Privileged Pages: Contextualizing the Realities, Challenges, and Successes of Culturally Responsive Canonical British Literature Instruction

• In Event: 16.034 - (Re)Envisioning Educational Equity: Explorations of Teacher Practice

Abstract

Though research suggests a dichotomous relationship between transformative pedagogies and canonicity, these tensions are insufficiently nuanced. Accordingly, this collective case study
investigates the culturally responsive characteristics of a diverse triad of British literature teachers and the factors inhibiting/promoting these behaviors. Data collection included five
months of classroom observations and forty-two interviews. Data were deductively coded for
their alignment with the Multicultural Teacher Capacity Scale; layers of inductive coding were
also applied. Results distill that certain culturally responsive characteristics were more
frequently performed/embodied, and that promoting/inhibiting factors shape-shifted based on teachers’ sociocultural awareness, contexts, and positionalities. Participants negotiated
particularized challenges actualizing culturally responsive pedagogy due to British literature’s
uniquely marginalizing properties. Implications, including the possibilities of a canonical
counter-curriculum, are discussed.

Author

• Jeanne Dyches, Iowa State University