Culturally Significant Learning in an Online Children's Literature Class: Transformations and Transactions

Introduction

Career teacher “Paula” (pseudonym) thought about pursuing a master’s degree for years, but her busy life and rural setting, far from a comfortable drive to a university campus, complicated that pursuit. When her undergraduate alma mater began offering their literacy education master’s program online, she decided to take the leap to enroll. She did so with a good bit of trepidation as she was not confident in her technological skills and it had been decades since she had been enrolled in school. Still, she was driven to learn more so she could better meet the needs of learners in her small school, in a community experiencing a changing demographic including an influx of English language users—so she logged on and dug in.

Years before, the literacy education faculty at Oklahoma State University (OSU) wrestled with similar concerns. Their literacy education master’s program had a strong reputation for developing leaders and advocates. Program faculty—committed to strong, engaging, scholarly teaching and creative, responsive delivery—had offered on-site coursework at two campuses for years, moving from fully face-to-face to some hybrid offerings. They were intrigued by the potential for outreach an online program would offer, especially into underserved rural areas that stretched across their state, but they were holding out until they felt confident that the quality of learning engagement for candidates would not be compromised. This chapter addresses candidates’ development from instruction and experiences in an online graduate-level children’s literature course in a recently transitioned degree program, particularly relative to cultural understandings and culturally-relevant pedagogy.

Advanced Studies in Children’s Literature is the first course candidates encounter in the Reading and Literacy Education master’s program at this large, public Midwestern university. Candidates are K-12 classroom teachers seeking an advanced degree and Reading Specialist certification. Because of the university’s location, the graduate program draws candidates teaching and living in both urban and rural settings. Teaching the course fully online for the first time did not significantly change that demographic, though it did change the interrelationship between university and classroom teaching sites.

The course has been a staple of the master’s degree curriculum for almost twenty years, most often taught by Suzii, the first author of this chapter. All aspects of course content are offered through a multicultural lens, with a primary goal of fostering student awareness of sociocultural implications in literacy education. The course is framed by and infused with a critical literacy theoretical stance in which literature is seen as a “space for constructing critical conversations and interpretations, where both teachers and students negotiate meanings, discuss the systems of power inherent in the meanings available, and share experiences of how these stories relate to their lives and communities” (Serafini, 2003, p. 7). It is designed so that candidates apply what they learn to teaching their own students and engaging with their school communities. Until Fall 2018, the course had been taught in face-to-face or hybrid formats. When the decision was made to move the master’s program fully online, the children’s literature course was the first migrated.

This chapter examines candidates’ responses and development in an interactive, multicultural children’s literature course taught online, highlighting practices and platforms that resulted in such rich results. The primary focus of this qualitative study is on how learners grew in understandings and practices related to diversity and equity in literacy education, specifically, “How did the shift to online delivery of an interactive graduate-level children’s literature class influence candidates’ understandings of culture and culturally-relevant literacy practice?” The authors include the course instructor (Suzii) who designed and redesigned the course, and a new professor with extensive experience as an online learner (Adam) who collaborated with Suzii on a broader analysis.