Hidden Features and Layered Audiences: Discoveries in a Writing Intervention for Social Justice Teacher Educators

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Reading the Word and Writing the World: Critical Literacies and Equity in Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper pulls from a larger qualitative study that considers what might be gained from viewing instructors as composers of social justice education; as creators who undergo various becomings and unbecomings across multiple contexts, and as agents who also employ composition as a tool to teach social justice. I examine a slice of preliminary findings that provide insight from the emergence and uptake of a writing intervention. Critical tensions were revealed between the instructors’ holistic (lifeworld) goals for social justice learning and the school-task oriented objectives communicated through the project rubric. Specifically, the discovery of hidden features and layered audiences became central to instructors’ reimagining of the project.

Author

• Autumn West, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign