Virtual Literature Circles: Providing a Conduit for Discourse Among Teacher Candidates and Practitioners

Introduction

Author Belén López Peiró suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle, a former police officer who was well-respected in his Argentine town. Between the ages of 13 and 17, her parents sent her each summer to stay with her aunt and uncle, and each night during her stay, her uncle would come into her room. Once she made the decision to file a complaint, it took nine years and countless court proceedings before her uncle was pronounced guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison. During those nine years, as she sought justice in a court of law, López Peiró also sought justice through the penning of two books, both narrating her quest for justice. In her words, as told to Paulina Villegas (2023) of The Washington Post, writing the books helped her “‘to leave that place of victim and made [her] feel [she] had certain control over something’” (para. 19). Not only did the writing of her books bring a sense of control back to López Peiró, the books also spurred a debate within Argentina about child sexual abuse and the way that the judicial system handles abuse cases and victims’ testimonies. Additionally, the books inspired other abuse survivors to step forward and seek justice.

Words and literacy are powerful. In Peiró’s case, words and literacy provided empowerment, connection, and social change; in short, literacy provided tools for social justice. In this chapter, we explore how words and literacy provide the means by which discourse can happen and how discourse can serve to enable social justice. Further, we explored how providing teacher candidates (TCs) and practicing teachers an avenue to discuss how literacy is connected to social justice may afford those teachers with a sense of agency and commitment to literacy pedagogy in their classrooms. Hence, we examined the role of discourse to charge teachers with the responsibility of providing their own students with the power of words and literacy.

With the drastic changes occurring in education resulting from the recent global pandemic, coupled with a rancorous political climate and parental misconceptions about the way that curriculum is implemented and taught, TCs and practicing teachers find themselves in ever changing and evolving classroom environments. Teachers have had to navigate changes to curriculum and materials (e.g., banning books and legislation targeting specific topics) in addition to format and delivery (e.g., face-to-face, virtually asynchronous, and synchronous). These changes not only impact K-12 students, but also practicing teachers, teacher preparation programs, teacher educators, researchers, and research. Even as we find our way through these transitions and debates, the role of technology in education has irrevocably shifted.

As words and literacy are powerful, dialogue and discourse are also tools that provide teachers with agency. John Stuart Mill’s proposal, in his 1859 On Liberty (Mills, 2011), suggests that debate and dialogue provide individuals with freedom of thought and freedom from indoctrination, ultimately connecting discourse to social justice. When exploring Mill’s arguments for social dialogue as a critical element of democratic and intellectual development, Inamura (2020) writes that Mill’s arguments are largely recognized as being grounded in Socratic dialogue, a long-established pedagogical approach. Similarly, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed,Freire (1970) presented the argument that dialogue is vital to build a pedagogy that fights oppression. Freire’s emphasis on dialogue as a cooperative practice that builds more meaningful learning and connections is also framed in seeing students as more equitable and active participants in their own learning (1970). Further, education for social justice is also key in helping learners to be willing to engage with marginalized others in genuine, empathic, caring, and collaborative relationships (Freire, 1970).