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MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

Vanessa Grace Winn

Candidate for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

______Brittany Aronson, Director

______Lisa Weems, Director

______Thomas Poetter, Reader

______Katherine Batchelor, Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

CRITICAL LITERACY BOOK CLUB: MAKING SENSE OF CRITICAL LITERACY AND DIVERSE, SOCIAL ISSUES PICTUREBOOKS WITH PRESERVICE TEACHERS

Vanessa G. Winn

The purpose of this research inquiry was to understand how preservice teachers, in the social engagement of a book club meeting, understand critical literacy and narrate their positionalities. The research question asked are (1) How does a critical literacy book club serve as a social space for preservice teachers to construct critical literacy? And (2) How do preservice teachers narrate their positionality while participating in a critical literacy book club reading social issues picturebooks? A case study method bounded the scope of this research to the book club session meetings and all participants involved. The data produced from the case study which utilized post-structural frameworks on critical literacy was analyzed qualitatively using three rounds of coding: categorizing, in vivo coding, and conceptual coding to determine themes that answer the research questions. The findings suggest that preservice teachers benefit from familiarizing themselves with socio-cultural content in texts, personally engaging with the texts in conversation, and supporting one another when discussing texts. Critical literacy was primarily understood as traditional reading. Also discussed is how preservice teachers responded differentially to representations of social identity differences in the texts and in turn constructed their own and others’ positionality. In conclusion, recommendations are made for book clubs as a research site, the role of the researcher in a critical literacy book club, and book club text selection. Keywords: critical literacy, picturebooks, social issues texts, social justice

CRITICAL LITERACY BOOK CLUB: MAKING SENSE OF CRITICAL LITERACY AND DIVERSE, SOCIAL ISSUES PICTUREBOOKS WITH PRESERVICE TEACHERS

A DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Educational Leadership

Vanessa G. Winn

The Graduate School Miami University Oxford, Ohio

2018

Dissertation Directors: Drs. Brittany Aronson & Lisa Weems

Vanessa G. Winn

2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction to the Study ...... 1 Organizing Books ...... 1 Organization of Chapter One ...... 3 Motivation for the Study ...... 3 Motivations from Teaching Experience...... 3 A Mother’s Motivation: “Raising Readers” ...... 8 Importance of the Study ...... 10 Research Questions ...... 12 The White Social Identities of Preservice Teachers and Whiteness ...... 13 Conceptual Frameworks: Critical Literacy and Social Justice ...... 14 Introduction to Conceptual Frameworks ...... 14 Conceptual Framework: Critical Literacy ...... 16 Reading and Politics: Aren’t Reading, Literacy, and Critical Literacy all the Same Thing? ...... 16 Reading and Literacy ...... 16 The Reading Wars...... 17 The National Reading Report ...... 18 1970s – When Reading Became Literacy ...... 20 How Critical Literacy is Used Across Academic Fields of Study ...... 21 Table Two: Critical Literacy Across Academic Fields of Study ...... 21 New Literacy Studies ...... 23 Multiliteracies ...... 23 Critical Literacies ...... 25 Critical Pedagogy ...... 26 Text Analytic Approaches ...... 26 Hilary Janks’ (2010) Synthesis Model ...... 27 Conceptual Framework: What is Social Justice in Preservice Teacher Education? . 29 Multiculturalism ...... 30 Critical Multiculturalism ...... 32 Critical Multiculturalism and Anti-Racist Education ...... 32 Critical Multiculturalism and Critical Race Theory ...... 33 Critical Multiculturalism and Critical Pedagogy ...... 34

iii Critical Multiculturalism Conclusion ...... 34 Critical Social Justice ...... 35 Keeping “Social Justice” in Teacher Preparation Programs: Words Matter, Social Justice, and NCATE...... 35 Social Justice and Critical Literacy...... 36 Diverse, Social Issues Picturebooks ...... 38 Selecting Diverse Literature ...... 44 Social Issues Texts ...... 45 Diverse, Social Issues Picturebooks and Critical Literacy ...... 47 Critical Literacy Meets Social Justice in This Study: A Critical Literacy Book Club and the Importance of This Study ...... 49 Organization of the Dissertation ...... 50 Chapter Two: Literature Reviews on Critical Literacy with Preservice Teachers and Book Clubs in Education ...... 52 Introduction to Literature Review on Critical Literacy with Preservice Teachers ...... 52 Methods of Research Study Selection ...... 52 2002 - 2017 ...... 52 United States Context ...... 53 Search Methods ...... 53 Types of Studies, Preservice Teacher Preparation & Journals of Publication ...... 53 Findings in the Literature ...... 55 How Critical Literacy is Theorized in Current Research on Critical Literacy with Preservice Teachers ...... 55 What Preservice Teachers Believe about Reading and Literacy ...... 56 Prior Experience for Preservice Teachers Matters...... 56 Critical Thinking and Critical Literacy ...... 57 Reading and Critical Literacy ...... 57 Literacy is Epistemological...... 58 Beliefs about what literacy is and how one defines literacy are crucially intertwined...... 58 Research Results: How Preservice Teachers Respond to Critical Literacy ...... 59 Ways that Preservice Teachers say “No” to Critical Literacy ...... 59 Standards are the Curriculum...... 61 Keeping it Personal ...... 61

iv Other Strategies of Avoidance ...... 62 Ways that Preservice Teachers say “Yes” to Critical Literacy ...... 62 Recommendations: If You Want to do Critical Literacy with Preservice Teachers ...... 63 Preservice Teachers are Becoming Teachers ...... 63 Feelings Matter ...... 64 Do as we say, and as we do, and do it again ...... 64 Reading social issues books is not enough ...... 65 Discussion ...... 66 The Gaps ...... 66 Introduction to Literature Review on Book Clubs in Education ...... 68 Methods of Research Study Selection ...... 68 2003-2017 ...... 68 Context of Studies ...... 69 Search Methods ...... 69 Types of Studies & Journals of Publication ...... 70 Findings in the Literature ...... 71 What is a book club? ...... 71 Book Club Format...... 71 Book Club Texts ...... 72 Book Club Participants ...... 72 Logistics of Meetings ...... 72 Voluntary Book Clubs ...... 73 Book Clubs are Social ...... 73 Mirrors, Windows and Doors: Self, Others, and Imagining ...... 73 Learning about Oneself ...... 74 Learning about Others...... 74 Imagining ...... 76 Discussion: Hopes of Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors ...... 76 My Research Niche: A Critical Literacy Book Club ...... 78 Critical Literacy Literature, Book Club Literature, and the Research Questions for This Study ...... 79 Overview of Chapter Two ...... 80

v Chapter Three: Methodology ...... 81 Qualitative Research ...... 81 What is Qualitative Research? ...... 81 Why Qualitative Research for Me, as a Researcher? ...... 84 Methodology: The Research Process ...... 85 A Multicultural Subject: My Positionality Statement ...... 86 My Literacy Positionality ...... 88 Constructivist-Interpretivist Paradigm ...... 89 Research Design: Case Study Research ...... 91 Case Studies and a Constructivist-Interpretivist Paradigm ...... 91 Case Study Research ...... 92 Data Production ...... 93 Institutional Review Board ...... 94 Data Sources ...... 94 Documents ...... 94 Video and Audio Recording ...... 95 Field Notes and Researcher Journal ...... 95 Ethnographic Participant-Observations ...... 96 Analytic Notes ...... 97 Interview Strategies ...... 98 Participant Selection ...... 99 Site Selection ...... 104 Diverse, Social Issues Picturebook Criterion...... 105 Pedagogy for the Critical Literacy Book Club ...... 124 Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) ...... 125 The Roles of the Researcher and Participants ...... 126 Teacher Researcher ...... 126 Participants ...... 128 Guidelines for Discussion ...... 128 Intervention in the Critical Literacy Book Club ...... 130 Summarizing the Critical Literacy Book Club Pedagogy Planning ...... 130 Making Sense of the Data ...... 131

vi Coding ...... 131 Generating and Organizing Transcripts ...... 131 Round One Coding: Codifying and Categorizing ...... 132 Round Two Coding: In Vivo Coding ...... 133 Round Three Coding: Conceptual Coding ...... 133 Limitations, Generalizability, Credibility, Transferability, Dependability, and Confirmability ...... 134 Case Study Limitations ...... 134 Credibility, Transferability, Dependability, Confirmability and Generalizability: Critical Literacy Knowledge, Difference, and Power ...... 135 #We Need Diverse Books ™ and Issues of Representation ...... 137 Summary ...... 138 Chapter Four: Data Analysis ...... 139 Data Analysis Organization ...... 139 Preparing for Book Club ...... 139 Getting Personal ...... 152 Relying on Each Other ...... 161 Constructing Critical Literacy in the Book Club ...... 165 Constructing Critical Literacy: Conclusion ...... 170 Narrating Positionality ...... 171 Positioning Self ...... 172 Age and Readiness ...... 172 White Readers ...... 177 Learners...... 180 Positioning Others ...... 184 Multiculturalism in Representation ...... 185 Discussing Difference ...... 188 Promising Narratives of Critical Engagement ...... 190 Discussion ...... 194 Chapter Five: Discussion and Implications for Future Practice ...... 195 Introduction ...... 195 Discussion ...... 196 Constructing Literacy...... 196

vii I Need more Background Knowledge: More than Personal Knowledge ...... 197 Seeing Others: Selectively Celebrating Diversity...... 201 Whiteness All Around...... 203 Critical Literacy and Social Justice ...... 206 Social Justice Education ...... 207 Personal and Political: “The Line” ...... 208 Positioning Themselves as Social Justice Educators – But are They? ...... 210 Conclusion ...... 211 Implications for Future Practice: Notes from a Teacher Educator ...... 212 The Book Club as a Research Site ...... 212 Role of the Researcher as Facilitator ...... 213 Visual Thinking Strategies ...... 214 Books Alone...... 215 Reading Social Issues Books is Not Enough: They Do Need Background Knowledge ...... 216 More Focused Book Club Topics ...... 216 Considering Theories of Literacy ...... 217 Other Research Directions for Future Practice ...... 218 Statistics on Diversity in Children’s Literature Beyond Race ...... 218 Research Participants Beyond K-12 Preservice Teachers ...... 219 Summary and Conclusion of the Study ...... 220 References ...... 221 Appendix A: IRB Approval Letter ...... 239 Appendix B: Lay Summary of the Research ...... 240 Appendix C: Participant Consent Form ...... 242 Appendix D: Critical Literacy Discussion Guide and Visual Thinking Strategies Prompts ...... 244 Appendix E: Individual Interview Questions Guide ...... 247

viii LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Picturebook Summaries Table 2: Critical Literacy Across Academic Fields of Study Table 3: Biographic Sketches of Participants

DEDICATION

To my parents, Juleen and Charles Hershberger, thank you for every bedtime book.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the time, effort, and support that Drs. Aronson and Weems dedicated to me throughout the dissertation process. Thank you, Dr. Aronson, for believing in my scholarship, even as a doctoral student. And thank you Dr. Weems for your genuine words of praise and much needed clarity and deadlines. Without both of you, this would not be complete. I would also like to acknowledge the work of my other committee members, Drs. Poetter and Batchelor. Dr. Poetter, working as an instructor for EDL 318: Teacher Leadership was satisfying work. Thank you for introducing me to teaching in higher education and allowing me the space to reclaim the professionalism of curriculum design and implementation that I longed for after teaching in public schools. And thank you to Dr. Batchelor who introduced me to critical literacy and several key pieces of scholarship, without which, this study would not be possible. Also, thank you to Dr. Rousmaniere who found a place for me at Miami University as a Masters student, supported me throughout the doctoral program, and served on my comprehensive exam committee. You always offered clarity to the messy ideas that I presented in coursework and demonstrated a healthy humor about graduate school and an example of loving one’s job in academia. Thank you to the friends and colleagues who checked in with me and supported me throughout the doctoral program and the dissertation. Jody Googins, Katherine Smith, and Chloé Bolyard, your coffee dates and phone calls always helped immensely. Asha Hosangadi Smith, Chelsea Ulle, and Kirsten Sundquist, you helped keep me encouraged and in good company, thank you! I would also like to acknowledge the support of my family. My parents, Juleen and Charles Hershberger, you have never had any doubts about my ability to complete anything. Your unalterable assuredness is invaluable. Katharine and Craig Winn, thank you for the days of support particularly caring for Zolie throughout coursework and early phases of this project. Your time and attention were instrumental to both my completion and Zolie’s happiness throughout. And sissy, Laura, you take every phone call. I could not do or be without every day with you.

