BRIDGING THE LIVED EXPERIENCES OF TEACHER CANDIDATES AND THEIR STUDENTS: POSSIBILITIES FOR CREATING AND CURATING MULTIMODAL, CRITICAL TEXT SETS

Abstract

Post-baccalaureate students studying to be educators begin a Teacher Credential Program with their own varied life experiences and backgrounds. Given their own learning journey as students across classroom contexts, teacher candidates enter the teaching profession with a range of beliefs about teaching, learning, and literacy. It is crucial for teachers to understand the diverse learners in their classrooms and to build from their students’ intersectional identities and sociocultural capital. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2018 it was estimated that of the 51 million students in the United States who would attend pre-K through 12 grade, about half (26 million) would be children of color (Price-Dennis, D., & Sealey-Ruiz, Y, 2020). This practitioner research study focuses on how three teacher candidates develop as culturally responsive educators and integrate critical literacy practices into their content area classrooms. This research examines one elementary Physical Education teacher, one middle school Math teacher, and one high school World Language teacher in their development of designing meaningful literacy experiences that leverage students’ lived experiences and intercultural backgrounds. The theories undergirding the research include: culturally sustaining pedagogies (Ladson-Billings 1995; Gay, 2000; Paris & Alim, 2017; Muhammad, 2020), critical literacies (Janks, 2000; Luke, 2004; Vasquez, 2017; Vasquez, Janks, & Comber, 2019; Vasquez, 2005; Zacher Pandya & Avila, 2014) and Harste et al. 1984; Jewitt, 2016; Morrell, 2011; Mosley, 2010; Muhammad, 2020; Moll, 2019;Nash et al., 2023, p. 2). This qualitative research study employed practitioner inquiry and utilized thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) to analyze critical text set reflections about the design and implementation of critical text sets. Findings suggest that teachers recognize the importance of expansive notions of literacy, reenvision text collection as a generative process, and link learning to lived experiences of students. The findings from this study have implications for teachers across educational contexts and global spaces. By investing time to integrate historical and culturally relevant people and places into content learning, teacher candidates recognize the value of drawing from their own lived experiences to build connections to students’ multilayered identities and to create elevated engagement and learning in the classroom. This study led to the development of a new model called TEXT that helps foster ongoing reflective points to consider in the selection, sequencing, and situating of multimodal texts within teaching.