Elementary Literacy Teachers' Text Selection for Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy

• In Event: Disrupting Dominant Narratives: (Re)Thinking Text Selection for Liberated Futures

Abstract

National literacy organizations (e.g., NCTE) advocate for culturally relevant and anti-racist pedagogies. They recommend that literacy teachers use diverse children’s literature (Thomas, 2016) to develop their own and their students’ critical consciousness. In this study, I observed three critical elementary literacy teachers who selected and curated sets of texts that built on each other over an academic year to sustain a critical counter narrative of activism and liberation.
I drew on Kumashiro’s (2001) framework of anti-oppressive education, which has two central ideas: all stories are political, and all stories are partial. An anti-oppressive education framework questions the notion of a single truth. With Kumashiro’s framework as a lens, I examined the ways these three teachers engaged in the art of text selection as an enactment of anti-oppressive education.
I employed qualitative, multi-case study methods (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Stake, 2006). The study took place in three classroom contexts, each one serving as a bounded case (Merriam, 2002). I analyzed each case individually first, and then I analyzed the data (e.g., interviews, read aloud video recordings, transcripts) across the cases.
Unlike the experiences of many teachers today, Ms. Smith, Ms. Martinez, and Ms. Barker had the freedom to choose their own curricular resources for literacy instruction in their public elementary classrooms. A key structure of their literacy instruction was daily read aloud, and the teachers were committed to sharing diverse literature and texts. Based on their text selection criteria, organization of texts into text sets, and development of units of study which centered critical sociocultural and sociopolitical topics, it was evident that Ms. Martinez, Ms. Barker, and Ms. Smith were not merely adding on (Banks, 1994; 2014) to the curriculum. Rather, they transformed their read aloud curriculum and engaged their students in generative and recursive daily critical conversations in response to the texts across topics. As a result, the diverse texts and classroom discussions morphed into a collective, multilayered, complex, and unfinished text on anti-oppression. Ms. Smith, Ms. Martinez, and Ms. Barker did not allow any text to stand alone and serve as the whole story on race, immigration, civil rights, gender, class, etc. Kumashiro (2001) speaks to the dangers of repetition of dominant narratives such that they become society’s common sense; we can infer that in response to this repetition, critical educators need to facilitate repeated opportunities to consider diverse perspectives that have the potential to disrupt and ultimately dismantle the power structures enforced by the dominant social group. By framing every text as political and partial, the teachers’ were able to release themselves from the tensions of selecting the perfect text to tell a story because they inherently understood that there is no such text. Through this ongoing structure of read-aloud, intentional decisions to focus on political discourse with every text, and the creation of daily opportunities for students to actively voice their perspectives, these three teachers prepared their students to participate in study and struggle (Patel, 2021) for social change today and throughout their lifetimes.

Author

• Saba Khan Vlach, University of Iowa
  Presenting Author