xi Finally, thank you to Ryan, my person. You have always been supportive with your perspective and time. You never made me feel as if this program or dissertation was anything but the right thing to do at the right time. While charging through early parenthood together, that is a monumental feat in and of itself and I am always grateful. To my children, Zolie and “Bean,” you do not have to read this someday, it is not too interesting. But - may we have many days of reading ahead of us.

xii Chapter One: Introduction to the Study Organizing Books According to Glesne (2016), qualitative researchers “tap into [their] subjectivity, of which passion is a part, to find topics appropriate to [their] interests” (p. 32). Brown, Carducci, and Kuby (2014) suggest that, “where there is passion, there is possibility” (p. 3). And so, I will begin with a personal story, my passionate beginning, for why I am interested in doing research on critical literacy. When I think about children’s literature generally, I go back to a touchstone memory on August 15, 2008. I had just moved to Durham, North Carolina, three days prior and I was cleaning and organizing my first, first-grade classroom. It was late in the afternoon and I found a large pile of big books (oversize picturebooks1 for whole class language arts activities) in the closet. I remember that it was cool inside because the air conditioning was turned up to full- school temperatures and I was hot and tired from moving furniture and cleaning tables, chairs, and all the classroom materials that get filthy from a school year of pencil dust, playground dirt, and summer storage. I felt physical relief as I sat down in a child size chair with my MacBook ® at one of the students’ tables and read all of the big books, one-by-one and inventoried them. I created a catalogue in a Word ® document table with: title, author(s), ways to use, and reading level as the column titles. I read and cataloged 30 big book titles. I felt very clever and well organized when I did this. I wanted to be prepared for my students. I wanted to touch each book and be thoughtful about how I would use them. This preparation felt satisfying. Little did I know as a naïve beginning teacher that I would have most of my books prescribed by the curriculum. But also, little did I know that a literacy coach and soon-to-be mentor would soon introduce me to children’s books that were so much more interesting to subvert the prescribed ones with. The literacy coach, Sara (pseudonym), was a woman who read books with a different purpose than I had. I read for content that I could use to build reading skills. For example, were there rhyming words to promote phonemic awareness? Sara, on the other hand, read for diversity of context, diversity of racial and ethnic makeup of characters; she

1 Picturebook is the term used throughout this study. Utilizing the “picturebook” spelling, rather than “picture book” indicates that picturebooks are a “multimodal reading experience” (Batchelor, 2017, p. 14), not simply a book with pictures. 1 read for humor and relatability to students. She worked in the Public Schools for almost 20 years when I began and she taught with a conviction that students needed more than the “all-white world of children’s books” (Larrick, 1965) particularly in my class of African American, Honduran, Mexican, and Chinese students, some of whom were first generation immigrants, and most of whom lived in downtown, urban settings. As a preservice teacher, I had some awareness of the importance of multiculturalism. And so, when Sara exposed me to ways of making the faces that showed up in picturebooks less White2, and less middle-class, I was eager to consider how I might continue to do this, and expand the representations of diversity in my classroom library. Over the course of my graduate education, I have purposefully thought about how to diversify reading lists and curriculum activities with more diverse books. However, I wanted to do more than remedy issues of representation. Representation is important, but in my studies in social science theory, socio-cultural theories of literacy, and critical pedagogy, I arrived at a pedagogy of critical literacy that not only raises issues of representation but how issues of representation are caught up in structural systems of privilege and oppression. Furthermore, this study and the findings also disrupt the notion that diversifying literature is the solution to the problem that I encountered with the picturebooks, and ways of teaching about texts and reading, in public education. This study is for me many ways. It is not primarily answering someone else’s questions or concerns; my own experiences draw me to this topic. I am finding a way to nestle myself into the literature and theory in order to carve out a space that’s my own - to answer my own questions that I began to hold as concerns and possibilities in my first teaching position. Like Glesne (2016), I am “restless and eager to go beyond experience” (p. 2). When I began graduate studies, I could only describe my classroom experiences and feelings that I had about them. I am interested in doing more, or perhaps better articulated, I am interested in doing things differently or alternatively with reading texts. Critical literacy, which considers not just what texts can do to

2 In this study White, as proper noun used to refer to a racial social group, is capitalized per APA: 6th Ed. style recommendations. However, there are exceptions to this use of capitalization when the authors cited in the text refer to a racialized group as “white” e.g. Larrick (1965) and DiAngelo (2012). All other racial groups are capitalized as well. Whiteness is always capitalized and “refers to the specific dimension of racism that elevate White people over people of Color” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. 119). 2 develop literacy, but considers literacy and power (Janks, 2010) has the potential to have an important influence on preservice teachers as well.

Organization of Chapter One The introductory chapter to this research study begins with motivations for the study, a statement of the research questions, and builds conceptual frameworks for both critical literacy and social justice education. Next, the role of the diverse, social issues picturebooks is discussed in the study at length because they are a large part of the study’s focus. The conceptual frameworks and discussion of diverse, social issues picturebooks provide a broad context for how this study, and the study materials, fit into broader literature as well as the way that they were considered for this study. Each of these discussions does not fit neatly into another chapter of the dissertation. They are not comprehensive literature reviews, as are found in Chapter Two, and they are not necessarily used to inform the research design outlined in Chapter Three. These discussions help clarify my use of terms and the overall importance of the study in these broader fields. The chapter ends with a synopsis of the following Chapters Two – Five.

Motivation for the Study Motivations from Teaching Experience This research inquiry is motivated in part by my own experiences as a teacher. The opening vignette, described above as organizing books, is a memory that I return to as I consider the ways in which my beliefs about preparing to become a teacher were grounded in the idea that literacy, as reading, was a skill-based acquisition. Organizing books is one of the few episodes in my early teaching career that I remember clearly as significant effort towards doing the work of what I believed was necessary for students: An educational experience that would make teaching and learning academic skills possible in my classroom. After I catalogued the big books as described above, I did the same for my classroom library which held approximately 50 - 75 more titles. I was eager to demonstrate, to myself and my new colleagues, the ways that I could be well organized and align the books to the curriculum so that students, in what was already described to me by coworkers and the state of

North Carolina as a “high need” school, could be “successful.” I wanted to be “successful” and I thought this would also make me a “good” teacher. I use quotes around the words: successful and good because both of them are subjective qualifiers with significant social implications. Critical approaches to education prompt me to question whose definition of “successful” and “good” I was using and how those definitions are embedded in socio-cultural understandings teaching and literacy. In Teaching Children to Read: Putting the Pieces Together by Reutzel and Cooter (2004), my undergraduate textbook on reading instruction and my primary source for discussing reading and literacy in 2008 when I began teaching, touted that “highly successful reading teachers” (p. 6) have seven characteristics. Successful reading teachers:  Assess learner needs to plan instruction  Create print-rich and well-organized learning environments  Use research-based instruction  Adapt instruction for learners with special needs  Understand language and children’s reading development  Teach explicitly the skills and strategies of literacy  Involve school, family, and community (Reutzel & Cooter, 2004, p. 6) By these standards, I demonstrated the capacity to create a well-organized learning environment that could “explicitly” (Reutzel & Cooter, 2004, p. 6) teach skills, such as identifying rhyming words, in first grade. I was, by this definition, preparing to be a successful teacher who could teach reading well. What I failed to consider in the moments when I was organizing the classroom library books was not just that there is more to literacy than just learning skills, but that the ways in which the definition of success that I was operating from was also embedded in social contexts and social values. Reutzel and Cooter (2004), open their text with a discussion of the importance of literacy in a literacy / illiteracy binary titled “the high price of reading failure” (p. 4). Poverty, incarceration, crime and violence all have a common denominator in our society. That commonality is exclusion. Most of these children grew into adulthood unable to read in an information society… The most expensive burden we place on our society is those students we have failed to teach to read well. The silent army of low

readers who move through our schools, siphoning off the lion’s share of administrative resources, emerging into society as adults still lacking the prerequisite for managing their lives and acquiring additional training. They are chronically unemployed, underemployed, or unemployable. They form the single largest identifiable group of those whom we incarcerate, and to whom we provide assistance, housing, medical care, and other social services. They perpetuate and enlarge the problem by creating another generation of poor readers. (Fielding, Kerr, & Rosier, 1998, pp. 5-7 as cited in Reutzel & Cooter, 2004, p. 4). In this description of a population of people who cannot read, illiterate people are grouped together and described as “expensive,” a “silent army,” who “siphon” off resources, who cannot “[manage] their lives,” and need much more “training” in order to be employed (Fielding, Kerr & Rosier, pp. 5-7). Furthermore, illiterate adults “create another generation,” which implies that illiteracy can be passed on from parents to children, the implied familial avenue for creating new generations (Fielding, Kerr and Rosier, 1998, pp. 5-7 as cited in Reutzel & Cooter, 2004, p. 4). This argument for the importance of literacy has significant classed arguments with racial undertones and implies that illiteracy is a moral failing. A key critical literacy practice is considering how texts work to position the reader (Janks, Dixon, Ferreira, Granville & Newfield, 2014, p. 158) and creating a literate / illiterate binary is a powerful social tool that does this work. In the binary, as constructed above, “the binary literacy/illiteracy offers only negative subject positions for people who are not literate” (Janks, 2010, p. 5) and positive subject positions for literate individuals. In the excerpt selected to demonstrate “the high price of reading failure” (Reutzel & Cooter, 2004, p. 4), I am positioned by the inclusion of this argument in the text as reading from the same perspective as Fielding, Kerr and Rosier (1998) (as cited in Reutzel & Cooter, 2004). I am, therefore, a good, moral, literate person. “Language can create a sense of belonging to a group or community… It helps create an ‘us’ – those who belong – and a ‘them’ – the outsiders” (Janks et al., 2014, p. 42). The us / them divide is created by referring to illiterate people as “’them’- the outsiders” (Janks et al., 2014, p. 42) and “those students,” “they,” and “them” by (Fielding, Kerr, & Rosier, 1998 as cited in Reutzel & Cooter, 2004). By creating a “them,” an illiterate reader, I am urged to consider myself part of the us, or “we” who manage our lives, are employed, provide the assistance

5 needed, do the incarcerating, and will have children that will also be literate and not considered a “threat to society” (Janks et al., 2014, p. 43). Janks (2010) argues that the literate / illiterate binary “produces further oppressive binaries” (p. 2). I see this in the way that the undertones of race and class are implied in this excerpt as well. A reader may walk away from this argument feeling morally superior and justified in privileged access to housing, medical care, etc. because they are literate. Eventually, as a teacher I began to feel discomfort about the ways that I enacted literacy in standards driven ways. I also began to recognize that the language used to talk about my school and my students was always deficit oriented. I was working in a “failing” school, according to measures of adequate yearly progress, yet I was working with incredibly skilled veteran teachers and my students were not actively failing on a daily basis. The differences I began to see were systemic throughout the school. I realized slowly that the way language was used to talk about children in my school was a key issue that I needed to better understand. My definition of “successful,” borrowed from Reutzel and Cooter (2004) became more troublesome when I considered the arguments they used to support their claims about the importance of literacy. During my years of teaching, I also began to question and rethink the way that I narrated myself. As a young woman, on a full scholarship, who attended college from a rural, Appalachian town I was socialized into an understanding of my life that I theorized through the myth of meritocracy (Wyatt-Nichol, 2011), a belief in equal opportunity, and my unique individualism. I initially believed that much of my personal success was based on my interest and skills in reading and literacy. As described in my literacy positionality statement in Chapter Three, becoming “a reader” was an avenue that placed me in the us category, of the literate, and the “’educated’ or ‘schooled’” (Janks, 2010, p. 3). However, the myth of meritocracy eventually fell apart as I acknowledged with more clarity that being educated and working hard did not guarantee access to material advantages among the people I grew up with who may have worked equally as hard, or for students and their parents at my school. These binary ways of thinking and meritocracy beliefs were not intentionally malicious. However, as Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) argue, “Our lack of awareness or denial of our behavior does not lessen the reality of its impact” (p. 73). What I find hopeful, however, is that “awareness of our theoretical maps can lead to fundamental change in our behavior” (Sensoy &

DiAngelo, 2012, p. 7). Critical literacy and the practice of understanding that all texts, and discourses such as the literate / illiterate binary, the us / them binary, and meritocracy position readers is a critical pedagogical strategy for fostering an awareness that can potentially influence individuals to change behavior. For me, these include examples such as finding alternatives to using deficit language to discuss students and discarding meritocracy as a means for narrating my life experiences.

