A Space for Critical Conversations: Reimagining the Possibilities of Interactive Read-Aloud

• In Event: Pedagogical and Methodological Approaches to Facilitating Critical Conversations With Elementary-Aged Children in Literacy-Rich Contexts

Abstract

Scholarship has found that K-12 teachers often find it challenging to enact critical pedagogies in school due to the demands of the institution and the lack of support from the institution (e.g., Alford & Jetnikoff, 2016). Thus, teachers, often unknowingly, enact a pedagogy, such as culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) at a surface level (e.g., Harris Russell et al., 2016), “dulling its critical edge or omitting it altogether” (Ladson-Billings, 2014, p. 77).

One way teachers, particularly teachers of literacy, challenge inequity in the classroom is by sharing and discussing multicultural children’s literature (MCL) with their students (e.g., Brooks, 2006; DeNicolo & Fránquiz, 2006; Price-Dennis et al., 2016). National literacy organizations such as NCTE advocate for the use of MCL for critical classroom discussions on social and cultural issues. In my review of literature, I discovered only a small number of studies focused on inservice teachers’ use of MCL in the classroom context as a resource for enacting critical pedagogies. This qualitative, multi-case study examines the classroom interactions across three self-identified critical elementary teachers and their students during interactive read alouds and literature discussions with MCL. The following questions guided my research:
1. During whole-group discussions of multicultural children’s literature, how do teachers address critical sociocultural knowledge and issues of inequity?
2. How do teachers who practice critical pedagogies navigate the “critical encounters” that arise when they discuss multicultural children’s literature?

Drawing on Freire’s (1970/2000) theory of critical literacy, Kumashiro’s (2001; 2009) theory of anti-oppressive education, and Brown’s (2013) theory of humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge, my analysis centered on illuminating the ways that three teachers enacted critical pedagogies within this specific structure of interactive read aloud as a component of their daily literacy instruction. Across these three conceptual frames, the teacher is responsible for providing the pedagogical conditions that enable students to develop and maintain their own cultural competence and critical consciousness.

I took an ethnographic approach to data collection (one academic year); and I used qualitative and discourse analytic methods to analyze within and across multiple data sources, including audio-and video-recordings of the daily interactive read alouds, transcriptions, classroom artifacts, memos, and field notes.

In response to my research questions, my analysis revealed that all three teachers designed a yearlong reading curriculum comprising structures and routines that met Banks’s (1993; 1994; 2014) criteria for the “transformation approach”. The teachers were committed to working for change in the context of school, and they enacted this commitment in part by continuously integrating sociocultural topics into their reading instruction. I found that the teachers’ enactment of critical pedagogies included the following yearlong commitments: implementing structures that welcomed community and dialogue, planning curricula grounded in sociocultural topics, and drawing on global and political discourses that offered new perspectives to students. Through all of these strategies, the teachers sought to “change the underlying story” (Kumashiro, 2001) of oppression and inequity. In doing so, they made it possible for students to develop their own critical sociocultural knowledge.

Author

• Saba Khan Vlach, The University of Iowa