“This Book Speaks Back ...”: Rhetorical Reader Response and Navigating Difference in the Humanities Teacher Education Classroom

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Occupation and Empowerment: Lessons From Difference and Conflict

Abstract

Research in teacher education has continuously stressed the need to provide pre-service educators with the opportunity to experience a variety of cultures, ethnicities, and races in an effort to create culturally responsive and culturally sustaining instructors. This paper focuses on the critical examination of pre-service teachers’ written responses (academic papers on course texts, informal online discussion forum, textual artifacts) and classroom discourse to analyze how pre-service teacher’s view tensions of difference. Using “critical fictions” as a vehicle to critically analyze teacher’s response and uncertainty in navigating issues of diversity and equity, this paper illustrates how issues of difference, especially as they pertain to the teaching of multicultural literature are woven into layers of the socio-political and socio-cultural contexts of schooling.

Author

• Jon Michael Wargo, Michigan State University