Social Justice Motivation This inquiry is also contextualized in my process of becoming a more critical, social justice educator throughout graduate education and while working as an instructor for preservice teachers throughout the doctoral degree. In my Masters’ self-study thesis on my process of developing a personal and structural understanding of social justice, I worked to uncover my own “theoretical maps” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. 7) and better understand how I moved away from preparing students for troubling notions of success to more socially justice-oriented practices: By personally engaging in critical pedagogy that opened up societal norms to criticism, I better understood my experiences in education. Yet it seemed, too little, too late. Now, I am seeking ways to challenge the societal norms and critically determine if the ways that I assume are ‘normal’ need to be challenged in order to not ‘other’ an individual or group. This articulation of the importance of critical pedagogy to my own social justice identity development is evidence of the impact that critical pedagogy can have on individuals. I cannot help but wonder how I might have been a different educator if the knowledge I gained from critical pedagogy might have been fostered before I taught in public schools. Or, if it was taught, what I would have needed to understand the importance of critical pedagogy? What if I had read my reading textbook from a critical stance prior to my first teaching assignment? I was eager to prepare for my students, as the opening vignette explicates, but I did so in uncritical ways. bell hooks (1999) writes that theorizing as sense making are places “where [she] could imagine possible futures” (p. 61). I have always drawn excitement about the possibilities for theory as potential for imaging new ways of being from hooks’ (1999) simile. Exposure to critical pedagogies has changed the way that I imagine myself as an educator and, with those

7 imaginings in mind, I continue to reflect and remake decisions to teach, talk, and read in more socially just ways. Much of my teaching and research is done with a focus on social justice and, in this case of dealing with books, critical literacy is a specific critical pedagogy operating in this study. Janks (2010) describes the way that critical literacy and social justice work together in this way: “a shared goal of all critical literacy work,” is “equity and social justice” (p. 27). The practice of understanding texts as positioned and positioning is an instrumental one and needs a guiding sense of the purpose for teasing out the way that texts position the reader. “Critical reading, in combination with an ethic of social justice, is fundamental in order to protect our own rights and the rights of others” (Janks, 2010, p. 98).

A Mother’s Motivation: “Raising Readers” As a mother of soon-to-be two children, I always exist as a teacher, scholar, and parent. The ways in which my life is always personal and political (Sprague, 2016) has never felt as weighty as it has in my life as a mother. The division between paid and unpaid labor, gender expectations for women as parents, and my professional identity as a scholar who works with young children are constantly being negotiated. False divisions between the public and private sector have never felt as permeable or flimsy, either. So, for the motivation for the study, I am including my role as a mother as a significant part of my positionality that influences me as a researcher. As an upper-class, White, cisgender, heterosexual, raised Christian, U.S. citizen, I meet a lot of other mothers who fit into my same socially privileged demographics. One of the ways that I meet and spend time with other parents, mothers particularly, are at child-oriented play spaces and activities. On Mondays and Fridays, the days my daughter is not at daycare and I do not do paid work, I usually spend some time casually chatting with mothers about a wide variety of topics from age-specific oddities that we observe in our children to where their children are, or will be, enrolled in educational settings. In these conversations about education, which are raised fairly frequently, I hear a lot about how the mothers I meet want to “raise readers.” I have the urge to ask, “Why?” because there is an undertone in this goal that makes me feel unsettled. I am familiar with the motivation. I have babysat, nannied, and taught children for years whose parents want to do the same thing: “raise readers.” Parents and caregivers send their

8 children to tutoring, take them to the library, and enforce the recommendation of 20 minutes of reading per day, every day. These are habits, are, however, particularly enforced by middle and upper-class White parents. These parents also tend to already have college savings accounts and expect that their children will one day attend college. I realize that I am making broad generalizations based on class, race, and economic income. Not everyone whose social identities align with this have the same priorities, and individuals in different social identity categories that I have not named also share these priorities. My intention is not to create another us / them binary, but to reference my most frequent social contexts for these interactions. The pattern that I see among these parents, in these contexts, is that reading is a commodity that their children need to acquire in order to be successful in their eventual workplaces. “Raising readers,” is a phrase loaded with the social implications associated with being literate, as referenced above, and embedded in arguments, such as the one that Reutzel and Cooter (2004) also make that, “Literacy cannot be oversold in today’s economic marketplace” (p. 5). Labaree (1997) describes this goal of education as education for social mobility. Under this model of education, students with competitive advantages earn more credentials that can be used in a capitalist marketplace to get the best paying jobs and highest standard of living possible (Labaree, 1997). I suspect that when I meet parents who openly admit to not reading for purposes outside of education, is that this underlying market model of education is what motivates them to “raise readers.” As a mother, I am not cynically hoping to raise “non-readers.” I have an excess of books for my children. We go to the library occasionally, but the chances of a toddler’s heavy hand ripping a page out of the expensive, if damaged, book is less than a high priority on my list of activities. The toddler is just as happy to sing “Five Little Ducks,” using her board book as a guide, over and over again. But, what I want for my children is that they learn to read, not just for understanding what a book is about or to read the right books to prepare them for “college and career readiness” (U.S. Department of Education, n.d.) but to better understand how texts work and how they want to respond to those texts. I want my children and preservice teachers to read critically in the way that Janks (2010) describes criticality: that is, readers “[seek] to uncover the social interests at work [and] to ascertain what is at stake in textual and social practices” (pp. 12-13). Not all books are good just

9 because the medium of the message is a reading text. Not all texts are created by the same people. Not all texts serve the same goals. Being able to situate themselves and read for the social positioning in a text is the first step in their ability to understand that language is used to exert power. Language can be used to “affect people’s opportunities and life chances” (Janks et al., 2014, p. 5) but it can also be used to “challenge the way things are” (Janks et al., 2014, p. 6). Language, whether that be in writing, speaking, or other multimodal ways, are the ways in which “dominant meanings are maintained, or challenged and changed” (Janks et al., 2014, p. 6). Reading is not just a commodity to acquire for social mobility, conceptualized as a private good, it also has the potential to foster democratic equality, a public good “designed to prepare people for political roles” (Labaree, 1997, p. 42).

Importance of the Study My experiences as a teacher, social justice educator, and mother come together in this introduction to elaborate my motivations for this study. However, my motivations are not just personal, they are embedded in my socio-political context and, as such, the personal motivations for this study are also the foundational argument for the importance of the study. Critical literacy and better understanding how preservice teachers respond to critical literacy and narrate their positionalities while reading are important for the following reasons. First, in the current political climate educators are being prepared to teach reading in autonomous, not social models of literacy. As discussed later in the conceptual framework for literacy, the panel for the National Reading Report commissioned by Congress to scientifically uncover the best reading practices made decisions about what to include and exclude from their report, and settled on eight topics: phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, encouraging children to read, vocabulary, comprehension strategies, professional development, and technology (Shanahan, 2005, p. 4). These are all matters of skill acquisition and have been guiding research findings for federal and state literacy programs since the early 2000s. The results of this report serve as justification of literacy as reading at a federal level. It is important that preservice teachers understand that there are alternative approaches to literacy besides acquiring reading skills. Critical literacy is one of these social approaches.

Second, understanding and exercising critical literacy when reading is also important in contemporary times when ethics of social justice are described by Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) as: societal-wide social justice illiteracy and argue that this illiteracy is not due to a lack of information alone. Rather, social injustice depends on this illiteracy; it is not benign or neutral, but actively nurtured through many forces and serves specific interests. (p. xvii) In order to understand critical social justice, one must “recognize that society is stratified (i.e., divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality and ability” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. xviii). Critical literacy argues that all texts are “positioned and positioning” (Janks, 2010, p. 61). A greater awareness of the way that texts act on and create positions for readers is important work in what Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) describe as an “important principle” of becoming a critical social justice activist. That is “those who claim to be for social justice must engage in self-reflection about their own socialization in these groups (their ‘positionality’) and must strategically act from that awareness in ways that challenge social injustice” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. xviii). Aronson and Poetter (2017) also suggest to preservice teachers who want to become critical social justice educators that “knowing [themselves] is fostered dialectically and exponentially by [their] willingness to consider multiple points of view that challenge [their] own” (p. 1). Engaging with critical literacy to consider and narrate their social positions and the way that their social positions are mediated and influenced by texts is one way to challenge social justice illiteracy and injustice by reading from multiple viewpoints and negotiating those positions. Once aware of the positions offered to them by a text, preservice teachers can choose the way that they exercise responses to texts, not just consume them as designed. Finally, the understanding that social justice illiteracy is “actively nurtured through many forces and serves specific interests” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. xvii) calls attention to the myriad of avenues through which readers are socialized into social justice illiteracy. Some of these avenues are texts, mono and multimodal, that use language in which “dominant meanings are maintained, or challenged and changed” (Janks et al., 2014, p. 6). These texts are varied and may not be perceived as political. And one of these avenues, often perceived as innocent and neutral, existing under a “cloak of innocence” (Bernstein, 2011 as cited in Nel, 2017, p. 4), is

11 children’s literature: “One of the places racism hides – and one of the best places to oppose it – is books for young people” (Nel, 2017, p. 1). Research suggests that many preservice teachers resist critical literacy (Cho, 2015; Herbeck, Beier, Franzak & Stolp, 2008; Holloway & Gouthro, 2011; Norris, Lucas & Prudhoe; 2012; Reidel & Draper; 2011; Schmidt, Armstrong & Everett, 2007; Riley & Crawford-Garrett, 2015; Skerrett, 2009; Papola-Ellis; 2016). However, there is space in the research literature where opportunities to reflect on one’s own socialization can result in an evolving critical consciousness (Boyd & Noblit, 2015) and an appreciation that all knowledge is socially constructed (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012). These positions share concerns: awareness of one’s own socialization, or social position, and the understanding that literature, and other media, are socially positioned and positioning is the area of overlap between critical social justice education (Sensoy and DiAngelo, 2012) and critical literacy (Janks, 2010). The avenue for the work in this study is diverse, social issues picturebooks because of my interest in works of children’s literature and their perceived innocence. The research questions for this study query how preservice teachers understand critical literacy and their positionality.

Research Questions The research questions for this study are:  How does a critical literacy book club serve as a social space for preservice teachers to construct critical literacy?

 How do preservice teachers narrate their positionality while participating in a critical literacy book club reading social issues picturebooks? These questions help narrow the focus of this research project and are drawn from the motivation and importance of the study. These two research questions are also generated from literature on doing critical literacy with preservice teachers and literature on critical book clubs in education, as discussed in Chapter Two. Both questions highlight the ways that preservice teachers understand critical literacy and themselves as socially positioned, two key themes from my motivation and importance for the study.

