"Rise Up, Hand in Hand": Early Childhood Teachers Writing a Liberatory Literacy Pedagogy

• In Event: Composing Futures: Children, Youth, and Teachers Dreaming Educational Justice in and Through Writing

Abstract

Purpose
Although teachers often explore literacy pedagogies through dialogue and text analysis, less work has examined how writing supports critical pedagogical learning. We documented the writing practices of early childhood teachers in a critical literacies inquiry group. We examined how critical proleptic writing--enacted in community and solidarity--supported teachers’ development as liberatory literacy educators.

Theoretical Framework
We drew on two complementary perspectives: critical writing pedagogies (Kamler, 2001) and prolepsis (Cole, 1993). Critical pedagogies connect writing to power (Janks, 2010) and position composition as a space for subversion and transformation (Morrell, 2008). Prolepsis, “a mediated representation and nascent experience of the future in the present” (Vossoughi, 2011, p. 184), describes how imagination of the future simultaneously shapes present action (Gutiérrez, 2018). Together, these perspectives highlighted how teachers used composition to imagine justice-oriented futures, and how writing supported liberatory pedagogies in the present.

Methods & Data Sources
In this participatory case study (Reilly, 2010) of a year-long critical literacies teacher inquiry group, participants included five early literacy educators (three women of Color; two white women) with 1-5 years of teaching experience.
Data sources included transcripts of audio-recorded inquiry group meetings (n=16) and artifacts produced or brought into meetings (n= 74), including writing. Analysis included cycles of descriptive, process, and in vivo coding (Saldaña, 2015). We constructed 71 codes (e.g., “making sense of literacy,” “implicating ourselves”) which we collapsed into 17 categories (e.g., “teachers making meaning,” “taking up critical literacies”). We connected our coding scheme to literature and theory to construct themes (Ravitch & Riggan, 2016). We engaged in analytic memoing and peer debriefing (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), coordinated multiple types of data, and sought disconfirming evidence to challenge our findings (Ravitch & Riggan, 2016).

Findings
Across our data, teachers used writing to process harmful histories and reimagine more just futures through creative compositions. For example, Lauren composed a “letter to literacy,” which subverted compositional practices associated with “schooled” writing. Teachers also negotiated what it means to be a social justice teacher by iteratively and reflexively writing for children/families. For example, after collaboratively envisioning a classroom framed by her values (e.g., “all languages are valued”), Amrutha composed a letter to students/families, writing “El futuro del mundo está en este salón” (the future of the world is in this classroom). Simultaneously, teachers reclaimed truth(s) through recursive cycles of resistant writing and planning, ultimately sharing this work with broader audiences. For instance, Nadia used blackout poetry to resist harmful messages in presidential election debate transcripts, which informed her revisions to a grade-wide unit plan focused on examining voter suppression. These critical proleptic processes generated and realized individual and collective visions of what liberatory literacy pedagogies could be.

Significance
Although prolepsis has been explored in relation to writing in preservice teacher education (Gilligan, 2020), we describe practicing teachers’ engagement in critical proleptic writing. We documented how teachers’ imagining of a more socially-just future began to shape their pedagogies in the present, contributing to existing literature in teacher education, writing studies, and justice-oriented teaching.

Authors

• Emily Machado, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Margaret R. Beneke, University of Washington

• Jordan Taitingfong, University of Washington - Seattle