Abstract
Critical consciousness, teacher agency, intellectual freedom, and equity-informed practices are vital aspects of a collaboration between a faculty member and an educational librarian, whose shared goal is to support teacher candidates' capacity to use diverse children's literature to teach for social justice. In this chapter, teacher educator Homza and head librarian Fontno share ways to help teacher candidates use diverse children's literature to develop their own critical consciousness, explore issues of equity, and teach for social justice in their future classrooms. Grounding their work in conceptual frameworks, the authors discuss their positionalities, how the literature collection is built, and course activities that use diverse children's literature. Teacher candidates' reflections suggest that these efforts have an impact on their critical consciousness and capacity to engage in the challenging work of transformative pedagogy. The authors share implications for other teacher educators and librarians and questions to explore in future work.
TopBackground And Conceptual Frameworks
Overarching Themes
An encompassing goal of the school of education’s mission is to make the world more just, and much of the work explored here is situated within this aspirational goal. As Figure 1 illustrates, the teacher education program themes are embedded within a broad understanding of the school’s mission; these themes establish the shared values of the program faculty and describe its conceptualization of key aspects of teaching, learning, and schooling. The emphasis on social justice is evident in the first program theme, “Advancing equity and justice,” which acknowledges the political dimensions of teaching and the need for teachers to challenge society’s inequities in order to promote the learning and life chances of all students, particularly those who have historically been marginalized. The four program themes in Figure 1 are integrated across all coursework and field-based experiences, in both theory and practice.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Critical Consciousness: The capacity to understand societal forces of power and oppression that shape one’s position in and perceptions about the world. Critical consciousness is often thought to be a precursor to individual and collective action toward the creation of a more just world.
Critical Pedagogy: An approach to teaching and learning, inspired by the work of Paulo Freire, that aims to assist learners and teachers in developing critical consciousness within and about education and the world beyond.
Foundations Course: An undergraduate level course in education for teacher candidates that is completed at the beginning of the degree/licensure program that covers topics such as psychological, historical, philosophical and sociological aspects of teaching as well as an introduction to theories about how children and young people learn.
Anti-Racist Pedagogy: An approach to teaching and learning that has as its goal the disruption of systemic racism and its impacts in education and in other institutions in order to create more equity and justice for those who have been historically marginalized and/or oppressed in society.
Translanguaging Pedagogy: An approach to teaching and learning that centers bi/multilingual learners’ entire linguistic repertoires in order to plan strategic instruction that uses these resources not only to scaffold successful language and content learning but also to make education more just for students of non-dominant languages by challenging the hegemony of English.
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: An approach to teaching and learning that values, honors, uses, and maintains students’ home-based cultural and linguistic resources as part of an effort to promote more equitable education and, ultimately, to create a more just pluralistic and democratic society.
Intellectual Freedom: The freedom to think about, study and have access to ideas and information without restriction. Intellectual freedom is highly valued and protected by libraries, including the American Library Association and is considered to be a basic human right by the United Nations.
Inquiry as Stance: A theory of action in which educational practitioners habitually problematize various aspects of their practice in order to systematically research and document teaching and learning in ways that benefit the learning and life chances of their students while serving to reconceptualize practitioner knowledge, agency and power to transform education to more just, equitable and democratic ends.
Linguistically Responsive Pedagogy: An approach to teaching and learning that centers learners’ linguistic backgrounds as assets while promoting knowledge and skills about language learning and teaching as well as orientations such as sociolinguistic consciousness and a valuing of linguistic diversity.