Literacy in Teacher Education: “It’s the Context, Stupid”

Abstract

This article emphasizes the importance of understanding local contexts to provide appropriate education for teachers about literacy instruction. The author reviews general problems that follow from extrapolating from unrepresentative research samples and the errors and deficit conceptions that follow from assuming that all cognition takes place within the human skull, irrespective of the contexts that shape human development and immediate textual exchanges. The author then demonstrates challenges to his own thinking when he used a book he coedited for U.S. educators in the context of a literacy education program at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. This narrative relates how the book was rewritten by the teachers in his seminar to have relevance, with extensive adaptations required. The author emphasizes the contextual facets of literacy development, and the need to think in terms of the settings of teaching and learning in university teacher education programs.