supported in developing such practices (Comber & Kamler,2004; Rogers & The Group, 2005; Rogers, Mosley, & Kramer, 2009a). However,there are fewer studies of how such literacy pedagogy develops within a pre-serviceeducation program.
Considering NLS in pre-service literacy teacher education
There is building evidence that good literacy teaching can be learned in a supportiveenvironment such as a literacy practicum (Association, 2007; Maloch et al., 2003;Mosley, Hoffman, Roach, & Russell, 2010). The impact of new literacy studies isbecoming more evident in studies of teacher learning. Some teacher educators arebeginning to incorporate books and articles into their coursework that draw on NLSperspectives and critical literacy pedagogy (see Pahl & Rowsell, 2005; Vasquez,2003). In many studies that look at how pre-service teachers teach students in practi-cum and how they talk about such practices, the focus has been on cultural responsive-ness, care, and on particular practices of teaching reading and writing (see Turner,2006; Worthy & Patterson, 2001). Researchers have also considered shifts in defini-tions of literacies and use of critical literacy within the teacher education classroom aswell (see Assaf, 2005; McVee, 2004). There are fewer accounts of how definitions andtheories are built during a practicum of the pre-service program (for exceptions, seeDozier, Johnston, & Rogers, 2006; Mosley, in press). For the most part, the researchcommunity has not studied just how pre-service teachers learn to take up local litera-cies and critical literacy pedagogy in their teaching. Nor have they taken a look at theways that literacy practicum are shaped by the practices that pre-service teachersdesign with and for students (Heller, 2008).
Attention to how pre-service teachers learn to draw on local literacies in powerfulways with students is particularly important in the current policy context in the US.Current policy in reading and language arts calls for literacy teachers to adhere to stan-dards that are situated in more traditional views of literacy than NLS offers. Withinstate standards for reading and language arts and the forthcoming Common Core StateStandards for K-12 education, literacy is defined as an individual activity, divorced
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from social context. In contrast, pre-service teachers are usually taught theories ofmultiliteracies, introduced to teaching literacy using digital technology, and encour-aged to adopt culturally responsive literacy practices. Surprisingly, little researchexists on how teachers are prepared to deal with the tensions between NLS frame-works and more reductive notions of literacy (Barr, 2000; Rogers, Mosley, & Kramer,2009b).
The study reported here draws on the New Literacies Framework to examine howpre-service teachers design critical literacy practices in a literacy practicum. The largerstudy focuses on the learning of four pre-service teachers introduced to multiple frame-works for teaching literacy, including NLS, critical literacy, critical race perspectives,and culturally responsive practices. The article focuses on two of these pre-serviceteachers and their practices with students in a practicum. The author was the researcherand a co-instructor of the practicum. After a description of the theoretical lens, twocases of how the pre-service teachers drew on students’ local literacies are presented,followed by a discussion of the cases in terms of the approximations each pre-serviceteacher made while learning to teach (Cambourne, 2001). To foreshadow the conclu-sions, each pre-service teacher, through multiple tries with critical literacy teaching,constructed a set of practices for herself as a literacy teacher. Finally, the notion ofsedimentation is developed to interpret the construction of pedagogical practices(Rowsell & Pahl, 2007) and present implications for literacy teacher educators.
Theoretical frameworks
Literacy practices
From an NLS perspective, literacy occurs as people interact with texts in purposefulways (Barton & Hamilton, 2000). Literacy practices, like speech events, include boththe practices that involve texts that people engage with as well as the cultural mean-ings of such practices (Street, 2003). Take, for example, what a teacher might saywhen a student is struggling to decode an unknown word. If the teacher says, ‘Whatpart of that word are you sure about and what part are you not sure about’, she is usinga particular practice here (Johnston, 1997). Teaching reading strategies is a literacypractice, one that teachers use to help students develop a self-extending system as areader (Clay, 1993). However, in the use of this particular practice, cultural meaningsare also signaled (for example, readers come to a problem with a set of set of strate-gies). Literacy practices are learned as people enter into new situations with texts,monitored and scaffolded by others who have an interest in their learning and in suchpractices (Gee, 2008). The reproduction of literacy practices is not politically neutral,however. As Luke (2008) pointed out, students often reject sanctioned literacy prac-tices because of the cultural meanings of such practices, leading to their exclusion insuch practices, in ways that maintain the social and economic order of society.
In the chapter ‘Pedagogy as gift’, Luke (2008) points out that teachers and studentshave the potential power to expand literacy education, ‘They have as availableresources blends of traditional and radical, didactic and dialogic, rote and constructiv-ist pedagogies’ (p. 89). Luke points out that a ‘positive pedagogical model’ mightinclude critical literacies, such as ‘critical, self-reflexive pedagogy… to explore,analyze, weigh, and critique the social fields where educational acquired capital isdeployed’ (p. 78). Luke points out that the development of such a habitus, inBourdieu’s term, is akin to other models of reproduction, in which teachers engagestudents in particular discursive practices that align with their own. In order to
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acknowledge and move forward from reproduction in this sense, teachers must findways to recognize and work with and through the literacies that students bring to peda-gogical spaces (i.e., draw on the expertise of the community to model and scaffoldstudents’ literacies). An approach to teaching literacy requires active design betweenteachers and students.
The notion of ‘design’ is a fundamental part of an NLS perspective (Jewitt &Kress, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). For the most part, in the field of literacy,design has referred to the use of multiple sign systems (speech, gesture, image, andideologies) (Kress, 2003; Siegel, 2006). In studies of critical literacies, researchershave looked at how students move beyond the boundaries of written and verbal textand consider how image, movement, and layout create a message (Siegel, 2006).Janks, a critical literacy scholar, writes:
Design encompasses the idea of productive power – the ability to harness the multiplicityof semiotic systems across diverse cultural locations to challenge and change existingDiscourses. It recognizes the importance of human creativity and students’ ability togenerate an infinite number of new meanings. (Janks, 2000, p. 177)
The notion of design suggests that students and teachers become critically literateby discovering patterns in how semiotic resources are used to construct socially justliteracy practices. For example, researchers have documented young children’s use ofpractices from the civil rights movement (organizing, boycotts, writing public letters)to construct texts that question social practices in their local communities such asdiscrimination (Mosley & Rogers, 2008; Rogers & Mosley, 2006; Vasquez, 2004).Through design, students focused on rhetorical strategies and what it looks like,sounds like and feels like to reproduce the practices of critical literacy for socialaction. Critical literacy scholars still have work ahead to understand the ways in whichlocal literacies become part of the design process, and in particular, what conditionsand discursive practices are present.
