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Full-Text Articles in Education
If I Knew Then What I Do Now: Fostering Pre-Service Teachers’ Capacity To Promote Expansive And Critical Conversations With Children’S Literature, Stephen Adam Crawley
If I Knew Then What I Do Now: Fostering Pre-Service Teachers’ Capacity To Promote Expansive And Critical Conversations With Children’S Literature, Stephen Adam Crawley
Occasional Paper Series
In this article, I reflect on my practices as a teacher educator and respond to the following questions: How do I foster the capacity of pre-service teachers to use children’s literature to promote expansive and critical conversations in the classroom? How do pre-service teachers report their stances and sense of preparedness when reflecting on the course? To address these questions, I share two strategies I employed in my undergraduate course for elementary education majors: 1) emphasizing children's literature as windows and mirrors and 2) considering stakeholder responses. For each strategy, I include preservice teachers’ (PTs’) statements that reflect how the …
What Do You Do When You Don't Know How To Respond? Supporting Pre-Service Teachers To Use Picture Books To Facilitate Difficult Conversations, Kathryn Struthers Ahmed, Nida Ali
What Do You Do When You Don't Know How To Respond? Supporting Pre-Service Teachers To Use Picture Books To Facilitate Difficult Conversations, Kathryn Struthers Ahmed, Nida Ali
Occasional Paper Series
In this paper, the authors – a preservice teacher (PST) and a teacher educator – consider how teacher education might better prepare PSTs to use picture books to facilitate difficult conversations in elementary classrooms. They share missed opportunities from their own experiences in a fourth-grade fieldwork classroom and in a graduate-level elementary literacy methods course where they felt unprepared to respond to students’ comments about “controversial” topics. They reimagine how these experiences might have been transformed to be more educative for PSTs, first by considering how they could have responded more thoughtfully in the moment and then by thinking about …
Focus On Friendship Or Fights For Civil Rights? Teaching The Difficult History Of Japanese American Incarceration Through The Bracelet, Noreen N. Rodríguez
Focus On Friendship Or Fights For Civil Rights? Teaching The Difficult History Of Japanese American Incarceration Through The Bracelet, Noreen N. Rodríguez
Occasional Paper Series
Japanese American incarceration is one of few Asian American historical topics addressed in P-12 curriculum. A dearth of children’s literature is available about Japanese American incarceration, yet given young learners’ limited exposure to World War II historical narratives, simply reading a picturebook about the topic does not ensure that students and teachers will address the injustices involved in the event. This study contrasts the distinct pedagogical approaches taken up by two Texas elementary educators who read aloud Yoshiko Uchida’s The Bracelet, a picturebook that details a young Japanese American girl’s forced removal from her home.
Angry Like Me, Catherine-Laura Dunnington, Shoshana Magnet
Angry Like Me, Catherine-Laura Dunnington, Shoshana Magnet
Occasional Paper Series
In this article we take on a challenging picture book, The Heart and the Bottle written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers, and how one preschool boy’s response changed us. As part of a three-center initiative to discuss hard feelings and grief with preschool learners, we teamed with six preschool teachers to read and work through this text. We explore how both the preschoolers’ and the teachers’ responses challenged us to look at how the disjoint between pedagogy (literature that says we should teach these types of texts) and practice (how this classroom experience actually unfolds) leaves much room for continued …
Choosing Advocacy
Occasional Paper Series
Two articles comprise this publication. In "Beyond the Story-Book Ending: Literature for Young Children About Parental Estrangement and Loss," Megan Matt analyzes over 30 books for young children on the topics of abandonment, estrangement, divorce, and foster care. She observes that this loss might appear as an event within the story or as a fear articulated by a young child. She states that, as an educator, she hopes that she can make the children realize that their own stories are "real" and legitimate, no matter what messages they might encounter or fail to encounter in the media. In "Walking the …
Changing The Shape Of The Landscape: Sexual Diversity Frameworks And The Promise Of Queer Literacy Pedagogy In The Elementary Classroom, Cammie Kim Lin
Changing The Shape Of The Landscape: Sexual Diversity Frameworks And The Promise Of Queer Literacy Pedagogy In The Elementary Classroom, Cammie Kim Lin
Occasional Paper Series
Analyzing LGBTQ-inclusive children’s literature and teaching practices in the elementary classroom, the author outlines a vision for a queer literacy pedagogy. The article begins with a description of four different sexual diversity frameworks: homophobia/heterosexism, tolerance/visibility, social justice, and queer. It includes an exploration of children’s literature and teaching practices that exemplify each framework, making explicit the connections between theory and practice. It then expands on the theories, principles, and practices composing queer literacy pedagogy. The article will be of particular interest to teacher educators and elementary classroom teachers, though the frameworks are equally applicable to all levels and settings.