The White Social Identities of Preservice Teachers and Whiteness Before delving into the two overarching conceptual reviews for this study, and while discussing the research questions and motivations for the study, it is worth discussing a brief but important imperative implied but not yet explicitly named in this study. The participants in this study are preservice teachers who are part of a larger population of all preservice and inservice teachers who are overwhelmingly White. In the 2015-2016 school year, about 80% of all teachers were non-Hispanic White (Taie & Goldring, 2018, p. 3) in the United States whereas approximately 50% of students enrolled in public schools are children of color (NCES, 2017, n.p.). As a study that queries how the preservice teachers enrolled in the study understand their positionality, or social identities, while engaging in critical literacy pedagogy, approaching the study with knowledge about how preservice teachers understand themselves as racialized is one place to begin as much as the conceptual frameworks that follow are needed as well. It has been well documented in what is called first-wave White teacher identity studies that “White teachers [evade, resist, and deny] the saliency of race, White identities, White privileges, [and] Whiteness inherent in knowledge and social institutions” (Jupp et al., 2016, p. 1159). This evasion and denial of White identity denies the existence of racism as “a systematic relationship of unequal power between White people and people of color” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. 119) and Whiteness which is “a specific dimension of racism that elevate[s] White people over people of color” (p. 119). Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) call Whiteness “White supremacy” and emphasize that White supremacy in their use of the term is not referring just to hate groups but “[captures] the all-encompassing dimensions of White privilege, dominance, and the assumed superiority in mainstream society” (p. 120). Racism and Whiteness are constantly operating in every social setting. Therefore, what is often called the demographic imperative of research on preservice teacher identities is not just a number based imperative, as referenced above as the large difference between the demographics of teachers and their students. It is an imperative embedded in power relations of race that are always operating in individuals and systems, including schools. “Power is not dependent on numbers but on position” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. 120). Whiteness, when operationalized by teachers can be used to justify the implementation of school practices and curriculum that are perceived as “individual and rational” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 5) and “normative sentiments of the nation-state as a monocultural, equal-opportunity

13 entity for all individuals, whereas group identity discrimination is viewed as an aberration rather than a structural practice” (Varus, 2010, p. 19). White identity and Whiteness when unconfronted remain “hegemonic narratives” which “convince those of us who benefit from dominant institutional and cultural arrangements and those of us who are oppressed by them that these arrangements are ‘natural’ (emphasis in the original)” (Lea, 2010, p. 33). Quite succinctly, Sleeter and Bernal (2003) state that “the great majority of classroom teachers and school administrators are White and bring a worldview that tacitly condones existing race and class relations” (p. 240). This study is situated within the context of second-wave White teacher identity studies, which “refers to an area of research that seeks to prepare and conscientize a predominantly White preservice and professional teaching force for teaching and learning across cultural differences in public schools” (Jupp, Berry & Lensmire, 2016, p. 1151). In this research context, there is a greater emphasis on the pedagogy enacted to raise an awareness of the preservice teachers’ positionality as well as the ways in which preservice teachers are not exclusively race- evasive, but that there are “nuances and complexities of White race-visible identities” (Jupp et al., 2016, p. 1176). The particular contours of these nuanced race-visible identities, while still engaging in the power of Whiteness by the preservice teachers in this study, is found in the discussion of the data findings in Chapter Five. Race is not the only social identity that creates unequal relations of power between more and less powerful socially identifiable groups. More on this is discussed in Chapter Three using Tatum’s (2000) seven categories of otherness and DiAngelo’s (2012) additional social identity categories that discuss relative positions of more and less powerful social groups. However, race in the case of preservice teachers has maintained particular attention in lieu of the obvious and increasingly extreme difference in the demographics of the teaching workforce, preservice teachers, and the students they serve in schools.

Conceptual Frameworks: Critical Literacy and Social Justice Introduction to Conceptual Frameworks Before investigating specific research about critical literacy with preservice teachers and book clubs in education in the literature reviews for Chapter Two, it was first necessary to pull together frameworks for two concepts that helped me “think broadly about how [my] work fits

14 into larger theories” and “significant ideas” (Glesne, 2016, p. 37). These are the conceptual frameworks on critical literacy and social justice, as presented in the rest of this chapter. Critical literacy is a critical pedagogy, as will be explained below. The eventual goal and purpose for engaging in critical pedagogies, including critical literacy, is social action. And social action, in the case of working with preservice teachers, is often described as social justice work or social justice education. Kincheloe (2008), a critical pedagogy scholar claims that critical pedagogies in education are “... dedicated to the struggle for the social good and the sanctity of a rigorous and social justice-based curriculum” (p. ix). The connection between critical literacy and social justice is not directly connected by the research questions. However, as can be seen throughout the literature on critical literacy in Chapter Two, the goal of developing social justice-oriented educators is often a goal for researchers who engage preservice teachers with critical literacy and include 1) fostering social justice (Cho, 2015; Souto-Manning, 2017) and 2) promoting social action or social change (Soares, 2013; Wolfe, 2010; Laraz & Offenger, 2011; Souto-Manning, 2017). In the critical literacy book club, the research site for this study, there is a close enough relationship between critical literacy and social justice education that the participants in this study talked about social justice more frequently than critical literacy. More on the way that participants in this study discussed critical literacy as social justice, or displaced social justice with critical literacy, is discussed at length in Chapter Five. Because these two terms “critical literacy” and “social justice” are so widely used and the definitions of practices that are used by scholars in these conceptual fields can be so varied, some initial definition of terms and scope of their use is needed to make sense of the way that both critical literacy and social justice are understood in the context of working with preservice teachers. Furthermore, it is through these complementary conceptual frameworks and my emergent understanding of critical literacy that an argument for the importance of this study is made.

Conceptual Framework: Critical Literacy Reading and Politics: Aren’t Reading, Literacy, and Critical Literacy all the Same Thing? It is evident from the selections of literature that support this study that Luke and Dooley’s (2011) assertion is true: “multiple and competing versions of critical literacy are at play in education” (as cited in Cho, 2014, p. 678). To contextualize all historical and contemporary notions of literacy, the term critical, and critical literacy would exhaust a history of conflict but would not result in a historic or contemporary consensus. Lankshear and McLaren (1993) describe both “critical” and “literacy” as “buzzwords” and claim that, like most buzzwords, they are “likely to be avenues to nowhere” unless there is a purpose for the terminology (p. xii). Therefore, these efforts do not lie in an attempt at comprehensively determining what every scholar means by these terms and how they are used. The purpose is to give a general overview of the fields in which critical literacy is a term in use. I begin with an overview of the way that I separate reading from literacy, even though these terms are often used interchangeably. Then, I describe some ways in which critical literacy is a term employed by several socio-cultural perspectives on literacy. According to Perry (2012), critical literacy is a socio-cultural perspective on literacy, but the other two fields New Literacy Studies and Multiliteracies also take up critical literacy. Finally, I discuss Luke and Woods’ (2009) two approaches to critical literacy, critical pedagogy and text analysis approaches.

Reading and Literacy For the purposes of clarity, I need to discuss what reading is specifically. Critical literacy will not always refer just to reading text print. Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) theorize that individuals can make semiotic meaning of images, sound, color, etc. as well as written text. But reading, meaning reading written text specifically, and literacy are terms that are often used interchangeably and the differences in terms have implications for research. Reading is decoding written language symbols to make meaning. In English, the ability to decode phonemes (the smallest unit of sound in words) and combine those phonemes to create whole words is how words are read. Words then make up texts and when an individual can decode all, or most, of the words in a text, the individual is reading.

The ability to decode texts is what Janks (2010) refers to as functional or basic literacy (p. 22). When an individual can read a text for meaning and make use of a text for basic comprehension, a reader can “read with the text” (Janks, 2010, p. 22). Andreotti (2011) calls this process traditional reading (p. 195). In this paragraph, reading and literacy have already been used interchangeably. Reading is a part of most activities, critical or not, and so reading gets subsumed into the term literacy. Generally, unless specifically stated otherwise in public education in the United States, when students are being taught literacy, they are being taught to decode the written English language, or read. This is the commonsense understanding. As a reading teacher in early childhood settings, my experience can be described as teaching reading. I taught phonemic awareness: the names of the letters, letter sounds, and how some letters combine to make unique phonemes not directly attributable to each letter, e.g., “ou” says “ouch!” etc. I taught students to recognize and memorize sight words that do not conform to phonetic rules of Standard American English, e.g., “the.” I also taught students to read for comprehension: identify the main character, major plot movements, and supporting details. This version of skill-based, phonics heavy reading is pervasive in American educational settings. This is due partly to the political context for reading instruction and ways that approaches to reading have been legislated.

The Reading Wars Described as the “reading wars,” the pedagogical and political debates between phonics- based reading instruction and whole language reading instruction in the 1980s and 1990s were politically framed as a reading “war.” One summary of the political climate at the time describes the conflict this way, albeit dramatically: “the war of words between whole-language and basic- skills philosophies became so intense that it disrupted schooling and threatened to undermine confidence in public education” and so “for the first time in history, the federal government called for a report on what research had to say about reading” (Shanahan, 2005, p. 1). This was the National Reading Report commissioned by Congress in 1997. The reading wars followed two lines of argument. The first is that students need to be taught reading skills, and through skill acquisition, students will learn to read. This is commonly referred to as the phonics movement or the skill-based movement. The second argument is that students who are exposed to high quality literature and engage in meaningful literacy practices,

17 such as engaging with culturally relevant literature, will acquire the reading skills they needed to learn to read throughout the curriculum. This is called the whole language movement. Both sides of the debates have conflated over time into a “balanced approach” (Cobb & Kallus, 2011, p. 47) that is arguably the most “reasonable” approach to reading instruction for scholars in literacy who distance themselves from the debate, often framed as a debate of the past. However, this reading “war” was not just about the most effective way to teach reading, these approaches took on radically different beliefs about literacy, and the “winner” of the reading wars, as implicitly addressed in the results of the National Reading Report, had a lasting impact.

The National Reading Report The National Reading Report was undertaken by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), in consultation with the Secretary of Education, “to assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read” (National Reading Panel, 2005, p. 1-1). Congress requested that the report be done by November, 1998, and a progress report was submitted in 1999, but in 2005, the final report from all subgroups was presented. As the panel charged with the National Reading Report made decisions about what to include and exclude from their report; “the Panel considered, discussed, and debated several dozen possible topic areas and then settled on the following topics for intensive study” (National Reading Panel, 2005, p. 1-2): phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, encouraging children to read, vocabulary, comprehension strategies, professional development, and technology (Shanahan, 2005, p. 4). In the minority view, an appendix at the end of the National Reading Report, authors write about the narrow scope of the research collected and point specifically to the weakness of the research that cannot address how children learn to read at different ages and in different populations, the importance of children’s early literacy experiences at home, and “reading to learn,” not just “learning to read” (Yatvin, Appendix A, 2005, p. 1). Yatvin (2005) writes, “From the beginning, the Panel chose to conceptualize and review the field narrowly, in accordance with the philosophical orientation and the research interests of the majority of its members” (p. 1). This was a positivist, “scientific basis” (p. 1).