Conditions of learning
Learning occurs when students become users of particular practices. When trying onnew practices for a particular purpose, experimentation and revision may occur. Thatis, students may draw on many resources to design a practice but decide that aresource is not effective or desirable and shift our use of such a resource. Cambournecalled this notion ‘approximations’ and described it as one dimension of the condi-tions of language learning for young children (Cambourne, 2000). He writes:
When learning to talk, learner–talkers are not expected to wait until they havelanguage fully under control before they’re allowed to use it. Rather they are expectedto ‘have a go’ (i.e., to attempt to emulate what is being demonstrated). Their childishattempts are enthusiastically, warmly, and joyously received. Baby talk is perceived asa legitimate, relevant, meaningful, and useful contribution to the context. There is noanxiety about these unconventional forms becoming permanent fixtures in the learner’srepertoire. Those who support the learner’s language development expect these imma-ture forms to drop out and be replaced by conventional forms. And they do.(Cambourne, 2000, pp. 185–186)
Cambourne explored classrooms as ecological spaces in which this conditionamong others support learners over time in their development.
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Teachers, as well as students, learn through design. When first implementing prac-tices that have been demonstrated and discussed in teacher education classrooms,educators ask that pre-service teachers ‘have a go’. These practices are not anendpoint, but relevant, meaningful, and useful attempts and opportunities for criticalreflection and discussion. In particular, the design of critical literacy practices withinan NLS perspective is highly contextual. This report of the practices of two pre-serviceteachers in an elementary literacy practicum explores a process to understand approx-imations in their design of critical literacy practices in a particular context, the literacypracticum. Drawing on interviews, fieldnotes, their coursework and lesson plans, andvideos of their teaching with one young student, the following question is addressed:What is the nature of pre-service teachers’ approximations of critical literacy teachingin a teacher preparation program as they design literacy practices with their students?
Research design
Context
At a Midwestern university in an elementary teacher preparation program, 19 pre-service teachers were placed in a cohort in a program based on three guiding principlesthat ‘foster a critical/social orientation to teaching and support a commitment togreater equity and social justice’ (program document, collected fall 2003):1 first,teacher education graduates are committed to equitable and just education for allstudents; second, teacher education graduates know the subjects they teach well andknow how to teach; and third, teacher education graduates enact the role of a teacheras an inquirer. All three principles were explicitly linked to descriptions of the waysthat teachers are prepared to promote learning by all students, the content and peda-gogical knowledge of teaching within different disciplines, and the tools of leadershipand inquiry that would be taught in coursework.
The program document concluded with the following statement:
Each principle provides a lens that teachers can use to continually assess the teaching/learning context as well as the professional climate, to reflect on the result of their prac-tices and assessments and to design programs and learning opportunities in response tothe needs of the learners in their classrooms.
In this document, there was a clear emphasis on the teacher as someone who is adecision-maker, a curriculum builder, a teacher, and a reflective pedagogue.
Within the literacy program, the practicum aligned with the program goals. Myco-instructor and I held courses in a historically black neighborhood school calledLiddell Elementary. We placed the pre-service teacher as a tutor in a school in anurban, low-income area, a context where equitable education was a relevant issue. Weengaged pre-service teachers in literacy work with first and second graders in a read-ing lab setting, during school hours, once per week for one hour. In the practicum, thepre-service teachers, as tutors, were asked to teach students in equitable ways, provid-ing well-planned, individualized, and culturally responsive instruction (Ladson-Billings, 1994). Linked to the second program guiding principle, the pre-serviceteachers were asked to read a number of professional books and articles about literacyteaching and learning that worked from different perspectives, from constructivereading assessment (Clay, 1993; Johnston, 1997) to a critical literacy model (Comber,Thomson, & Wells, 2001; Powell, Cantrell, & Adams, 2001). In regards to the final
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program guiding principle, pre-service teachers were responsible for planning instruc-tion based on informal and formal assessments, frequently writing case studies andsubmitting lesson plans and reflections to demonstrate their inquiry.
Positionality of the researcher
At the time of the study, I was a doctoral student working on my dissertation study onpre-service teacher learning in literacy. I now am a teacher educator who draws on thework of this dissertation in my current research and teaching. My experience alsoincludes elementary teaching in the area of critical race pedagogy and critical literacy.The participants knew me for two years, both as a co-instructor in their courses and asa researcher who was studying teacher learning. The four participants, who I describebelow, became a small learning community through their participation in this study.We talked often about how the study was shaping their practice, and each participantfelt they learned more because they were part of this study. Each participant read aninitial case study I wrote for the dissertation and provided feedback, which was wovenback into the case studies and informed the findings of this study.
Participants
The four participants who participated in all three phases were demographically repre-sentative of the teaching field in the US but diverse in their religious, socioeconomic,and geographic backgrounds. I chose two participants, Leslie and Melanie, in thisparticular article to explore the research questions. Both grew up in the same citywhere this study took place. Leslie Barton is a White middle class female, who iden-tified as both Jewish and Christian. Leslie majored in elementary education andanthropology and was a member of the Literacy for Social Justice Teacher ResearchGroup. After college, she moved to a nearby city and taught fourth grade in a publicschool. Leslie is devoted to teaching practices that promote justice and build commu-nity in her classroom. Melanie Landon identified as a White, Jewish, middle classfemale. Melanie valued her experiences working in the classroom, and she did practi-cum work at the same elementary school where she was a student as well as the practi-cum at Liddell Elementary. Melanie was interested in literacy teaching and indicatedthat she would pursue a master’s degree in literacy. She secured employment as a firstgrade teacher in the school district that borders the university, an urban-suburbandistrict that is racially and economically diverse.
Data collection
Data collection proceeded in three phases, and this report comes primarily from theanalysis of first phase data. The first phase occurred in a year-long literacy methodscourse and there were 19 participants. It is indicated throughout this paper whetherdata came from Phase IA (first semester) or Phase IB (second semester), Phase II(student teaching), or Phase III (interview study).
