Critical Reflection for Critical Literacy: Examining the Translation From Self to Practice

• In Event: 30.080 - Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: 30.080-9 - Promoting Critical Reflection in Teacher Education to Achieve the Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity

Abstract

Purpose
Scholars have well-established the need to address societal inequities with students in classrooms in order to promote critical awareness and to cultivate citizens who act for change (Darling-Hammond, French, & Garcia-Lopez, 2002). How to most authentically embody these elements, however, often daunts PSTs. Many struggle to engage with texts in manners that go beyond structuralist, new critic, and reader response perspectives, and how to engage in more critical, post structuralist ways with the texts they will teach. The question for literacy teacher educators becomes: how do literacy PSTs come to understand critical literacy through reflection and application, and how do they demonstrate this through planning for future practice?

Theoretical Framework
Critical literacy is rooted in Paulo Freire’s (1987) notion that students should come to discern themselves as agents of change, able to name and transform their own worlds. As taken up by modern scholars (e.g., Janks, 2013), critical literacy is defined as both a theoretical approach and a pedagogy that emphasizes questioning and prompts students to investigate the social conditions in which practices and texts are produced, with specific attention to language, power, and ideology (Janks, 2013).

Data Sources & Analysis
This study occurred during a 15 week secondary literacy methods course at a large northwestern university. The course instructor introduced 18 PSTs to notions of critical literacy and social justice in the opening weeks of the course and scaffolded their application of those concepts throughout the semester. Candidates first engaged in personal critical reflections through classroom-based activities, such as artistic representations of their backgrounds and writing poetry that delved into their own customs and traditions. After uncovering these aspects of self, they projected how such elements might enter into their teaching, considering the ways their own schooling experiences might affect their expectations for students. Finally, the candidates developed their own genre-based critical literacy lesson plans in which they centered on a focal topic of their choosing (e.g., gender social roles). Using deductive coding (Gilgun, 2010), the corpus of lesson plans (n=22) submitted was analyzed for evidence of understanding and application of critical literacy using Behrman’s (2006) categories: reading supplementary texts, reading multiple texts, reading from a resistant perspective, producing counter texts, student-choice projects, and taking social action.

Findings & Significance
Analysis of candidates’ reflection pieces and their lesson plans afforded for the discernment of which aspects of critical literacy PSTs personalized and to which they adhered most frequently. Those themes that were outstanding were: reading multiple texts and reading from a resistant perspective. Themes less frequently discerned were producing texts, and taking social action was almost non-existent. These most often traced back to the ways students understood critical literacy evidenced in their reflections. Findings provide insight into how literacy teacher educators can help students enact critical literacy in their future classrooms, and it solidifies the need for teacher educators to model for students tangible ways to act for equity and change.

Author

• Ashley Summer Boyd, Washington State University - Pullman