The authors of “The National Reading Panel Report: Practical Advice for Teachers,” which is a pamphlet designed to summarize the report for teachers, does not use the eight topics chosen as evidence that the panel came down on the side of phonics and skill-based rhetoric, yet, this influential report that “[continued] to be the cornerstone of the federal literacy policy” (Shanahan, 2005, p. 5) throughout the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush Presidential administrations, clearly indicates a relative winner in the reading wars. Reading, according to the legislative programs developed from this report, such as The Reading First Initiative, emphasize literacy as basic reading. The reduction of reading to a set of skills may seem a bit far reaching. Even if reading is not engaging or critical, it seems that there would be some meaning to be made from any text. Yet, there are some examples from my own reading-teacher experiences that exhibit attempts to make reading as basic as decoding alone. Take, for example the DIBELS ® assessment program that is used to measure early childhood reading skills. When students take the DIBELS ® assessments, the students are prompted to read “make believe” words for the sake of measuring their phonemic awareness. The words do not mean anything; they have no social or historical context, they are letters marching to the orders of Standard American English phonics e.g. sim, lut, rit, bal, etc. (Harris, 2016). For obvious reasons, there is also no connection to reading comprehension in “make believe” word exercises. Reading in this way is “understood to be a fixed body of skills or an individual, internal capability – culturally neutral, universal in its features, and developmentally accessible” (Luke & Woods, 2009, p. 9). Brian Street’s (1993) ““autonomous” model” of literacy is another term frequently found in literacy research for this type of definition of literacy. The “autonomous model” conceptualizes literacy “in technical terms, treating it as independent of social context, an autonomous variable whose consequences for society and cognition can be derived from its intrinsic character” (Street, 1993, p. 5). In all of the terms and definitions above, literacy, as reading, is an individual activity that can be done by anyone given the right access to learning reading skills.

1970s – When Reading Became Literacy Literacy “traditionally refers to the mastery of skills, processes, and understandings in making meaning from and through written text” (Luke & Woods, 2009, p. 9). But, why would someone use the term literacy instead of reading to describe these skills? In the 1970s illiteracy was “discovered” in the United States. In response to this “literacy crisis” (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993, p. xv), “dealing with the term literacy had become a way of ‘getting relevant’” (p. xv), in educational research. In this social context, literacy was taken up as a buzzword in educational scholarship on reading (and writing). Lankshear and McLaren (1993) argue that taking up the term literacy to represent reading and writing as a means of “getting trendy” (p. xiv) even though “little or nothing about their reading, theorizing, or practical activity may have changed” (p. xiv) is a type of “language abuse” (p. xv). However, rather than argue for a return to the demarcations of the differences between reading and writing as skill based and keeping the term literacy separate and indicating a meaning of its own, Lankshear and McLaren (1993) acknowledge that the conflation has already happened and is entrenched in research and practice. Therefore, Lankshear and McLaren (1993) argue that scholars should “demonstrate the advantages of adopting a more rigorous conception of literacy and of receiving the theoretical, ethical, political, and partial benefits and challenges it affords” (p. xvi). The influence of scholars such as Paulo Freire in the 1970s who influenced the shift away from talking about reading and writing to learning and teaching about literacy, was an opening for challenging the assumed neutrality of traditional literacy, or skill-based reading (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993). Freire urges us to “read the word and the world” (Freire & Madeco, 1987); “reading does not consist merely of decoding the written word or language. Rather, it is preceded by and intertwined with knowledge of the world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 29). Therefore, I take my cue from Freire and Macedo’s (1987) book title Literacy: Reading the Word and the World to transition from the term reading to the term literacy to discuss the “active mental work” (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001, p. 68) of sense making that “always and at the same time affects us” (p. 71). And consider furthermore that it is possible to think of a literacy teacher as someone who works with others to make meaning with or from texts. A critical literacy teacher is, in addition, interested in what

all kinds of texts (written, visual and oral) do to readers, viewers, and listeners and whose interests are served by what these texts do. (Janks, 2010, p. 19)

How Critical Literacy is Used Across Academic Fields of Study Table Two: Critical Literacy Across Academic Fields of Study The “autonomous The ‘ideological turn’ Concerned with Power model” of Reading (Street,1993) (Street, 1993) socio-cultural Perspectives on Literacy

Skill-based, Critical Literacy technical, individual Traditional literacy (Luke & Woods, Field: Critical 2009) Pedagogy Text Analysis Field: & Approaches Reading with the New Field: Critical Social & text (Janks, 2010) Literacy Multiliteracies Theory Subfield: Studies  multimodal & Critical Traditional reading  Print Freire’s Discourse (Andreotti, 2009) literacies Consciousness Analysis Raising & Mere literacy (The  consciousness Subfield: New London Group, raising circles Critical 1996)  generative Language themes Awareness

In a table with two parts, one could place the “autonomous model” (Street, 1993), traditional literacy according to Luke & Woods (2009), and literacy activities such as traditional reading (Andreotti, 2009) and “reading with the text” (Janks, 2010, p. 22) on one side, and place

21 all other types of pedagogical approaches and theoretical frameworks for literacy, that use the term critical literacy, on the other side of the divide. For the sake of simplicity and choosing just one juxtaposition, I use Street’s (1993) “ideological turn” to describe the non-technical side of the literacy divide. According to Street (1993), social science researchers, including himself, an ethnographer, became dissatisfied with narrow assumptions about literacy as a skill-based, individual task, especially in light of ethnographic work in different cultures. Scholars such as Street (1993) “[came] to view literacy practices as inextricably linked to cultural and power structures in society, and …recognise the variety of cultural practices associated with reading and writing in different contexts” (p. 7). Street (1993) explains that he uses two different models for the approaches to literacy that he theorized. The “autonomous model” assumes that literacy is an individual, neutral endeavor. The “ideological” model draws attention to power and this emphasis on power, language, and literacy is what connects all of the other pedagogical and theoretical approaches to literacy in Table Two. Before sketching out the landscape of the theories about language and literacy concerned with power, I will make one clarifying statement that skill-based acquisition of reading versus a consideration of power does not require an either/or position. Learning to read on a functional, mechanical, “autonomous” (Street, 1993) level serves a purpose. What I argue, and what Street (1993) colludes is that “the ‘ideological’ model… does not attempt to deny technical skill or the cognitive aspects of reading and writing, but rather understands them as they are encapsulated within cultural wholes and within structures of power” (p. 9). The manufactured “reading war” between phonics and whole language that fosters either/or positions on literacy can be seriously detrimental. In national legislation, the “autonomous” model (Street, 1993) has won and the “autonomous” model (Street, 1993) of literacy is thriving in public education, as the minority view writer for the National Reading Report Joanne Yatvin (2005) predicted. Ethnographic research that Yatvin (2005) explicitly names as missing along with socio-cultural research approaches, have been “misconstrued as failed practices” (Yatvin, 2005, p. 1). However, socio-cultural theories of literacy, specifically critical literacies, which are centrally concerned with issues of power (Janks, 2010; Lewison, Leland & Harste, 2015; Perry, 2012; The New London Group; 1996, Shor & Pari, 1999) are the focus of this research.

New Literacy Studies New literacy studies are “heavily influenced” (Perry, 2012, p. 53) by Brian Street’s (1993) ideological model of literacy. The emphasis in this field of study is that there are multiple literacies and that all literacies are social (Purcell-Gates, 2007). Literacy events, the observable times that “we can see what people are doing with texts” (Perry, 2012, p. 54) are connected to literacy practices always “constructed and enacted within social and political contexts” (Purcell- Gates, 2007, p. 3). Perry (2012) describes this social nature of literacy by asserting that, “individuals must have a great deal of context-dependent knowledge to engage in a literacy practice” (p. 57). How individuals use their multiple literacy is highly context dependent and power laden. “Some literacies provide access to power and material well-being, others are marked as substandard and deficient” (Purcell-Gates, 2007, p. 3). Critical literacy in the New Literacy Studies is attributed to Freire’s (1993) work that philosophically draws researchers’ attention to the literacies that marginalized students have when they come to school settings. Academic literacy continues to be the dominant literacy, and the measure by which schools consider individuals literate and illiterate. Rather than using what the field calls “vernacular literacies” that students have from non-academic experiences as bridges to academic literacy, critical literacy critiques academic literacy “as it functions as a social and political tool for the powerful” and students are encouraged to “confront classism, racism, and other forces of marginalization” (Purcell-Gates, 2007, p. 10).

Multiliteracies In 1994, a group of 10 scholars from the United States, Australia, and Great Britain met to discuss the state of literacy pedagogy. All were concerned with the inadequacy of traditional literacy pedagogy to prepare students to negotiate their private and public lives as citizens in an increasingly multiliterate world. Traditional literacy pedagogy taught “formalized, monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 61). Multiliteracies is the word they “chose to describe two important arguments we might have with the emerging cultural, institutional, and global order: the multiplicity of communications channels and media, and the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 63).

Rather humorously, the authors of the essay published in 1996 scoffed at the sci-fi potential of all of us surfing information superhighways and becoming virtual shoppers. However, their wildest sci-fi dreams seem to have come true in a world that has surely realized a wide range of “textual multiplicity” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 64). In their collective essay, the group proposed a multiliteracies pedagogy, including a “what” and “how” of multiliteracies pedagogy. The “what” of multiliteracies pedagogy is Design. “As designers of meaning, we are designers of social futures – workplace futures, public futures, and community futures” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 65). This very agentive stance considers six design elements, “the how,” for the meaning-making process: “Linguistic Meaning, Visual Meaning, Audio Meaning, Gestural Meaning, Spatial Meaning, and the Multimodal patterns of meaning that relate the first five modes of meaning to each other” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 65). This scope certainly includes more than “mere literacy” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 64) of traditional literacy pedagogy. Recommendations for multiliteracies pedagogy include: drawing on students’ experiences in their lifeworlds as situated practice; overt instruction for developing explicit metalanguages to discuss design; critical framing which places designs in social context and purpose; and transformed practice that positions students as meaning-makers who Design their social futures (The New London Group, 1996, p. 65). Similar to New Literacy Studies, the New London Group (1996) situates students as a part of social context, particularly in the way that students as Designers are always drawing on social practices, what they call available designs, to Design their discourse and voice in literacy practice. Choices of design are not simply a matter of individual choice or style “but [are] inherently connected to different discourses with their wider interests and relationships of power” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 79). What I find interesting in this design process is the last of the three-part cycle of design: re-designing. Students as meaning-makers are never just reproducing what they have seen or heard in social contexts before, nor are they being totally original, unique designers (The New London Group, 1996, p. 76). Rather, The New London Group (1996) asserts that in the process of redesigning, students as “meaning-makers remake themselves. They reconstruct and negotiate their identities” (p. 76). The New London Group (1996) uses the term “critical” very scarcely in their writing. And the epistemological paradigm of the researchers is constructivist in their assertion that “the

24 human mind is embodied, situated, and social… and is embedded in social, cultural, and material contexts” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 82). Further evidence of their constructivist stance is that, “human knowledge is initially developed as part and parcel of collaborative interactions with others of diverse skills, backgrounds, and perspectives joined together in a particular epistemic community, that is, a community of learners” (p. 82). The New London Group does not emphasize the material realities of the impact of race, class, and gender, etc., on the nature of reality, as much as they assert that there are multiple realities which locate it closer inside the ontological boundaries of constructivism (Hatch, 2002). However, in their pedagogy they include critical framing and emphasize that overt instruction can be either critical, in the sense that it can be used to critique systems of power, or it can be complicit in “uncritical and unconscious” use of cultural meanings (The New London Group, 1996, p. 85). While they acknowledge the importance of critiquing systems of power, on the other hand they specifically state that the purpose of metalanguages is to “identify and explain differences between texts, and relate theses to the contexts of culture and situation in which they seem to work” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 77). The purpose is not to create a set of rules or “standards of correctness, or to privilege certain discourses in order to ‘empower’ students” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 77). Multiliteracies pedagogy seeks to keep metalanguage open and flexible; deciding how to “empower” students through critical framing is not the purpose of multiliteracies. This is not to say, however, that students might not feel empowered by the transformational, re-designing in the multiliteracies pedagogy.

Critical Literacies Critical literacy, not subsumed by other disciplines, but critical literacy as the named pedagogy, is the next field for discussion. According to Luke and Woods (2009), approaches to critical literacy follow two general theoretical and methodological approaches. The first is a critical pedagogy approach and the second is constituted by text analytic approaches to critical literacy.

