Warrior Teacher: An Iraq, Afghanistan, and Classroom Veteran Cross-Contextually Considers His Literacy Beliefs and Practices

• In Event: 33.078 - Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: 33.078-5 - Reflections on Cultural Competence and Culturally Responsive Teaching

Abstract

Jack Taggert’s (pseudonym) professional and personal lives crossed contexts throughout his thirty-year teaching career and multiple military deployments. This paper discusses how Jack’s contexts co-constructed the literacies, literate practices, and purposes he chose to privilege as a teacher. Jack’s qualitative case study was a part of a larger ethnography of adolescent literacy conducted in a northeastern U.S. high school. Sociocultural and constructivist frameworks and Change Epistemology guided ethnographic and multimodal data collection and analysis. Given calls to examine evolving literacies and practices in and out-of-school, the findings offer one teacher’s influences in literacy decisions, adolescent literacy socialization, and cross-contextual multimodal research consistent with participants’ ways of being. Further, this inquiry encourages giving voice to teachers during or after military duty.

Author

• Julie Frear Schappe, The Pennsylvania State University