TRANSFORMATIVE CLASSROOM PRACTICES: A FOCUS ON CLASSROOM LIBRARIES, IMAGINATIVE PRACTICES, AND SOCIOMATERIAL ENTANGLEMENTS.

Abstract

In September 2022, at the United Nations’ Transforming Education Summit, an urgent call was made to educators around the world to transform educational practices. Taking cue from this urgent call for action, this dissertation takes on the challenge of addressing the question - How can teachers transform their classroom practices using their classroom libraries, imaginative practices and sociomaterial entanglements? In that quest, this dissertation work starts with presenting an easy-to-adopt framework that shall allow teachers to strategically select critical texts to be used in their classrooms to serve as powerful tools for promoting critical literacy engagements. Then, this dissertation explores the importance for diversity consciousness and advocates for the use of imaginative practices to promote social justice and critical literacy in the classroom. Finally, this dissertation shifts lenses from sociocultural to sociomaterial to offer teachers with a fresh approach to investigating classroom literacy practices encouraging them to take a holistic approach to literacy instruction transformation. Together, in finding answers to the guiding question (listed at the start), this dissertation offers several transformative ideas with the hope that it inspires teachers to adopt, improvise and innovate the frameworks presented to continue fueling this line of inquiry.