Phase I
Four video recordings were collected while Melanie worked with Latisha and fivewhile Leslie worked with Martin. Leslie and Melanie both worked with the same
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student across two semesters. The videos are approximately one hour in length andwere recorded in a room where other pairs were tutoring. In the first semester of theliteracy courses, Leslie and Melanie wrote a ‘Guided reading paper’, reflecting on asingle guided reading lesson, one that was recorded as part of this study. Similarly,each participant wrote two case study reports, one at the end of each semester, thatserve as reflective data on tutoring events.
Data also include video recordings of peer debriefing sessions after recordedlessons that were part of required coursework. These data serve as immediate reflec-tion and description of a tutoring session. These debriefings, occurring immediatelyafter a session, were not led by myself or my co-instructor. Rather, a camera was setup to record but we were not present for the conversation. During this time, my co-instructor and I were meeting individually with pre-service teachers to talk about ourdaily observations.
Interviews occurred at the beginning and end of the first phase of data collection.They were semi-structured. The first was audio recorded and the second was videorecorded.
Phase II
The second phase, during participants’ student teaching semester, documented thedesign and implementation of an action research project. There were four participantsin this phase, selected because they agreed to be in this phase and met the researchcriteria. There were post-baccalaureate students in the original group of participants,but the decision was made in Phase II to focus on the students who were seeking anundergraduate degree. Data included fieldnotes collected during a course on teachingand learning that accompanied the student teaching practicum and videos of partici-pants working together on their action research projects while student teaching.
Table 1. Phases of data collection.
Phase Description Examples of data collected
IA Literacy methods course and practicum (Semester 1)
Video recordings of tutoring sessionsVideo recordings of seminar discussionsCoursework (i.e., guided reading paper, journal
entries)Transcripts of audio-recorded initial interviews
(2 hours total per participant)IB Literacy methods course and
practicum (Semester 1)Video recordings of tutoring sessionsVideo recordings of seminar discussionsCoursework (i.e., final case study of a tutee;
journal entries)Transcripts of video-recorded final interviews
(2 hours total per participant)II Student teaching and action
research Illustrations of the preservice teachers’ learning
over timeTranscripts of video recorded small group
meetings (5 hours total per participant)III Interview study (focus group
and individual interviews)Illustrations of the preservice teachers’ learning
over timeTranscripts of video recorded interviews
(5 hours total per participant)
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Phase III
The third phase of the research was a two-hour interview study, in which the four focalstudents worked together to construct artifacts of their learning over time in relationto literacy teaching and learning. Each participant also participated in an individualinterview in this phase of the research that lasted two hours. The third phase occurredduring the last semester of the participants’ undergraduate degree, the semester afterstudent teaching was over.
Data analysis
The first layer of analysis involved reconstructing each participant’s journey throughthe program into ethnographic case studies and a cross-case analysis (Carspecken,1996; Geertz, 1973; Merriam, 1998). Then, the literacy teaching practices from theyear that they tutored a first or second grader were analyzed using a hybrid critical andmediated discourse analysis of teaching practices (Norris, 2004; Scollon, 2001).Emergent themes included changes in literacy definitions, changing notions of thepolitical contexts of teaching, and ways that participants drew across multiple frame-works for teaching including critical literacy and multiliteracies pedagogy.
Two examples of literacy teaching were chosen from each case as data for thisexploration. Learning to teach literacy is an embodied act of ‘designing’ in which pre-service teachers draw on an array of modalities, including verbal conversation,gestures, emotions, movement, rhythm and music, and writing (Street, 2003). Multi-modal discourse analysis focused on how participants designed ways of interactingwith students using books, pencils, paper; ways of moving the body in response to afeeling or a rhythm of a poem; and layouts of space such as movement of a finger fromleft to right and sitting in a chair at a table (Levine & Scollon, 2004).
Critical discourse analysis was employed to examine patterns in talk across theorders of discourse in social interactions. Fairclough’s notion of orders of discoursewas used to analyze the genre, discourse, and style of the interactions (Fairclough,1995; Rogers, 2004). Genre reflects the structure of the utterance, whereas discoursemakes a statement about the world. Style includes a speaker’s position in relation tothe discourse, such as affiliation with that discourse. The following questions guidedmy analysis of multimodality in the design of literacy practices.
Looking at the genre of interactions, what were the literacy practice/s in use? Whatlanguage was the pre-service teacher using to construct those practices? How did thepre-service teacher structure the stories she tells about such events, and accomplishpositioning herself as a certain kind of literacy teacher in these stories? Whatdiscourses about race, culture, relationships, and literacy peppered the interactionsbetween participants and their students and peers about teaching? How did thosediscourses change across contexts and times? Finally, what was the style of the inter-action? How did the participant perform role of teacher, learner, partner, and friend intheir work with students in the literacy practicum? How did she construct storylinesabout her role vis-à-vis their students?
In this article, the moments in these two cases when it appeared that the pre-serviceteacher was using powerful teaching techniques in ways that were moving towardscritical literacy teaching are of central focus. The multimodal and critical discourseanalysis of the practices provided insight into how language and other action shiftedacross lessons but also how the participant described her practices in narratives aboutlessons and events (Mosley & Johnson, 2007; Wortham, 2001).
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Melanie and Leslie’s literacy teaching practices were situated in a particular context,a literacy practicum that was tied to two courses in their literacy teacher educationprogram. All of the practices of this class were centered on the idea that the tutor selectstexts – usually children’s literature – that either draw the tutee into a particular discus-sion of a social issue or draw the tutee into reading and problem solving. The tutor/tutee relationship, however, developed thoughtful conversations around those texts andwriting that occurred during the sessions. Another layer of meaning about these eventswas added in the interviews in which pre-service teachers described their sessions, thedesign of literacy practices within those sessions, and their pedagogical choices.
Melanie’s literacy teaching
Melanie, more than any other participant, talked in interviews and papers about howmuch she learned through the experiences in practicum. Latisha, a second grader atLiddell Elementary was a key player in Melanie’s learning. In this section, I describethe texts and conversations that were a part of Melanie’s work with Latisha, and alsohow she designed her practices using movement and music and critical literacy peda-gogy. I concentrate on two texts, The best thing (Williams, n.d.), a book Melanie usedin December and Jazz baby (Weatherford, n.d.), a book Melanie used in April.Melanie worked with Latisha from September through May, so examples of herteaching were recorded well into her work with Latisha.
