Critical, contextualized, content-rich: revisiting the call for humanizing pedagogies in literacy methods instruction

Purpose In this study, the authors draw upon 10 years of collaborative teaching and research as two, White, women literacy teacher educators to theorize the role of humanizing pedagogies within literacy teacher education and share explicit examples of how these pedagogies might be operationalized in actual classroom settings. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on 10 years of qualitative, teacher inquiry research on authors’ shared practice as literacy teacher educators and has included focus groups with students, the collection of student work and extensive field notes on class sessions. Findings Contextualized within decades-old calls for humanizing teacher education practices, this study puts forward a framework for teaching literacy methods that centers critical, locally contextualized, content-rich approaches and provides detailed examples of how this study implemented this framework in two contrastive teacher education settings comprising different institutional barriers, regional student populations and program mandates. Originality/value The proposed framework of critical, locally contextualized and content-rich literacy methods offers one possibility for reconciling the divergent debates that perpetually shape literacy teaching and learning. As teachers are prepared to enter classrooms, the authors model concrete approaches and strategies for teaching reading within and against a sociopolitical landscape imbued with White supremacist ideals and racial bias.

Enacting a Raciolinguistic Perspective for the “New Mainstream” in Literacy Classrooms

This chapter contributes to the conversation on reconceptualizing literacy teacher education through exploring the fallout of neoliberal sensibilities on U.S. schools. It continues to describe the new mainstream to be primarily racialized bi/multilingual students that defy the mono-mainstream assumption. The chapter then defines the mono-mainstream assumption that surreptitiously pervades educational systems with its deleterious effects on students. To combat this, the author explores how literacy teachers can enact a language architecture framework as an extension of a raciolinguistic perspective with practical classroom examples, including the terms used to describe students, their languages and literacies, how to negotiate hegemonic systems of accountability, specific pedagogical practices, and continued teacher reflexivity.

Righting the Literacy Teacher Education Debt: A Matter of Justice

The literacies of Black and other communities of Color have long been narrated pathologically in literacy teacher education. Literacy teacher educators have been complicit in upholding linguistic injustice and enacting linguistic violence in and through their practices, devaluing the practices, marginalizing the experiences, and interrogating the humanity of Black and other teachers of Color. In this article, extending Ladson-Billings's concept of the education debt, I assess the literacy teacher education debt, unveiling how white English and whiteness in general have been (over)valued and positioned as currency in literacy teacher education. After (re)examining and (re)assessing offenses and harms inflicted by literacy teacher education across historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral realms, composing the literacy teacher education debt, I take a restorative justice approach and offer an invitation to right literacy teacher education by addressing obligations and committing to healing as a matter of justice.

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

A common model for connecting theory to practice within literacy teacher preparation programs involves preservice teachers (PTs) working in field-based courses to contextualize their learning. Field-based courses create hybrid spaces for personalizing curricula and following students’ lead outside of the pressures of normal classrooms. Researchers note that although PTs have found field-based courses in diverse, minority school settings helpful, many PTs feel unprepared to work with diverse populations. There is a need for literacy teacher preparation programs to enhance field experiences and incorporate culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) within coursework. Few studies, however, have explicitly examined the role of CSP in literacy courses or field-based coursework. Moreover, even coursework intended to prepare teachers to work in diverse settings often centers the experiences of White PTs and reinforces pedagogical practices associated with White cultural and academic norms. In this qualitative case study, we explore the potential of experiences in field-based teacher education courses to disrupt White values, traditions, and curricular norms when CSP is centered and when PTs have the opportunity to work with, and learn from, young students. Findings highlight innovative ways three PTs worked in community with young students and built innovative curricula around their students’ funds of knowledge: by restorying deficit narratives about students’ literacies, following students’ lead into multimodal literacies, and bridging linguistic differences through translanguaging.

Bringing Literacy to Life

Since introducing REAL in 2015, Tinsley Meadows Primary school in Sheffield has strengthened its events and home visits to support key aspects of early literacy. Teacher David Yates explains exactly how these work and explains why it is so important to maintain the momentum.

CONCEPÇÃO DE DOCÊNCIA: O QUE PENSAM OS PROFESSORES ALFABETIZADORES DA REDE MUNICIPAL DE ENSINO DE CAMPO GRANDE-MS?

This article showedthe resultsoftheresearchconductedin2018, with the objective of investigating the teaching conceptionofliteracyteachersfromthepolicies continuingeducationdevelopedintheMunicipalEducationNetwork (REME) ofCampo Grande/MS.In this perspective qualitative research was adopted to address and discusspublicpolicies for the training of literacy teachers, going through the laws and programs of federal (PróLetramento and PNAIC) and municipal (Bet on the teacher). Datacollection occurred through semi-structured interviews with literacy teachers in municipal schools in CampoGrande/MS. The research showed that the teaching conception of the literacy teacher who works at REME now understands literacy a graduallearning process, now comprises the learning of literacy articulated with maturity. We also identified the concept of teaching permeated by affection and aptitude, thus tracing a literacy teacher profile. And finally, the conception of teaching based on the need to master systematized knowledge that permeates the literacy process, which allowed us to reflect and discuss the continuing formations offered to REME professorswho centralize discussions in teaching practices to leverage educational indices. It was concluded that there is an urgent need to restructure formations in order to enable discussions that include theory, practice and specificities experienced in the classroom enabling the acquisition of new knowledge and a critical look at the teaching-learning process, providing studies and reflections that articulate and resign the teaching conception of the literacy teacher.