Critical Pedagogy Paulo Freire was a Brazilian social theorist and educator who drew from humanist and Marxist philosophies to connect literacy and pedagogy with issues of power and empowerment. In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1993) writes about the banking system of education that depoliticizes education and constructs students as empty vessels to be filled up with knowledge. In a banking system, students are uncritical listeners, not actors; they are objects, not subjects (Freire, 1993). Education is positioned as neutral and irrelevant to the context of learners. Teachers give knowledge and the students are filled with knowledge without question, regardless of how decontextualized it may be (Freire, 1993). Critical pedagogy, and in this context critical literacy, promotes literacy education that works to dismantle this banking system model. According to Janks (2010), “Freire was the first to challenge our assumptions about literacy as simply teaching students the skills necessary for reading and writing and in insisting that we ‘reflect critically on the process of reading and writing itself’” (p. 13). As an iconic philosopher and teacher, Freire remains a constant presence in the critical literacy literature. Literacy as a way of “reading the word and the world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987) is drawn on in almost all critical literacy theory and research. According to Luke and Woods (2009), critical literacy, in critical pedagogical approaches, has a few key aspects: generally critical pedagogy is a process of reading and rewriting the world (p. 9); critical pedagogy is an exercise of critique about the social lives of students through “problematizing” the world (p. 12); and students are urged to become “agents of change” who “rewrite” the world after recognizing the oppression they experience (p. 13). Critical pedagogy promotes democratic learning settings to uncover the dominant ideology of social life in order to foster a democratic citizenry that is aware and active for change in learning and social communities.

Text Analytic Approaches Text analytic approaches differ in that they are influenced by poststructuralist critiques of critical literacy. Freire’s notion of an oppressed/oppressor binary is complicated by poststructural ideas that specifically try to complicate and eliminate binary understandings of the world (Luke & Woods, 2009). Poststructuralists make sense of the world as “complex,” not merely binary

(Luke & Woods, 2009, p. 16). One text analytic model that Luke and Woods (2009) cite is critical discourse analysis that focuses on the representation of the world and on what texts “do” in terms of power for/with/on the author and reader (p. 15). Critical discourse analysis focuses on language-in-use (Gee, 2014, p. 11) and assumes a theory of language in that “language has meaning only in and through social practice (emphasis in original)” (p. 12). Furthermore, meaning in language is “an integration of ways of saying (informing), doing (action), and being (identity)” (Gee, 2014, p. 8). Because critical literacy is centrally concerned with power and language (Janks 2010; Rogers & Wetzel, 2014) and this is the work of critical discourse analysts, critical discourse analysis and critical literacy are very compatible. Rogers and Wetzel (2014) argue that, “Critical literacy education is not possible without inquiry into discourse practices: an examination of the relationships between language, power, and identities” (p. 1).

Hilary Janks’ (2010) Synthesis Model Janks (2010) argues that “different realisations of critical literacy operate with different conceptualisations of the relationship between language and power by foregrounding one or the other of domination, access, diversity or design” (p. 23). However, Janks (2010) argues that concerns of domination, access, diversity and design are all “crucially interdependent” (p. 23). This is called the synthesis model (Janks, 2010). Theorists who see power as “negative and productive of inequitable social relations” (p. 23), understand language as a “powerful means of maintaining and reproducing domination” (p. 23). This is seen in Fairclough’s (2015) assertions about power and language. When these theorists create pedagogy, the work is Critical Language Awareness and the goal for students is to become aware of the ideological power in dominant language (or discourse). This pedagogy shares the goal of realization or consciousness raising (Freire, 1998) in critical pedagogy. This is one part of the synthesis model; scholars in critical literacy have to acknowledge that there as aspects of domination in language, even if that is not the only way to think about power. Without thinking about domination, and the realities produced by domination, scholars run the risk of not understanding “how these powerful forms came to be powerful,” “a celebration of diversity without any recognition that not all discourses/literacies are equally

27 powerful,” and “design without understanding how dominant discourses/practices perpetuate themselves” (Janks, 2010, p. 26). The second aspect of critical literacy that scholars under the synthesis model assume is a concern with access to dominant forms of language in order to mitigate marginalization in society based on not having access to dominant language. According to Gee (2014), “how you use language (and more generally how you say, do, and be) and how people respond to you is deeply consequential to you and for you” (p. 7). The language one uses can help one gain, or may cause one to lose, “social goods” (Gee, 2014, p. 7). Furthermore, different social groups have different notions of common sense, different vernacular social languages, and different dialects (Gee, 2014). When educators take this argument seriously, educational arguments for access to dominant discourses, for example, the “common sense” of school as described by Gee (2014), is important. Delpit (2006) asserts that “issues of power are enacted in classrooms” (p. 24) and that “if you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier” (p. 24). These rules, according to Delpit (2006) are “linguistic forms, communicative strategies, and presentation of self; that is, ways of talking, ways of writing, ways of dressing, and ways of interacting” (p. 25). Gee (2014) adds “props, technologies, and the social display of beliefs and values” (p. 24) as well. Explicit pedagogy is a pedagogical approach that considers issues of access and is an important part of critical literacy pedagogy. How, though, can educators “provide access to dominant forms, while at the same time valuing and promoting the diverse languages and literacies of our students in the broader society?” (Janks, 2010, p. 24). How does a consideration that all language is social and that there are multiple literacies, as in the field of New Literacy Studies, inform critical literacy? “The role of pedagogy is to develop an epistemology of pluralism that provides access without people having to erase or leave behind different subjectivities (Cope and Kalantzis, 2000, p. 18 as cited in Purcell-Gates, 2007, p. 134). Ethnographers who study cultural practices of literacy highlight the argument above. Different groups have different literacy practices and by studying them in depth, scholars better understand what those differences are and insist that there is not one-best-set of literacy practices. Scholars in multiliteracies argue the same principle: that pedagogical emphasis should be on “negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 60), not creating a hierarchy of

28 literacies among diverse literacies. Furthermore, “diversity provides the means, the ideas, the alternative perspectives for reconstruction and transformation” (Janks, 2010, p. 26). Finally, in the synthesis model, Janks (2010) argues that an emphasis on design as “productive power” (p. 25) is essential. The New London Group’s (1996) emphasis on design, as mentioned above is multimodal and “recognises the importance of human creativity and students’ ability to generate an infinite number of new meanings” (Janks, 2010, p. 25). In redesign, students have the potential to “design their social futures” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 60). But in order to be able to redesign their futures, or their “common sense” interactions and discourses, students have to be exposed to critical literacy that does all of the above. In other words, critical literacy needs to “take seriously the ways in which meaning systems are implicated in reproducing domination and it has to provide access to dominant languages, literacies and genres while simultaneously using diversity as a productive resource for redesigning social futures” (Janks, 2010, p. 27). There are so many ways in which educators can be socially just. How they use language, select texts, analyze those texts with students, and how they understand texts as dynamic: creating and recreating socialized knowledges is a powerful endeavor. Critical literacy draws attention to this particular aspect of social justice in education.

Conceptual Framework: What is Social Justice in Preservice Teacher Education? Social justice is a frequently used term in teacher preparation. Preparing preservice teachers to be social justice educators is a common goal of multiculturalism (Au, 2014; Gorski, 2010; Gorski, 2012; Gorski, Davis & Reiter, 2013; May & Sleeter, 2010; Sleeter & Bernal, 2003; Sleeter & Owuor, 2011), anti-racist pedagogy (Boutte, 2008; Ivey-Soto, 2013; Miner, 2014), equity-centered pedagogy (Collay, Winkleman, Garcia & Guilkey-Amado, 2009), culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2010; Sleeter & Owuor, 2011), and culturally relevant pedagogy (Ajayi, 2017). Gay (2010) elaborates on the additional terms used for culturally responsive teaching, which include: culturally relevant, sensitive, centered, congruent, reflective, mediated, contextualized, and synchronized pedagogy (p. 30). Culturally relevant teaching is separately defined by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) who developed a theory of culturally relevant teaching.

In more recent scholarship, Aronson and Laughter (2016) have synthesized Gay (2010) and Ladson-Billings’ (1995) scholarship, and the way their scholarship has been employed in education, and utilized the term culturally relevant education (CRE) (Dover, 2013 as cited in Aronson & Laughter, 2016). “CRE represents pedagogies of opposition committed to collective empowerment and social justice. As such, this research may represent our best hope against the focus on individualism, privatization, and competition embedded in neoliberal conceptions of education” (Aronson & Laughter, 2016, p. 164). Although none of these fields of research are exclusive from one another, I will delineate some of the finer points in the terminology in order to show how they have slightly different histories and implementation. However, they are interrelated and each contributes to the field of social justice education.

Multiculturalism Banks (2012) describes multicultural education as a product of the Black struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. What started out as Black studies drew attention from other marginalized groups and eventually became multiculturalism, which is the most inclusive term (Banks, 2012). Multicultural education integrates and privileges voices of individuals from historically marginalized communities in classroom curriculum (Sleeter & Owuor, 2011). Because of the inclusivity of multiculturalism, Ivey-Soto (2013) explains that social justice in education has frequently been framed within multicultural education (p. 6). However, despite its historical origins in the race motivated Civil Rights Movement, Ivey-Soto (2013) claims that the term “culture” rather than “racism” was adopted in multicultural education so that an audience of primarily White educators would listen to and engage with multiculturalism (p. 6). “Culture” as a term used in multiculturalism frames culture as “a concrete set of practices reminiscent of an outdated colonial view that dominated the work of anthropologists until about 40 years ago” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 4). Through this lens, the job of teachers and students in classrooms is to study “’other people’ [that] have culture” (Oritz, 2008 as cited in May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 4). In the 1990s “it seemed that multicultural education would become common practice in schools” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 1). Initial frames for liberal multiculturalism focused on “getting along better,” “fostering intercultural respect,” and “recognizing and celebrating our

30 ethnic and cultural differences in the classroom” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 1). The major appeal of multicultural education was that it was “readily implementable” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 4). “In its current political practice multicultural education is often superficial and based on holidays and food” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 249) or “self-esteem” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 6). Liberal multiculturalism is frequently called the heroes and holidays approach to multicultural education. Furthermore, multiculturalism has been “filtered through conceptual discourses of individualism and psychology and took for granted as neutral the existing structures and processes of school and its relationship to communities” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 240). This interpretation of multiculturalism, without specific aspects of criticality or attention to systemic racial injustices and power, as discussed by critical multiculturalists, takes on a more “mainstream ideology” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 11) rooted in liberalism which emphasizes “individualism and rationality” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 5). The ideologies that support what May and Sleeter (2010) call “liberal multiculturalism,” as described so far in this discussion of the term multiculturalism, are delineated by Varus (2003 as cited in Varus, 2010) and include ideological beliefs that (a) racism is a “historical artifact,” (b) schools are “sites of fairness, not institutional racism,” (c) the best academic outcomes are driven by “Eurocentric curricula,” (d) meritocracy through “academic achievement is independent of lived histories” even if students experience oppression, (e) teachers hold justifiable “deficit” mindsets about “students of color and poor whites,” and (f) “the source of student academic failure rests with the family and community, not the learning environment of the school and a teacher’s disposition toward social justice” (p. 26). The use of the term multiculturalism has also been appropriated by advocates for a canon of Eurocentric knowledge such as E. D. Hirsch’s claim that his great books program is about the knowledge of a “multicultural nation of diverse immigrants” (Au, 2014). However, Buras (as cited in Au, 2014) critiques Hirsch’s claim because Hirsch claims multiculturalism while “simultaneously covering up systematic oppression based on class, race, and nation status” (p. 2). Although multiculturalism began a field of study to “address power relations critically, particularly racism” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 240), liberal multiculturalism which offers “lesson plans based on … visible cultural differences [and] are easily available for teachers” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 4) do not share the same purposes as critical multiculturalism.