The best thing: approximations with critical literacy
Throughout the year, Melanie demonstrated through her teaching that her role was toteach her student strategies to be a better reader. She focused on practices such asasking questions to prompt for understanding and pointing to words to keep thestudent on track. Melanie wrote, ‘When I am reading with my student, I find that shewill say more words correctly when I point to the word that we are reading. I thinkthis helps her keep her place as well as it helps slow her down’ (Melanie’s journalentry, 11 October 2004).
Melanie used questioning and teacher-led strategy instruction within her tutoringsessions. In one particular lesson, Melanie chose a guided reading book for Latisha toreread:
The reason that I chose The next best thing [sic] for a reread was that I wasn’t sure ifLatisha really understood what it meant to be adopted and how families can still be differ-ent (example: single mom, having a child be adopted, gay couple, etc). I wanted to rereadthis book again so this time Latisha doesn’t struggle so much with the language of thebook, but more on the meaning. (Guided reading paper, Phase IB, 7 December 2004)
Melanie described this lesson as an attempt to move beyond a first reading of abook, in which decoding the words was a priority, to concentrate on the meaning ofthe story, or comprehension. In the following excerpt from Melanie’s book introduc-tion of The best thing, she leaned over the book with her hands resting above thepages. She tilted her head and began:2
Melanie: [Reads title and points] The best thing. What do you think she means by this?Latisha: [Looks down.]M: Why would she call this book The best thing?
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L: Maybe its fun adopting another child? [Looks up at Melanie with a question-ing look?]
M: Well, do you think the mom wrote this book or it’s from the kid’s point ofview?
L: The kid’s point of view.M: The kid’s point of view. [Points to picture.]M: So do you think the kid likes being adopted?L: [Nods.]M: What do you know about adoption? [Folds arms, looks at Latisha.] Can you
tell me? Do you know it’s when um, sometimes it could be a mom or dad orboth of them together or different kinds of families. Well, they really want akid. So they will bring that kid into their family and then they have anothermember of their family. (Transcript from video, Phase IA, 30 November 2004)
Melanie’s practices, verbal and nonverbal, served to provide and reinforce a singleperspective on adoption, that childless families adopt children (‘they really want akid’). Her body language, a leaning down position with clasped hands, suggested thatperhaps she was uncomfortable with Latisha’s engagement in her book introduction.Melanie used questions to keep control of the conversation when Latisha provided apartial understanding of what the book was about and to construct certain storylinesabout families. When Latisha did respond to Melanie’s questions, Melanie eitheraffirmed her answer by repeating the answer or disconfirmed her answer by askinganother question. Critical literacy teaching asks students and teachers together toconstruct meaning from texts in powerful ways. However, in this interaction, Melanie’sbody and questions are closed, limiting the possibility for co-construction.
From her course paper in which she told a narrative about this event, Melanie wrote:
Latisha’s response [about cousins living in the house] made me glad that I chose thisbook because I could show her that not everyone has their cousins living with them. It isreally hard to show a child that people are different than them, especially if they don’tsee it in their daily lives… Latisha said that ‘families are different if they got no mom ordad’. I thought this was a very compelling statement because it clearly shows thatLatisha understands the ‘typical American family’ that everyone wants to be a part ofthat isn’t present as much as it has been previously. (Guided reading paper, Phase IB, 7December 2004)
Melanie’s use of critical literacy is an approximation: she hoped to engage inconversations about difference with Latisha through her choice of text but did not co-construct meaning with her student. She articulated her aim to present a positive notionof diversity by carefully choosing The best thing. However, her use of questioning strat-egies and positioning of Latisha demonstrated that she did not know how to constructthis conversation in a way that centered Latisha’s experiences and knowledge. Melaniewas approximating critical literacy teaching in a way that may ring true to teachereducators: relying on book choice rather than on the design of practices that are power-ful for understanding texts. In this way, she centered the notions of diversity and familythat she thought would expand Latisha’s experience. This approximation was perhapsa missed opportunity to enter into a space of negotiation or dialogic exchange.
Jazz baby: designing texts and practices in synchrony
Melanie assumed in The best thing lesson that her use of a multicultural text mightexpand Latisha’s understandings of the world. A later interview quote also suggested
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that she was thinking deeply about her choices of texts in terms of what books mightengage Latisha also in the act of reading in ways that were valued in the context of thetutoring practicum:
And I remember having like multiple conversations with people about you know, whatkind of literature do you select for younger children, and like just finding out what theywere doing in their sessions with their students, I think that we were all just talkingtogether like that, and I know I was talking a lot to Janet, cause her student was proba-bly at the same level as mine. And sometimes collaborating, ‘Oh this lesson wentreally well for me’, you know, ‘Did this go so well with you?’ and lots of hand gestureand using each other’s success and going off of that. (Interview, Phase III, 30 May2006)
Melanie’s report above occurred in April, when her classmate Janet used a bookcalled Jazz baby (Weatherford, n.d.) with her student. Jazz baby incorporatesonomonopia, rhythmic movement, and lively illustrations.3 In this quote, she refer-enced her many conversations with other students in her class, indicating an engage-ment with some of the opportunities afforded through the program structure,specifically the multiple chances for debriefing and building knowledge sociallywithin the course. Melanie took advantage of opportunities to debrief with her peersand reflect on her teaching. She implemented new kinds of literacy teaching, askedquestions about her teaching, and as we see in the following example, learned what itlooks like and sounds like to engage with Latisha in literacy practices.
At this point in the semester, Melanie was becoming more adept at describing whatstrategies Latisha used as a reader. The following is an excerpt from a peer debriefingsession just before she took Janet’s lead and used the book:
She was so engaged in what we were talking about, that she was really fighting to figurethose words out, by herself. And really trying to stretch the words out. I guess she wastrying to get through it as quickly as she could, but to make sure that she got it. Becauseshe wanted to know what we were going to discuss next. (Transcript from Peer Debrief-ing, Phase IB, 12 April 2005)
In this excerpt, Melanie described her discussion with Latisha as ‘meaning-based’, which meant that the mechanics of reading and writing were aimed towardsmeaning-making. Melanie’s choice of The best thing reflected her desire to expandLatisha’s thinking about diversity, reading to learn, which was not the focus of thislesson. What was of central importance here was Melanie’s engagement of Latishain the kinds of practices that reflect learning to read. This shift illustrates theentrance of design into Melanie’s practices: she drew on the notions of engagement,of the reading process, and a text that engaged the reader in new modes of repre-sentation.
