Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the orientations Jamaican preservice teachers characteristically bring to the diverse youth literature that they read and to examine instructional approaches designed to help student develop a postcolonial orientation that will yield richer insights into their future students. The chapter presents a thematic analysis of extended response survey questions distributed to 86 Jamaican preservice teachers. The results revealed that these preservice teachers primarily sought literature for its ease, enjoyment, escapism, and personal growth, though a minority of students did indicate interest in broader issues of structural inequalities. Unfortunately, such emphases are inadequate to address issues of diversity. Consequently, the chapter proposes three instructional strategies to foster a postcolonial orientation: semantic differential scales, direct instruction in postcolonialism, and the TACT-MR model of writing instruction to develop students' critical empathy.
TopBackground
In their call to make postcolonial theory more central to teacher education, Viruru and Persky (2019) make a complementary argument by noting that postcolonial theory has two primary strands. The first is a critical examination of what they call “grand narratives of ‘progress and emancipation’” (para. 2) to reveal the oppressive forces that people encounter in their lives. The second is to imagine new patterns of relationship that contest these oppressive forces.
If teacher-educators want preservice teachers to take a postcolonial stance, it is important to understand that simply inviting them to read diverse youth literature is not enough. Classic reading research by Pichert and Anderson (1977) establishes that what readers learn and remember from a text is a function of the perspectives they bring to a text rather than a function of structural properties of the text itself. This is problematic because, as Wilmot (in press) has argued, preservice teachers tend to adopt formalist and reader response perspectives. She cites this exchange between two classmates to establish her point:
Key Terms in this Chapter
Preservice Teachers: Students who are at any level of a teacher education program.
Postcolonial Theory: A theoretical approach that focuses on understanding the oppressive impact of European colonial rule around the world.
Reader Stance: The conceptions readers have about the purposes for reading and the processes readers employ to achieve those purposes.
Critical Lenses: The underlying presumptions and sets of questions about a text suggested by different literary theories.
Semantic Differential Scales: Developed by psychologists to study meaning-making processes, semantic differential scales ask respondents to indicate their understanding of a text by marking a scale, the endpoints of which are words or phrases that have a bipolar relationship.
Evaluation and Selection: The process of analyzing a text, making a judgment about it, and determining its suitability for use.
Writing To Learn: A type of exploratory writing that is designed for writers to develop as opposed to display their knowledge.
Teacher Education: The preparation preservice and in-service teachers receive to develop the requisite skills, knowledge, and competencies to be effective teachers.