Novice Talk: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Preservice Teachers in a Practice-Based Elementary Literacy Course

• In Event: Building Voices of Passion and Justice in Preservice Teachers

Abstract

Teacher education is one context that can and must be harnessed to better understand and disrupt deep and ongoing structural inequities in U.S. schooling. Drawing from positioning theory, we employ a critical approach to discourse analysis to analyze the discourse of novice teachers enrolled in a critically framed, practice-based teacher education course. Findings illustrate that novice teachers negotiate complex and competing discourses related to teaching and students, often drawing on larger deficit-based discourses of urban students and their families through their words and actions, while simultaneously articulating critical commitments to social justice as future educators. Findings also point to the potential of critically oriented pedagogical feedback from teacher educators in identifying and disrupting normalized discourses that problematically position certain children.

Authors

• Wagma Mommandi, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Elizabeth M. Dutro, University of Colorado Boulder