Critical Multiculturalism In response to these appropriations and the filtering of multiculturalism through liberal ideology, critical multiculturalists are rearticulating the “core conceptual moorings” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 240) of multiculturalism and drawing attention back to multicultural education as “a part of a larger, more serious struggle for social justice, a struggle that recognizes the need to fight against systematic racism, colonization, and cultural oppression that takes place through our schools” (Au, 2014, p. 2). By renaming and recentering oppression through systemic injustice, critical multiculturalism rejects the dilution into what Enid Lee describes as the aspects of multiculturalism that have become, “quite superficial: the dances, the dress, the dialect, the dinners” (Milner, 2014, p. 10) and lacks a consideration of “the power relationships that shape the culture” (Milner, 2014, p. 10). Sleeter and Bernal (2003) suggest that critical multiculturalism can be re-anchored by connecting critical multiculturalism to antiracist education, critical race theory, and critical pedagogy. These fields of study “generally spend more time examining the nature of oppression and culture in depth in order to develop ideological clarity, even though they may have less to say about teaching practice” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 252).

Critical Multiculturalism and Anti-Racist Education Antiracist pedagogy “emerged largely in opposition to multicultural education, particularly in Britain” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 249) in the 1970s and 1980s when multiculturalism began to take on the heroes and holidays approach and was utilized as a problem-solving program for the “problems brought about by ethnic minority students” (p. 249). Popular in Britain and Canada during the 1970s and 1980s, antiracist education spread to the U.S. “Antiracist education can be defined as an action-oriented strategy for institutional, systemic change to address racism and the interlocking systems of social oppression” (Dei, 1996, p. 25 as cited in Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 249). Antiracism in education “examines how a racist system,” such as a racist system of schooling, is “maintained, roles of individuals maintaining it, and how racism can be challenged both collectively and individually” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 250). In opposition to the heroes and holidays approach of liberal multiculturalism in the U.S., Enid Lee prefers the use of the term “anti-racist education” (Milner, 2014, p. 10). Ivey-Soto

(2013) does the same in her research arguing that multicultural education has been weakened by generalizing the focus to culture, rather than to race. White educators are able to discuss “diversity” rather than issues of equity (Ivey-Soto, 2013, p. 7) when the broader term multiculturalism is employed in pedagogy. In contrast, anti-racist educators have specific conversations about race and racism to combat colorblindness, rather than “teaching tolerance,” and “appreciating diversity,” which are safer, less challenging realms than directly addressing race and equity (Ivey-Soto, 2013, p. 4-7). Boutte (2008) also addresses the need for educators to actively address and name racial issues because “[o]mitting the word race obscures the issues at hand” (Boutte, 2008, p. 169). Boutte (2008) advocates for pedagogy that is specifically antiracist as well as multicultural and pro-justice (p. 170). However, while American scholars emphasize the importance of discussing race using the term anti-racist education, antiracist educators in Canada “have been making connections with multiple forms of oppression… and offer ways of framing antiracism that address multiple oppressions without losing focus on racism” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 252). Antiracist scholars do emphasize race, but emphasize that racism and Whiteness are part of “interlocking systems of social oppression” (Dei, 1996, p. 25 as cited in Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 249).

Critical Multiculturalism and Critical Race Theory Critical race theory is also an anchor theory for critical multiculturalism. Critical race theory is “similar to antiracist education because it is a social justice paradigm that seeks to combat racism as a part of a larger goal of ending all forms of subordination” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, pp. 245-246). However, it is a U.S. based theoretical discourse (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 7). Sleeter and Bernal (2003) argue that critical race theory is an important theoretical framework for critical multiculturalism because it theorizes about race as well as “the intersectionality of racism, classism, sexism, and other forms of oppression” and “challenges Eurocentric epistemologies and dominant ideologies such as meritocracy, objectivity, and neutrality” p. 245). Furthermore, the counterstorytelling practices of the discipline are useful pedagogical tools that “allow multicultural educators to better understand and appreciate the unique experiences and responses of students of color through deliberate, conscious, and open types of listening” (Delgado Bernal, 2002 as cited in Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 248). The connection between counterstorytelling and reading not just for content of a text but for the purpose of

“learning how to listen and hear messages in them” (Delgado Bernal, 2002 as cited in Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 248) is particularly well suited for connections to critical literacy pedagogies.

Critical Multiculturalism and Critical Pedagogy Like pedagogies of critical literacy, critical pedagogy also plays a role in social justice education, particularly in critical multiculturalism. Critical pedagogy, when combined with critical multiculturalism, highlights the importance of critical reflexivity, analyses of class, and “a deeper analysis of language and literacy than one finds generally in multicultural education literature” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 242). Critical pedagogy focuses on “analyses of power and consciousness” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 243). However, the power dynamics, or systems of power under scrutiny for critical pedagogies have historically focused on issues of social class, not race, ethnicity, or gender. Because of this emphasis, critical multiculturalism informed by critical pedagogies, but not combined with antiracist education and critical race theory, may allow scholars “a White bias” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 244).

Critical Multiculturalism Conclusion Multiculturalism, understood as critical multiculturalism with foundations in antiracist education, critical race theory, and critical pedagogy, contributes to education for social justice in ways that multiculturalism understood as liberal multiculturalism cannot. Critical multiculturalism understands schools as “cultural sites, and everyone in the class is culturally constructed through participation in multiple cultural communities” (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 4). And the purpose of engaging critical multicultural pedagogies is to understand “structural [analyses] of unequal power relationships, analyzing the role of institutionalized inequities, including but not necessarily limited to racism” (emphasis in the original) (May & Sleeter, 2010, p. 9). Each of the disciplines that contribute to critical multiculturalism “came about through specific histories to address social justice from specific vantage points” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 253) and as such they can “provide overlapping but still distinct lenses for viewing schooling, each revealing somewhat different issues and possibilities” (Sleeter & Bernal, 2003, p. 253).

Critical Social Justice Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) describe their critical approach to social justice as committed to the theoretical perspectives that recognizes that society is stratified (i.e., divided and unequal) in significant and far reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Critical social justice recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e., structural), and actively seeks to change this. (p. xviii) Informed by critical social theory that always keeps at its center a consideration of structural, not just personal roles in society, is what the “critical” in critical social justice signifies. This term “critical” is a signifier of structural considerations of power and oppression, at least in this case, and in the case of critical literacy as this term is used in the study, is where this study’s definition of critical literacy: “at the interface of language, literacy and power.” (Janks, 2010, p. 22) and critical orientations to social justice, as in the definition above and for critical multiculturalism, come together to ground this inquiry in a sense of vigilance about the importance of personal and socially located responses to the critical literacy book club. Preservice teachers’ responses to the book club are always personal as well as embedded in “…social positions and the relationship between those positions and the knowledge that they validate” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. 8).

Keeping “Social Justice” in Teacher Preparation Programs: Words Matter, Social Justice, and NCATE “There are no recipes, no best practices, no models of teaching that work across differences in schools, communities, cultures, subject matters, purposes, and home-school relationships” (Cochran-Smith, 2004, p. 64). Rather, teaching for social justice requires an awareness of the context in which one is teaching and a willingness to engage openly and actively on behalf of justice and against injustices. Thus, teaching for social justice can be interpreted as a general statement of purpose and values rather than a set of delineated characteristics or specific goals. However non-specific and contested the use of the term social justice may be, it is important that teacher educators not lose sight of the importance of naming social justice at this

35 current moment. In 2006 the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), (then, the National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Education) the accreditation organization for preservice teacher education, removed the term “social justice” from the guidance literature and standards for preservice teacher dispositions (Boyd & Noblit, 2015; Alsup & Miller, 2014). Alsup and Miller (2014) argue, social justice isn’t just a euphemism for liberal politics. It isn’t a way to exclude a group of preservice teachers who belong to a certain political party or vote a certain way. It is a way of approaching public education, and teacher education, that ensures that it will be as open and equitable as possible to all children, regardless of their identities, biologies, or experiences. (p. 199) Removing social justice and replacing it with the terms “‘teaching tolerance’ or ‘appreciating diversity,’” and taking a “liberal-humanist stance is insufficient” (Oyler, 2011, p. 148 as cited in Ivey-Soto, 2013, p. 4). The number of researchers who address social justice and equity through different lenses and terminology speaks to the diversity of communities and conceptions of equity. And, “although teachers cannot substitute for social movements aimed at the transformation of society’s fundamental inequities, their work has the potential to contribute to those movements in essential ways” (Cochran-Smith, 2004, p. 65). It is this belief that teachers can be more socially just citizens and educators that keeps social justice embedded in the curriculum of preservice teacher education programs despite conflicts over terms and practices.

Social Justice and Critical Literacy No educators have yet found the perfect pedagogy for accomplishing social justice, nor should teacher educators rely on one. Social justice and critical literacy are always contextually located (Janks, 2010; Lankshear & McLaren, 1993; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012) and this specificity requires flexibility of approaches and pedagogies. In the broad literature on social justice with preservice teachers, the pedagogies, means, and classroom activities for developing socially just educators in education vary widely. Autobiography (Boyd & Noblit, 2015; Cochran- Smith, 2014), community engagement and service learning (Bussert-Webb, 2011; Hyland & Noffke, 2005; Klehr, 2015; Lin & Bates, 2015; Walker & Waldron, 2009), critical discussion (Convertino, 2016; Davila, 2008; Lynn & Smith-Maddox, 2007; Tannebaum, 2017), and arts-

36 based engagement (Felleman-Fattal, 2017; Kraehe & Brown, 2011; Reed, 2009; Parsons, 2011) are a few shared methods. Other teacher educators point broadly to class readings and activities over the course of full semester courses on social justice topics (Moore, 2008; Han, 2013; Han, Madhuri & Scull, 2015). The range of approaches to social justice is wide and varied. The arenas in politics and education that have room to become more socially just spaces seem ever expanding, rather than narrowing. Critical literacy is not the quintessential pedagogy for fostering social justice, or social justice preservice teachers. However, it is one option in a field of critical theories and critical pedagogies because the activity of critical literacy is to acknowledge issues of power (Rogers 2013 as cited in May, 2015). Critical literacy is described as a pedagogy (Lesley, 2004; Soares, 2012; Soares, 2013; McNair, 2003), a theory (Soares, 2013), and an educational movement (Lazar & Offenberg, 2011). Critical literacy is described as ideological (Albright, 2002) and political (Soares, 2012; Cho, 2014). It is a practice of critique (Van Sluys, Laman, Legan & Lewison, 2005; Saunders, 2012). And, like social justice, it has no agreed upon best practices (Lesley, 2004; Van Sluys, et al., 2005; Herbeck, Beier, Franzak & Stolp, 2008; Cho, 2014). The purposes for engaging preservice teachers with critical literacy are diverse: fostering social justice (Cho, 2015; Souto-Manning, 2017), exercising and hearing voice(s) (Lesley, 2004; Robertson & Hughes, 2012), promoting democratic inquiry (Herbeck et al., 2008), promoting social action or social change (Soares, 2013; Wolfe, 2010; Laraz & Offenger, 2011; Souto- Manning, 2017), and “negotiate[ing] multiple ‘partial cultural truths’” (Myers & Eberfors, 2010, p. 152) in a social context. But for preservice teachers individually, the goals are to “shape students’ lives” (Soares, 2012, p. 28) and “understand and affect the world around them” (Wolfe, 2010, p. 371). These purposes are diverse, yet they are united in being uniquely concerned with non-marketable, socially oriented purposes for literacy. And when it comes to how critical literacy is done, at least one strategy is consistent throughout most of the research. That is, asking questions is a central practice of critical literacy (Van Sluys et al., 2005; Soares, 2012; Herbeck et al., 2008; Schieble, 2011; Groenke, 2008; Cho, 2015). These questions are asked of readers, of texts, and of text production. Particularly, the act of questioning is compatible with the goals of social justice education. According to Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012),

… a person engaged in critical social justice practice must be able to: recognize that relations of unequal social power are constantly being enacted at both a micro (individual) and macro (structural) levels. Understand our own positions within these relations of unequal power. Think critically about knowledge. [And] act on all of the above in service of a more socially just society. (p. xix) There is no panacea of perfect practice that accomplishes all of these goals for promoting socially just educators. As evidenced in the variety of means that teacher educators are employing to develop these goals, there are many ways to accomplish them. Therefore, in the interest of specificity, and in a sea of pliable and variable definitions and practices of socially just educators, a critical literacy book club offers one avenue for fostering more socially just preservice teachers.

