(Re)Active Praxis: Reading Community in a Reading Community: Working toward Social Imagination in English Teacher Education

Abstract

In this essay, two English teacher educators detail a two-year inquiry process in which they worked to frame curriculum and instruction in secondary reading methods around the development of social imagination: the ability to engage imaginatively with the perspectives of others and to envision more just ways of being in the world. In the curricular approach detailed here, preservice teachers developed social imagination by reading not only the words on the page but also the world around them, attending to the ways in which other readers make meaning within their reading community. In this way, classroom communities and intellectual partnerships become central to the teaching of reading and literature in English classrooms and serve as starting points for envisioning new ways of being in schools. The authors describe one particular classroom lesson in depth and discuss the connection between reading pedagogy in English and the imagination of more democratic and equitable classroom spaces.