The next week, Melanie again chose Jazz baby (Weatherford, n.d.). In her narra-tive of this tutoring event in an interview, Melanie’s gaze was steady and intent as shetold the following narrative about the lesson. I encouraged her talk using the phrase‘mm hmm’:
And so, and this had like come up before that she really liked jazz music and she reallyliked music and because she, we had written, I think, the week before about, like, Nelly4
[mm hmmm] and her interest with her mother [mm hmmm] and so I chose this book aslike one of the ones she could pick from because I knew she’d be more engaged in thetext. (Interview, Phase IB, 15 May 2005)
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Melanie used the adverb ‘really’ to emphasize the affinity between her student andthe genre of text she chose. She also emphasized the relationship between her studentand herself. Melanie’s relationship with Latisha was building, and she was relying onthat relationship as an additional element to design her instruction. Melanie was alsopaying attention to Latisha’s interests and building these lessons across the sessionsrather than thinking of them individually. Her use of the book was an example ofreflection on lessons and using those reflections to plan out future lessons.
Although this text was difficult for Latisha, she was engaged with the genre ofmusic, which helped her access the text using her strategies for reading. Melaniefurther supported her by asking open-ended questions as Latisha read the book, a tech-nique that her instructors had reinforced throughout our observations and modeling.Melanie connected the book to a writing activity, leading Latisha to write a song,using rhythm. After Latisha wrote a line of text, they would read it together, snappingtheir fingers to see if the beat sounded right.
Here is the text of Latisha’s poem:5
Jazz Baby
Jazz baby, jazz baby/ move the bow/ across the violen [sic] as we go.Jazz baby, jazz baby/ move your feet/ across the floor to the beat.Jazz baby, jazz baby/ Sing to the beat./ crump and stomp in your seat.Jazz baby, jazz baby/ blink your eye/ as we sing right on by.
The text of this song mirrors the language in the book; however, Latisha andMelanie designed new lyrics. Latisha brought resources from the text but also used herbody to perform her very own jazz baby text. The text was co-constructed andreflected repeated readings and discussions about the language and the rhythm of jazz.
In contrast to the lesson The best thing (Williams, n.d.), Melanie’s teaching in thislesson was based on a relationship that she built with her student and was grounded inpedagogical theory about critical literacy instruction. The student was not engaged inthe deconstruction of the text in order to learn a ‘lesson’; instead, the student and theteacher together used the text as a tool towards new literate practices. Melanie andLatisha brought together multiple modes, text and music, and in their conversations,drew on these modes to read and write. In the performance of the event, they addedmovement (dance) to the text of their conversations. The modality of the eventreflected and created a collective identity: an identity that we do things together, wecollaborate to read and write, and we are ‘in sync’. I return to this point later, but hereit is important to note that pedagogies of multiliteracies, as put forward by The NewLondon Group (1996), include the design of such practices that ask teachers andstudents to consider the affordances and grammar of modes to design new texts. Inaddition, the text constructed in the session had an audience: Janet and her student,the video camera, etc. Melanie and Latisha made a mark on the field of the literacypracticum with this text.
Leslie’s literacy teaching
Melanie and Latisha’s performance reflected and influenced changes in the literacypracticum. As new modalities came into the sessions, my co-instructor and I saw recog-nizable shifts in relationships, energy, and engagement. Leslie, another pre-serviceteacher, and Martin, a second grader at Liddell Elementary, provide another look at
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the literacy practices in this context of the practicum. This section reports the texts andconversations that were a part of Leslie’s sessions, and like Melanie, how she designedher practices using rhythm and music and critical literacy pedagogy. The two guidedreading lessons center on the texts, The best thing (Williams, n.d.), the same bookMelanie used, and Summer sun risin’ (Nikola-Lisa, n.d.), a book Leslie used in April.
The best thing: approximations with critical literacy
Like Melanie, Leslie used the book, The best thing (Williams, n.d.). Leslie linked heruse of the text to the photographs that Martin took with a camera (Fieldnotes, PhaseIA, 30 November 2004). Leslie reported, ‘This book provided a great example of astory about a family; it also contained many social messages that allowed for discus-sions about adoption, friendship, and the meaning of the word baby-sits as each cameup in the book’ (Guided reading lesson paper, Phase IA, 7 December 2004). Ratherthan focus heavily on the themes of the book, Leslie used this book to set up a writingactivity: Martin would use his photographs from home to write what was on his mind(Harste, 2003), to compose meaningful texts using words and images.
Leslie took on the task of deconstructing big ideas with Martin during her earlyteaching, as we will see below. In the book introduction, Leslie planted importantphrases to support Martin’s reading of the text. Leslie brought Martin’s attention tothe visual cues in words, the letter–sound relationships and the meaning of the story.While Martin was reading, Leslie read his nonverbal cues, his intent look at the bookand his finger on his chin, to find out when Martin had a question about somethingthat he was reading.
Martin used the gesture and gaze pictured above to tell Leslie that he was stuck ona word and she prompted him with self-extending phrases such as ‘that doesn’t makesense, does it?’ and ‘what can you look for in that word?’ As Melanie did with Jazzbaby (Weatherford, n.d.), Leslie used the text to teach strategies for decoding andreading behaviors. As Leslie and Martin read together, a discussion emerged. At thismoment, both Leslie and Martin were focused on the text and illustrations. Martinleaned over the book and Leslie asked, ‘What are you thinking?’
Martin: I wonder why she’s adopted, if they can become friends.Leslie: What makes you wonder that question?M: I don’t know if different colored people can be friends. I don’t know about
those people.L: You don’t know if they can be friends? [Places finger on lips.]M: [Shakes head.]L: Why don’t you think they could be friends?M: Because they come from a different… [shrugs and opens arms].L: A different…M: Country, or…L: Do you remember the book when we read A friend for little white rabbit
[Randell, 1994], when the white rabbit and brown rabbit became friends, right?And these [sic] they can become friends too even though they are fromdifferent countries. They look a lot the same, don’t they?
Martin: A little.L: They do. All right.
