Preservice Teachers' Speculative Designs: A Relational Theorization of Conceptual Development

• In Event: Disrupting "Designs" in Literacy Research and Practice

Abstract

Although literacy research illustrating the importance of adolescents’ reading for pleasure is extensive (Ivey & Johnston, 2012), professional discourse often implies that reading popular texts is academically unfruitful and that pleasure itself should not be a main curricular goal (Wilhelm & Smith, 2016). Since the mid-20th century, these discourses have been linked to the cultural construction of adolescence as an impressionable and precarious time (Lesko, 2012), and of young adult literature (YA Lit) as of lower quality than more traditional literature (Niccolini, 2015). This paper therefore investigates pre-service literacy teachers’ conceptions of (1) adolescents/ce, (2) reading for pleasure, and (3) YA Lit. Data comes from an undergraduate YA Lit course that provided varied experiences through which students might live these concepts differently than they had before; for example, talking with teens about their leisure reading; and, reading Indigenous YA Lit alongside Indigenous youth.

Analysis includes discourse analysis of students’ talk over the semester and their final projects, which involved creating diegetic prototypes for pieces of design fiction that imagined potentials for fostering pleasure reading in schools. In these projects, diegetic prototypes were an educational strategy, technology, environment, or anything not possible today, but possible in a future influenced by the story-world created. The paper presents a relational theorization of conceptual development, arguing not that students changed their conceptions of study constructs toward values predetermined by researchers; rather, the theorization illustrates how students’ moving each other and being moved through course experiences related to students’ speculative designs of diegetic prototypes that foster experiences for youth to read for pleasure beyond existing structural constraints. The paper therefore illustrates how moments of shared intensities lead to the relational co-creation of a sense of possibility for disrupting, and not simply critiquing, structural constraints that create inequitable and unjust conditions in adolescents’ reading lives.

Authors

• Christian Ehret, McGill University

• Emily Mannard, McGill University