Preparing Preservice Educators to Teach Critical, Place-Based Literacies
Abstract
Secondary education means helping students develop a diverse repertoire of literacy skills, but the focus has been on disciplinary and digital literacies practiced by geographically distributed communities (an international, middle class curriculum) rather than on practices associated with orality, the trades, and minority, immigrant, and Indigenous knowledges. In contrast, critical approaches to literacy instruction recognize the need to incorporate students’ place‐based funds of knowledge into the curriculum. To illustrate one such approach, this article presents a case study of practitioner research in a secondary teacher education program. Although the syllabus of a core course on adolescent literacies focused on academic and digital ones, teacher candidates who participated in a form of qualitative inquiry called Indigenous métissage had much to say about place‐based funds of knowledge in their subject areas during a field trip and class discussion. These findings suggest that critical, place‐based literacy may be an untapped resource in teacher education.
Reference
Mendoza, A. (2018). Preparing Preservice Educators to Teach Critical, Place‐Based Literacies. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61(4), 413-420.
Journal
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
Analysis
Is this article part of a larger project or series of studies?
no
Does this study draw on a large, preexisting data set?
no
Research Approach
Geographic Setting
Institutional Context
Certification Level
Programatic Focus
- Drama
- English
- ESL
- foreign language
- Mathematics
- Science
- Social Studies
Research Location Context
- Literacy and Assessment Practices - Secondary
Preservice Participants
- undergraduate preservice teachers
Preservice Sample Size
34
Duration of Data Collection
Data Sources
Data Analysis Tools
Researcher Positionality
- Inside (studying their own practices)
Research Questions
How do place-based resources help teachers imagine others’ funds of knowledge?
Is this research question explicit from the manuscript? Yes
What strategies do teachers propose for teaching
discipline-specific literacies that build on place-based resources (human, linguistic, textual, ecological, technological, etc.)?
Is this research question explicit from the manuscript? Yes