Exploring Preservice Teachers' Social Perspective-Taking as Teachers and Readers of Young Adult Literature

• In Event: 45.092 - MTCC Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: 45.092-12 - Teacher Attitudes and Approaches in Literacy Education

Abstract

Literature provides readers the opportunity to reflect on their lives and to consider diverse cultures, time periods, and experiences. Readers can recognize themselves or grow to know someone, something, or someplace quite different. The purpose of this research was to investigate 25 preservice teachers’ propensity, confidence, and motivation for social perspective taking over the course of an eight-week period, in which preservice teachers rotated between four weeks of reading and discussing selections young adult literature and four weeks of teaching counter-narratives in a juvenile detention setting. The he data suggested that it was preservice teachers’ experiences across the eight weeks that led to a shift in their propensity, confidence, and motivation as related to their social perspective taking.

Author

• Kristine Pytash, Kent State University