Context, Identity, Comprehension, and Critical Literacy: A Shifting Matrix of Factors Influencing Social Justice Pedagogy

• In Event: Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: Positioning Language, Identity, and Content in the Classroom

Abstract

This qualitative case study examines the relationship between context, identity, comprehension, and critical literacy by following two in-service teachers from a graduate course on children’s literature into the Kindergarten classes they currently teach. Because children’s literature can provide a mirror, window, and springboard for discussing social justice issues, investigating how teachers make meaning of it across different contexts provides insight about social justice teaching. Analysis was grounded in reader response theory and Bourdieu’s constructs of habitus, field, capital, and doxa. Findings present understandings of the goals and attempts of two particular teachers and new avenues for thinking theoretically and pedagogically about the relationships between comprehension, identity and institutional context, and critical reading of texts for social justice teaching.

Author

• Grace Enriquez, Lesley University