How Reading and Writing Literacy Narratives Affect Preservice Teachers' Understandings of Literacy, Pedagogy, and Multiculturalism

Abstract

How to best prepare teachers to work with diverse learners engaged in multiple and new literacies (Luke & Elkins, 1998; The New London Group, 1996) is a critical concern to teacher educators. In the 21st century, the face of literacy and the faces in K-12 classrooms will become increasingly diverse. Luke and Elkins (1998) point out, The texts and literate practices of everyday life are changing at an unprecedented and disorienting pace. This applies across a range of contexts, in urban or rural areas, the shifting borderlands of multilingual communities, postindustrial or newly industrializing nations, traditional neighborhoods, and the virtual communities of the Internet (p. 4). Even as these changes occur, the teaching force remains homogeneous (Banks, 1991; Haberman, 1989). Melnick and Zeichner (1998) note, Demographic projections suggest that, in the coming years, students in U.S. schools will be even increasingly different in background from their teachers, making the task of teacher education one of educating largely typical candidates--White, monolingual, middle class--to teach an increasingly diverse student body composed of many poor students of color (p. 88). Faced with these challenges, teacher education programs must change substantively to successfully prepare teachers for diverse classrooms. How and in what ways such changes should occur remain open questions. In this article, we describe one set of possible answers to these questions as we examine the curriculum of a course in a newly restructured master's of education (M. Ed.) certification program at the Ohio State University. A collaboration between the course instructor and a graduate student, the study brings together the reflections of the professor who designed and taught the course--a form of teacher research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993)--with those of a researcher reflecting as a participant observer. We bring our respective positionings as a White, female, assistant professor and a Latina, female, graduate student to bear as we explore the role of reading and writing literacy narratives in shaping preservice teachers' understandings about literacy pedagogy and multiculturalism. The Research Context The course under examination provides secondary M. Ed. certification students with an introduction to definitions of language, literacy, and culture, and to key issues underlying their fields of study--social studies, English language arts, and foreign and second language education. These issues include current understandings about language and learning, literacy, and instructional debates surrounding the teaching of language, literacy, and culture generally, and within more specific content areas. During the autumn 1997 class, we explored issues related to language in use: language and literacy in home, community, workplace, and school settings; the notion of multiple literacies; literacy and education in a democratic society; civic literacy, multicultural and global education; and critical views of learning and teaching. To contextualize the many theoretical and pedagogical issues that were explored, students wrote and shared three papers related to literacy including a personal literacy narrative in which they wrote an account of their coming into literacy or experiences with literacy. They also read a variety of literacy narratives (Eldred & Mortensen, 1992), written from multiple perspectives; they used these to frame their understandings of language, literacy, and culture more generally. Students in the course divided into self-selected reading groups and chose among book-length narratives such as Push, by Sapphire (1997); Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (1997); Always Running, by Luis Rodriguez (1993); Working in the Dark, by Jimmy Santiago Baca (1994); and Rivethead, by Ben Hamper (1986). All of the students also read Keith Gilyard's (1991) self-study, Voices of the Self and shorter narratives by Richard Rodriguez (1982), Frederick Douglass (1845), Harper Lee (1960), Amy Tan (1991), Maxine Hong-Kingston (1985), and Toni Cade Bambara (1972). …