Supporting Teacher Candidates as Social Justice Change-Makers

Critical consciousness, teacher agency, intellectual freedom, and equity-informed practices are vital aspects of a collaboration between a faculty member and an educational librarian, whose shared goal is to support teacher candidates' capacity to use diverse children's literature to teach for social justice. In this chapter, teacher educator Homza and head librarian Fontno share ways to help teacher candidates use diverse children's literature to develop their own critical consciousness, explore issues of equity, and teach for social justice in their future classrooms. Grounding their work in conceptual frameworks, the authors discuss their positionalities, how the literature collection is built, and course activities that use diverse children's literature. Teacher candidates' reflections suggest that these efforts have an impact on their critical consciousness and capacity to engage in the challenging work of transformative pedagogy. The authors share implications for other teacher educators and librarians and questions to explore in future work.

Creating Praxis for Pre-Service Teachers

This chapter introduces a storied learning model to create opportunities for praxis within teacher education courses in order to humanize student experiences through book clubs. As many argue that people perceive the world in narrative form, embedding book clubs within methods courses creates opportunities for pre-service teachers to explore and reflect upon unfamiliar experiences, identities, and stories in order to cultivate their critical consciousness. Building off of Bishop's metaphor of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, as well as existing literature that discusses the use of book clubs in pre-service teacher methods courses, two case studies are offered highlighting theoretical and practical ways for book clubs to be embedded within methods courses. Case studies are followed by a framework for implementation that considers research in both critical pedagogy and reading comprehension.

Preservice Teachers

This chapter describes how a children's literature educator provided a space for preservice teachers to select, read, and discuss diverse and social justice literature through read-alouds and literature circles. In addition, the preservice teachers questioned and challenged their own assumptions about their world during a semester-long read-aloud partnership with elementary students focusing on diverse or social justice children's literature. The college students involved the children in discussions around the texts and planned response activities for them. The findings suggest that partnerships, emphasizing diverse literature, help preservice teachers practice how to choose diverse books, experience the value of read-alouds, and discover how to encourage discussion around diverse texts.

Using the Children's Literature Course to Promote Teacher Candidates' Cultural Competence

This chapter presents the results from a collective case study of 23 undergraduate preservice teachers enrolled in a Children's Literature course at a large Mid-Atlantic university. It explores how course instruction in and around high-quality, culturally diverse children's literature facilitated both displays of culturally competent dispositions and cultural knowledge of self and others. The chapter also describes how the preservice teachers under study applied their culturally competent dispositions as they rehearsed selecting texts, planning activities, and asking questions to their future students. The Cultural Competence for Teaching Framework provided a useful metric to evaluate participants' displays of cultural competence across the course of the semester. Within this chapter, the authors describe how they embedded cultural competence education inside the course including a description of the activities, texts, and pedagogy used.

Developing a Children's Literature Course to Facilitate Pre-Service Teachers' Understanding of Culturally Relevant Texts

This chapter describes the development of an undergraduate course focused on exploring children's literature using a critical lens. Descriptions of course assignments and activities are provided to illustrate how pre-service teachers engaged in learning how to identify and evaluate diverse books. Additionally, reflections provide insights into the lived experiences of the students enrolled in the class and the faculty member who created the course. The course framework emphasizes the importance of providing culturally relevant texts that reflect the cultures and identities of readers ages 3-12. This framework aligns with the seminal work of Bishop's “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors” that described the importance of children accessing books that are windows into other experiences, books that mirror their own lived experiences, and sliding glass doors that children can walk into the other world created by the author.

Seeking Diversity in Children's Literature Utilized in Elementary Classrooms

Utilizing literature in classrooms that is representative of all provides opportunities for students to find within a book the truth of their own experiences. Literature provides the windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors that afford opportunities to consider multiple perspectives and lenses in life. This chapter discusses different representations of diverse literature in classrooms and explores what educators might consider for their teaching and learning. Specifically, the chapter describes books student teachers identify using in their classrooms and considers how the books aligned with the different categories of a rubric used to assess them. Of the 113 books sampled, only nine books distinctly represented diversity. Implications of these findings and how they can support and challenge the children's literature utilized in today's classrooms are discussed.

Deploying Black Joy

This chapter describes a theory into practice approach for using children's literature to explore and affirm Black joy, Blackness, and Black identity in the elementary classroom. The work of Dr. Bettina Love on abolitionist teaching provides the theoretical grounding for this chapter. The authors describe a synthesis of representation in children's literature and framework for abolitionist teaching, a description of three lessons focused on teaching Black joy, and a call for expanding this work in teacher education.

Embedding Diverse Children's Literature Throughout a Teacher Preparation Program

This chapter explores the incorporation of diverse children's literature into a teacher preparation program, both in and beyond a required Literature for Children course. With the aim of cultivating positive reading identities for pre-service teachers, the authors focus on the process for implementing changes to build a culture of reading, so that pre-service teachers identify as life-long readers, and specifically readers who understand the importance of diverse texts. Changes to curriculum in writing, social studies, and special education methods courses are described, as is the creation of a college-wide book club. The goal of embedding children's literature in and across teacher preparation programs is for pre-service teachers to feel prepared to bring these texts into their own classrooms and to facilitate discussions on the topics that these texts raise with their students, administrative team, and parents. In order to do this, teacher educators need to provide ample opportunities for students to practice selecting, analyzing, and discussing diverse children's literature.

Promoting Race Talk With Elementary Preservice Teachers Through Diverse Picture Book Read Alouds

The purpose of this chapter is to provide teacher educators with considerations on how to incorporate diverse picture book read alouds into their own education courses in an effort to promote race talk with preservice teachers (PST). The chapter begins by explaining the need for children to talk about race and the resistance of many PST engaging in these important discussions. Next, an explanation is provided of why diverse picture book read alouds may be a catalyst for preservice teachers to engage in race talk. The chapter continues with a description of the developed Race Talk Read Aloud Curricular Framework which includes a Race Talk Text Set. Eight considerations explain how the curricular framework and text set were developed with the purpose of promoting race talk with PST as they read and discussed the history of racism in the US, how it applies to ourselves, and current literacy instruction in our nation's schools.

Using Diverse Youth Literature to Expand Knowledge and Consider Multiple Perspectives Through Tri-Texts

This chapter shares lessons learned in relation to intertextually connected texts with a focus on tri-texts. It presents both the theoretical framework and underpinnings that support utilizing tri-texts in the classroom as well as practical and engaging ways for preservice and in-service teachers to implement these practices in their own classroom. The organization of this chapter will lead readers through valuable steps and will support teachers in this implementation. This chapter is organized in six sections: 1) Diverse Youth Literature, 2) Intertextuality, 3) Tri-Texts, 4) An Instructional Framework for Tri-Texts Utilizing Diverse Literature, 5) Putting Intertextuality Into Action Using Tri-Texts and Diverse Literature, 6) Final Thoughts and Next Steps.