Martin raised a question about race and friendship, a question related to the mean-ing of the story. Perhaps, this was a move to show his awareness of the racial differ-ence between him and his tutor. Leslie picked up this thread and prompted for deeper
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discussion, which gave Martin the opportunity to present an idea about friendshipacross racial lines. Leslie often used moments like these to explore their own relation-ship through the characters and storylines of the text.
Based on Martin’s discourse, Leslie interpreted that he thought people with differ-ent races couldn’t be friends, which may or may not be the case. Leslie proposed thatthe people in the picture can be friends because the rabbits with different colors (fromanother guided reading text) were friends and, in fact, ‘they look a lot the same’.Leslie moved forward with the book introduction at this point, perhaps because shewas uncomfortable, perhaps because she was conscious about time.
This interaction has many possible interpretations in regards to Leslie’s approxi-mations. It appeared that Leslie is an expert in reading the nonverbal signs from herstudent and she used her finger and language to construct a shared focal point, inter-racial friendship. In the book introduction, Leslie had control of the text. One possi-ble read of Martin’s choice of questions is that he sought to gain control of thereading by posing a question. By placing his head on his hands, and gazing up diago-nally, he strikes a pose, which adds to the statement, ‘I wonder’. Leslie read his bodylanguage and mimicked this position to engage in the wondering with him. Theirsynchronicity moved the interactions forward, even when their discourses of interra-cial friendship collided. This passage and the images of Leslie entering into discus-sions suggest just how difficult literacy teaching is when race enters into theconversation.
As the semester continued, writing became a way for Leslie to continue to engagein critical literacy with Martin, not by addressing race or discourses of racism, but byfinding out what texts and contexts supported Martin in his use of powerful literacy inthe world. While Martin read, she asked him questions such as, ‘Why did someonewrite these books?’ and ‘Why do you write?’ Leslie wrote, ‘A future text thataddresses writing for authentic purposes would be useful, because it would allowMartin to broaden his views on the purpose of writing’ (Guided reading lesson paper,7 December 2004).
Indeed, drawing on support again of a more knowledgeable other, the courseinstructor, Leslie began to lead Martin in writing texts that were meaningful, authenticand purposeful. During the event that was a turning point in Leslie’s teaching, Leslieand Martin read The low down bad day blues (Barnes, 2004) (15 February 2005). Oneinstructor of the course, Louise,6 was observing that day and modeled a shared-penwriting activity in which Martin wrote the following blues song. Reflecting on theobservation and feedback model that was used in class, Leslie stated:
You know, how like she [Louise] comes in and she’s working there next to you and shejust kind of picks up like where you are? Well they started to co-construct a song, andum, I thought it went really well, and they, you know, kind of talked about how, um,music in his life and how he listened to music at his home and danced… So it came upthat he danced in his dining room and he had older brothers that wrote songs and this wassomething that he was interested in. (Interview, Phase IB, 24 May 2005)
On that day, Martin wrote the following song:
I have the low down super bad day blues/I fell in the mud and I broke my arm/Then my arm was better/and the low down super day blues went away./By Martin Wilkins
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Leslie wrote about Martin’s writing in a class paper, ‘He was able to formulate hisideas, write them down in the language of a Blues song, and come up with a title forhis song’ (Case study report, Phase IB, 15 February 2005). Leslie also noted in theinterview that he shared with her how the Blues related to his life (e.g., ‘So it came upthat he danced in his dining room and he had older brothers that wrote songs and thiswas something that he was interested in’). Leslie chose the text, Low down bad dayblues (Barnes, 2004), but Louise picked up on Leslie’s goal to share culturally rele-vant texts with her students and supported her with pedagogy around the text – thekind of support that Leslie and Melanie perhaps needed on an earlier date to extendtheir uses of the text, The best thing (Williams, n.d.).
The next text that Leslie chose for Martin was Summer sun risin’ (Nikola-Lisa,n.d.). The book featured a Black character, a young boy, and featured a rhymingpattern in the book that would extend what Martin was already doing in hiswriting.
And so it was like a song when you were reading the book, and so I thought that wouldwork well because maybe it would be similar in like rhythm to music that he listened toat home… So it was the style of the book was culturally relevant… (Interview, Phase IB,24 May 2005)
Again, the choice of the text was crucial in extending Leslie’s thinking aboutwriting and culturally relevant literacy practices. The lesson was composed of a longinteractive book introduction, then Martin read a bit of the text, and finally Martinwrote a song. Leslie began the book introduction, ‘So here’s what I’m wonderin’.Some of these words I’ve never seen before. So I want to look through this book andtry these words’. Leslie used words with ‘ing’ endings to talk about the story andsubstituted ‘n’ for the ‘g’ sound, a common pattern in this text. She sidled up to Martinto support him as he read small sections of the book, again showing Martin that shewanted to be in sync with him.
Leslie’s height dropped down to Martin’s level and they looked at picturestogether. Their arms were in similar positions and, when Martin leaned on botharms, Leslie mimicked this position. Leslie used the phrase, ‘Do you guys evermake music at your house? What kind of music do you listen to?’, to bridge theirreading of the text and the upcoming writing. It is important to note here that on thissame occasion and on other occasions, Martin talked about ‘good music’, music thathad themes of God, friendship, love, etc, that he and his brothers listened to andwrote. We see Leslie beginning to take up some of the practices modeled by herinstructor.
Martin began writing a song. He wrote for four minutes, talking through his spell-ing choices. Leslie was near him and available for assistance but did not watch overhim as he wrote. Instead, she busied herself with her own reflective writing in hernotebook. She used carbon paper to make two copies of his work, one to take home.As the time for the session dwindled, she asked him to read to her:
Leslie: Read it to me and then you can go back.Martin: [Reads his song]
Buster Slash/7
I’m rided down the street with two flat/Wheel and a bustit [busted] window/Playin my nintendow [Nintendo]/Ridin downa liasdow [the name of his street].
L: [Smiling, louder] that is so good.
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L: What is the name of this song goin’ to be?M: Uh…L: You know what I really liked, the way the words rhymed and the way you said
it with so much rhythm. I could really hear what you were sayin’. Will you readthat again?
M: [Smiles, reads again.]L: That is so good Martin! This one for sure you need to bring home. This is just
so good.M: I’ll try to come up with the title.
