Deconstructing and Reconstructing Stories About Ourselves, Each Other, and the World to Prepare Justice-Oriented Teachers

• In Event: Leveraging Teacher Identities: Telling Truths and Reconstructing Our Stories

Abstract

This paper shares an intervention to disrupt racism and white supremacy and re/create figured worlds in two teacher preparation classrooms via a textual lineage project. Drawing on backgrounds as former secondary English Language Arts teachers and now teacher researchers and educators, the authors designed and enacted a textual lineage project for preservice teachers to surface, interrogate, and evaluate their reading repertoires and resultant figured worlds before reading new texts. In evaluating their reading diets, how they are shaped by and reflect our intersectional identities, reading different texts, and designing and teaching lessons and units, preservice teachers engaged with critical perspectives to foster justice-oriented teaching: built new figured worlds and expanded understandings between who we are and what we read.

Authors

• Naitnaphit Limlamai, Colorado State University

• Elisabeth Spinner, Grand Valley State University