Martin’s text included invented and conventional spellings as well as a play onspelling to write the name of his street. Further, it was rhythmic and had the tone ofthe Blues. Martin’s song puts forth a particular discourse, making the best of badtimes, as the narrator is playing ‘nintendow’ in a car with ‘two flat Wheel and a bustitwindow’. Martin used descriptive language in this song and it had a stronger sense ofvoice than his earlier song.
When Leslie told a narrative of the lesson in a peer debriefing and to me in a laterinterview, she further clarified her intentions in the design of the writing events. Theways that Leslie carefully selected a text, used language of the text to support herreader, and connected the text to a multimodal practice of writing demonstrates theorchestration – the design – of successful literacy teaching. Louise was key in thedevelopment of this practice, yes, but Leslie also was drawing a great deal of experi-ential knowledge that only comes from ongoing trial and reflection in designing liter-acy practices.
In her debriefing, Leslie reflected the following points: Martin was able to reada higher level text, the events were co-constructed rather than teacher directed, andshe was the teacher that she wanted to be in this event. She told her peer about thelesson, emphasizing that the writing was linked to assessment and also to Martin’sviews of himself as a writer. Her peer moved her talk along using the marker‘yeah’:
OK, also, the idea is that he will start writing these songs, he’s using more than spelling[looks intently at her peer], he’s taking more risk-taking behaviors [yeah] and that we’ll,put them into a collection of songs, in order to show his growth [makes ball with hands]when I, where we could see this collection of songs and juxtapose that collection versussome of his earlier writings, [yeah] [hands come together], which um, you-know, evenwritings we’ve done a few weeks ago that were very teacher-directed, um, show like norisk-taking, [hands brush off] total teacher style.
In this passage, Leslie engaged in self-critique and reflection on how she sharedownership of the writing process with Martin. Leslie expertly linked to Martin’s localliteracies.
She explained in an interview:
I want to be a teacher who um, listens to my students’ ideas and uses their ideas versusa teacher who dispenses knowledge into the students. Um, and I think that that is like ahuge thing that has changed, um, I guess with my identity of what a teacher should be.(Interview, Phase IB, 24 May 2005)
Leslie positioned herself between where she was as a critical literacy teacher andwhere she might be, identifying her own use of approximations and signaling a partic-ular kind of learning.
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Discussion
The analysis of these four lessons in two cases of literacy teaching illustrated thecrucial role of approximations in how pre-service teachers learn to be literacy teach-ers. Approximations occurred within the practicum setting and through interactionswith peers, course instructors, and reflection. The reflection that occurred after asession, whether in a peer debriefing session, an interview, or in a course paperprovided clues into the nature of their approximations: why they made particularchoices of texts, how they drew on conversations as texts, and how they changed theirideas about their own teaching through such reflections. Melanie and Leslie bothlooked to their students to design literacy practices and to determine whether theywere, in fact, engaging in practices that drew on local literacies and led to the devel-opment of students’ identities as readers and writers.
The approximations took many forms in these four lessons. Melanie and Lesliechose texts in the genre of jazz and poetry because they believed these genresemerged from the children’s local literacies. In fact, Melanie abandoned her practiceof expanding Latisha’s knowledge through texts in order to create new practices.Both Melanie and Leslie created practices around texts that provided opportunitiesfor their students to learn to read and write, to accumulate the practices that havecapital in the literacy practicum and in the larger system of schooling in the US(Delpit, 1995). They shaped the field of the literacy practicum with such practicesas well: in Latisha’s case, she performed with a friend her new song; in Martin’scase, he brought his songs to a community that included his own family and teach-ers. Both created powerful literacies with their students that could only haveemerged from relationships that were built over time between teacher and student(see Ferreira & Janks, 2007; Gutierrez, 2008). As Luke (2008) suggested, theyengaged in a pedagogical exchange with their students, what he called ‘a routinizedweaving of those elements of rote pedagogy into more dialogic, critical education’(p. 86).
Sedimented identities in texts
The approximations of pre-service teachers and surrounding talk became artifacts ofidentities of particular kinds of teachers. Rowsell and Pahl (2007) argue that in theconstruction of texts, identities become sedimented. They describe the creation of arti-facts – text making – as follows: ‘as a process involving the sedimentation of identitiesinto the text, which then can be seen as an artifact that reflects, through its materiality,the previous identities of the meaning maker’ (p. 388). Drawing from Holland et al.’sconcept of ‘identities in practice’, Rowsell and Pahl put forward the idea that whenpeople create texts, they create artifacts of who they are in that particular moment intime. However, those texts also reflect practices that have happened in the past andperhaps even predict future practices.
The practicum allowed Melanie and Leslie a space to sediment their identities asliteracy teachers through multiple tries at choosing texts, building texts with students,and reflecting on the texts they constructed. In the area of building texts, the practi-cum provided time for play, for the exploration of how multimodality might aid inbuilding synchrony and richer practices around texts with students. In the currentcontext of literacy instruction in the US (among other places), the continual narrowingof curriculum to test preparation often limits the space for play. Had this space not
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been available, Melanie may not have seen examples of Latisha’s own multiliteraciespractices onto which she built.
Through her consistent work with peers and observation and modeling from peersand instructors, along with this space to play, Melanie learned to be responsive to herstudent, changing her patterns of interactions around reading texts both at the level oftalk and nonverbal action. In the first lesson, Melanie crouched low over the text,maintaining control, whereas in the second lesson, she sat alongside her student,encouraging her performance of her Jazz baby text by providing modeling and scaf-folding; the same type of scaffolding that her peers provided. The use of music andmultiple modalities in the Jazz baby lesson illuminate an entry point into pedagogythat was empowering for Latisha. Melanie was already moving toward responsiveteaching, and the modeling her peer provided was the appropriate scaffold at thatmoment.
Leslie also relied on this support from her instructors to help her bridge an impor-tant gap between the teacher she was and the teacher she was determined to be.Critical literacy may have the potential, as a kind of social interaction, to impact theways in which literacies are taken up, valued, and defined in classrooms. Rejecting anotion that Martin would write in ‘total teacher style’, Leslie relied on Louise to showher another way to support him in creating texts. Leslie designed literacy lessons thatwere responsive to her student by paying close attention to his verbal and nonverbalstyles of interacting and by carefully observing and taking notes while he read andcreated texts. The analysis of two of Leslie’s literacy teaching practices illustrates thegrowth that Martin made when Leslie began to integrate music writing into herlessons and choosing lyrical texts. Martin became more confident as a writer of textsin multiple genres and took the lead in writing texts that made him feel powerful as awriter.
It is not the case that the pre-service teachers in this study acted in ways that werecollectively responsible or action-oriented at all times, in line with common defini-tions of critical literacy. There were many examples in the case studies of individualparticipants that pointed to the partial understandings and even dysconsiousness(King, 1991). Melanie and Leslie used a children’s book that featured a Korean childwho was adopted by an American family. The participants reduced the book’s themeto ‘different kinds of families’ without looking critically at what it means to live in amultiracial or multiethnic family, how the family and child were represented in thetext, why it is that a book exists with this storyline, and what was relevant to thestudents’ lives. However, there must be space within the construct of critical literacyfor it to be defined and practiced in ways that emerge from local contexts, and further,in preparing teachers for teaching critical literacy, teacher educators might have toexamine their own notions of what ‘counts’ as critical literacy.
The findings from this study suggest that it was not positive feedback from peersor instructors alone that led to the sedimentation of new identities for Leslie andMelanie, although those were important. Rather, it was in the texts they chose, created,and their reflections on such texts that led them to tell stories about definitions of liter-acy and powerful literacy practices. Teachers learning to teach within NLS frame-works do not arrive at a predetermined place in their practices. Rather, they areinvolved in a constant process of shaping their identities through their practices andthey struggle and are motivated by their successes. These practices of an NLS teachermight also lead to changes in literacy policies and practices and lead teachers to beleaders in their schools and professional organizations.
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Limitations
There are limitations to how researchers and teacher educators can apply these find-ings. The study occurred in the second semester of a tutoring practicum, after relation-ships had been built, and many practicum last only one semester. The secondlimitation of this study was the lack of engagement with the policy context, globalsocieties, or changing notions of literacy in this study. Finally, it is not clear from thisstudy how the design of critical literacy practices as described in this report shaped orshifted students’ achievement in their regular classrooms or how such practices led orwill lead students or the pre-service teachers to bring about change in their localcontexts or future classrooms.
Suggestions for literacy teacher educators
This study suggested two implications for literacy teacher educators, first, the recog-nition of approximations, and second, the use of what I describe as critical practice inthis section.
Approximations
The notion of approximations suggests that pre-service teachers are encouraged toflexibly use frameworks. Their practices are documented – including both talk andaction – as well as analyzed and celebrated. Critical reflection is used in the process,in which teachers, students, and peers together build meaning about practices.
Melanie and Leslie’s cases reveal insights into what teacher educators can do tosupport approximations in critical literacy and multiliteracies teaching. Both casesillustrate that their instructors, course readings, peers, and reflections supported thepre-service teachers. They developed new questioning patterns and used strategyinstruction that transferred across reading and writing contexts through their closereading, but also in the ways they ‘read’ their experiences with students next to thesetexts (Johnston, 1997).
Literacy teacher educators must build in multiple opportunities for pre-serviceteachers to reflect not only on their text choices but also on the texts of the conversa-tions they create with students. The important thing about valuing approximations isthat the pre-service teacher learns over time to name and problem solve around herpuzzles and struggles. Discussions about approximations can occur during individualconferences, debriefing sessions, or in class. Pre-service teachers might use thecamera on their laptops to record their sessions daily, and choose short video clips topost on a blog and open to feedback from the community of the literacy course. Leslieand Melanie were able to see growth in students’ literacies as well as track theirprogress in written case studies because they had multiple opportunities like this toreflect in course papers and with peers on their teaching. Their teaching was public,which opened them to positive feedback, support, and models.
Immediate peer-debriefing groups can also support approximations of teachers. Inthis study, the peer groups provided an opportunity to talk with the same peers regularlyand over time to make sense of their snags and celebrate successes. Focal groups thatmet throughout the program of study were also sites of learning. The discussions inthese groups became ‘mentor texts’ that were taken up again and again in conversa-tions. Furthermore, the literacy practices that were modeled by the instructors and peerscaused a ripple effect throughout the cohort, and ‘good teaching’ became contagious.
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Teaching Education 423
Critical practice
Critical practice in pre-service literacy teacher education asks students to practice theuse of multiple frameworks and critical reflection; explore the effects of their choiceson the learning environment; analyze how the environment shaped their practices; anddesign new practices.
Teacher educators can also create opportunities for pre-service teachers to takeresponsibility for their own learning and the learning of their students. To give pre-service teachers the experience of being responsible for educational outcomes, theyneed opportunities to take action in the world. One way this occurred in the study wasin the case study reporting in Phase I of the study. Participants were asked to provideperiodic updates to classroom teachers, their course instructors, and parents. Leslietook this responsibility one step further and invited Martin’s family to a communitycurriculum fair in which Martin shared his good writing. This condition also includesthe incorporation of action into critical pedagogical perspectives. When dilemmas ofpractice come up in class, pre-service teachers need opportunities to work within andoutside of the teacher education classroom.
The social and political nature of literacy learning means that we cannot becomplacent about approximations, however. In the end, acceptance of approximationsis a teaching tool or a place to begin the work of pre-service teacher education. We dohave to, as Cambourne suggested, warmly receive approximations at the same time aswe provide legitimate direction and critique of practices that perpetuate racism,inequality, and static notions of literacy.
Notes1. I was not a part of the faculty at this institution and did not have a part in the design of this
program. However, my co-instructor in both literacy courses was a faculty member whocontributed to the document I describe here. We taught our classes in ways that alignedwith the program principals.
2. Throughout the manuscript, the words in italics are the nonverbal moves that along withtalk, were relevant to the analysis of video transcripts.
3. In this section, I describe an extended use of one such book. I did not video recordMelanie’s teaching of this book, although I did video record Latisha’s final performance ofthe text. In this section, then, I rely primarily on interview and debriefing transcripts toillustrate Melanie’s approximations with critical literacy teaching.
4. Nelly was a popular rap artist at the time of the study. His song ‘Country grammar’ wascomposed and released when he was living in the same neighborhood where this study tookplace, and his music was very popular with people of all ages.
5. Line breaks and conventions used by student are represented here.6. ‘Louise’ is a pseudonym chosen for my co-instructor.7. The title of Martin’s song was added later.
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