Diverse, Social Issues Picturebooks In the critical literacy book club, the research site for this study, I invited preservice teachers to read a set of diverse, social issues picturebooks over the course of six weeks. Titles and information about the books are included in Table One below. Why diverse, social issues picturebooks? The book selection process is expanded upon at length in Chapter Three of this dissertation. However, I specifically chose diverse picturebooks that are not typically available on public library shelves because they tell narratives that are not part of dominant histories and offer a small representation of diversity in a fairly monolithic legacy of publishing in the last 10 - 15 years that has been very White in children’s books.

Table One: Picturebook Summaries Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis The Hoodie Ashley Lucia Liu Da’Monte is a student at Reach Middle Hero Cooper, School. When his friend Jasmine is bullied Daequan by Marco and his sidekicks, Da’Monte has to Golden & decide if he is going to a bystander or Rico advocate for Jasmine. With his Granny’s gift McCard of an identity concealing hoodie, Da’Monte assumes the role of ally for Jasmine, but he soon realizes that he can confront Marco’s bullying behavior without the help of Granny’s hoodie.

Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2014 Shout 2/7/2018  Black  The Hoodie as Mouse Protagonist Hero Garb Press, Inc.  Setting:  Heroes Multiracial  Bullies Student Body at  Bystanders Middle School  Teen  Wheelchair User Authorship  Multiracial  Diversifying Friend Groups Publishing Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They help us question why certain groups are positioned as others (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

father, and why did her mom leave him behind? But Pri’s mom avoids these questions- the topic of India is permanently closed. For Pri, her mother’s homeland can only exist in her imagination. That is, until she finds a mysterious pashmina tucked away in a forgotten suitcase. When she wraps herself in it, she is transported to a place more vivid and colorful than any guidebook or Bollywood film. But is this the real India? And what is that shadow lurking in the background? To learn the truth, Pri must travel further than she’s ever dared and find the family she never knew. In this heartwarming debut, Nidhi Chanani weaves a tale about the hardship and self- discovery that is born from juggling two cultures and two worlds.” Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2017 First Second Graphic Novel  Indian  Patriarchy 2/14/2018 Protagonist  Capitalism  Female  Classism Protagonist  Education of  Religion: Women and Hindu Girls  Languages  Transnational Used: English Identities & Hindi  Citizenship /  Setting: United Nationalism States & India  Bi-Cultural Characters  Bi-Lingual Characters  Colonialism Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They help us question why certain groups are positioned as others (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis (Flyleaf Synopsis)

Sparkle Boy Lesléa Maria Mola “Casey loves to play with his blocks, Newman puzzles, and dump truck, and he also loves things that shimmer, glitter, and sparkle. Casey’s older sister, Jessie, thinks this is weird. Shimmery, glittery, sparkly things are only for girls, right? When Casey and Jessie head to the library for story time, Casey proudly wears his shimmery skirt and sparkly bracelet. His nails glitter in the light. Jessie insists that Casey looks silly. It’s one thing to dress like this around the house, but going outside as a ‘sparkle boy’ is another thing entirely. What will happened when the other kids see him? This sweet and refreshing story speaks to all of us about the acceptance, respect, and the simple freedom to be yourself. Shimmery, glittery, sparkly things are fun – for everyone!” Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2017 Lee & Low LGBT  Gender Non-  Heteronormativity Books, Inc. 2/21/2018 Conforming  Transgender Casey Oppression  Languages Used: English & 1 Spanish Word  Perceived Bi- racial Family Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They help us question why certain groups are positioned as others (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Fight for to attend the Mexican school instead. Sylvia Desegregation could not understand why – she was an American citizen who spoke perfect English. Why were the children of Mexican families forced to attend a separate school? Unable to get a satisfactory answer from the school board, the Mendez family decided to take matters into its own hands and organize a lawsuit. In the end, the Mendez family’s efforts helped bring an end to segregated schooling in California in 1947, seven years before the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in schools across America. Using his signature illustration style and incorporating his interviews with Sylvia Mendez, as well as information from court files and news accounts, award-winning author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh tells the inspiring story of the Mendez family’s fight for justice and equality.” Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2014 Abrams Social Justice  Female  Racism Books for 2/28/2018 Protagonist  Linguicism Young  Mexican  Citizenship / Readers American Nationalism Protagonist  Languages Spoken: English & Spanish Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They show how people can begin to take action on important social issues (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).  They explore dominant systems of meaning that operate in our society to position individuals and groups (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis (Flyleaf Synopsis)

The Black Menena Rosana Faria “It is very hard for a sighted person to Book of Cottin imagine what it is like to be blind. This Colors groundbreaking, award-winning book endeavors to convey the experience of a person who can only see through his or her sense of touch, taste, smell, or hearing. Raised black line drawings on black paper, which can be deciphered by touch, accompany a beautifully written text describing colors through imagery. The text is translated into braille, so that the sighted reader can begin to imagine what it is like to read by touch, and there is a full braille alphabet at the end of the book.” Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2006 Groundwood Disability  Writing  Ableism Books / 3/7/18 Systems:  Blindness House of Alphabetic  Sightedness Anansi Press & Braille Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They enrich our understanding of history and life by giving voice to those who have traditionally been silenced or marginalized (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis (Flyleaf Synopsis) Thunder Boy Sherman Yuyi Morales “Thunder Boy Jr. is named after his dad, but Jr. Alexie he wants a name that’s all his own. Just because people call his dad Big Thunder doesn’t mean he wants to be Little Thunder. He wants a name that celebrates something cool he’s done, like Touch the Clouds, Not Afraid of Ten Thousand Teeth, or Full of Wonder. But just when Thunder Boy Jr. thinks all hope is lost, he and his dad pick the perfect name…. a name that is sure to light up the sky.”

Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2016 Little, Award Winner  Native  Native Brown and 3/14/2018 American American Company Protagonist Identity  Identity Negotiation  Naming Practices Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They enrich our understanding of history and life by giving voice to those who have traditionally been silenced or marginalized (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Selecting Diverse Literature Acknowledging the importance of having exposure to diverse books, not just racially but also in terms of representations of gender, religion, ethnicity, language, citizenship, and ability that are included in this book club is partly driven by a demographic imperative to diversify the reading of the population of readers who have grown up in the “all-white world of children’s books” (Larrick, 1965).” “Critical pedagogy is always searching for new voices that may have been excluded by the dominant culture or by critical pedagogy itself” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 24) and the “diversity gap” in children’s books is significant (Nel, 2017, p. 2). In the last dozen years, the percentage of children’s literature featuring people of color has stayed fairly constant, from 13 percent (in 2002) to 15 percent (in 2015) of the total number of children’s books published annually, even though half of US school-age children are now people of color. (Nel, 2017, p. 2) Nel (2017) argues that our current political and social times are ones of a “new civil rights crusade” (p. 1) in which social movements including the Black Lives Matter movement and We Need Diverse Books ™ are related to one another “because racism is resilient, sneaky, and endlessly adaptable” (Nel, 2017, p. 1). And “one of the places that racism hides – and one of the best places to oppose it – is books for young people.” (Nel, 2017, p. 1).

Furthermore, “The State of Racial Diversity in the Educator Workforce” report by the U.S. Department of Education (2016) states that “While students of color are expected to make up 56 percent of the student population by 2024, the elementary and secondary educator workforce is still overwhelmingly white” (p. 1), so it is also important to be doing this research work with predominantly White preservice teachers. This combination of overwhelmingly White teachers, reading primarily books with White characters is out of balance with the demographic realities of public education. The pervasiveness of Whiteness in children’s literature is an issue that directly affects education and the ways that books are made available to and discussed by educators. As the research findings from this study confirm, preservice teachers have grown up in a very White world of children’s literature. In Chapter Four, one of the participants (Ashley) claims: “I can tell you, from the last 7 weeks that I’ve read this, and this, and this, and this. But before that… if someone asked me, like, for a book recommendation, … I would say something like, ‘oh, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or like, I don’t know, The Fault in Our Stars,’ or something. Like I wouldn’t know any books that are, that I liked, that had not a White person.” Prior to The Literacy Course and the Critical Literacy Book Club, which Ashley is referring to as the last seven weeks of reading, in which the assignments in the course and books selected for the book club intentionally featured non-White protagonists, Ashley’s repertoire of books that she could recommend were about only White people.

Social Issues Texts Social issues texts are defined as “a distinctive and powerful genre of children’s literature that invites the reader, whether child or undergraduate, into a world of tough, real-life issues… selected as tools to foreground issues for critical conversations” (Van Sluys et al., 2005, p. 16). Enriquez (2014) describe these books as “social justice picture books” and describes that way that they “center plot and development of central characters around issues of equity, human rights, cultural diversity, and environmental justice so the reader gains some insight about the challenges and possibilities involved… to contemplate and address these issues in their lives” (p. 27). By using the term “social issues,” as well as “diverse,” a broader range of topics can be

45 addressed in the text set selected for this study including race, but also including other aspects of social identities that lack representation in children’s literature. Social issues books have the potential to “facilitate provocative and productive multi- tiered inquiries into social justice topics” (Enriquez, 2014) and “explore how difference can make a difference” (Van Sluys et al., 2005, p. 16). McNair (2003) argues that, Confronting cultural phenomena such as racism within the context of children's literature forces individuals to examine how they have been affected by racism, which aids in the development of a social critical consciousness. Such a consciousness will enable preservice teachers to see what Nieto (2000) refers to as the "hidden curriculum" and the manner in which it operates not only in children's literature, but also across school practices, and curriculum as well. Children's literature can serve as a catalyst for helping preservice teachers learn to read the word and the world.” (p. 52) However, exposure to social issues texts alone does not prompt criticality. And in some instances, nostalgic attachment to picturebooks inhibits critical literacy (McNair, 2003), and strong feelings of anger or sadness elicited by texts discouraged some preservice teachers from planning to use social issues texts in classrooms with PreK-12 students (Herbeck et al., 2008; Papola-Ellis, 2016, p. 10). So, why begin conversations with preservice teachers that they may strongly oppose? For these arguments, I turn to the children’s book authors themselves. Sherman Alexie (2014), author of Thunder Boy Jr. (a part of this study) writes that when books raise difficult social issues, critics are “… simply trying to protect the privileged notions of what literature is and should be. They are trying to protect privileged children. Or the seemingly privileged” (Alexie, 2014, p. 93). Critics are not protecting children who are already navigating these issues as children. “They aren’t trying to protect the poor from poverty” (Alexie, 2014, p. 93). Kate Messner (2016) reflects I understand that school administrators are afraid to talk about tough issues sometimes. Authors are, too. But we’re not protecting kids when we keep them from stories that shine a light in the darker corners of their lives. We’re just leaving them alone in the dark. (n.p.) Although there are ethical issues raised and considered about using metaphorical “others” in order to better understand the social positions of preservice teachers, particularly raised by

46 scholars in postcolonial scholarship and discussed in Chapter Two and again in Chapter Five, preservice teachers can benefit from intentional exposure to the types of diverse and socially justice-oriented books that are investigated in this study.

Diverse, Social Issues Picturebooks and Critical Literacy Critical literacy offers a critical lens with which to consider the diverse, social issues picturebooks selected. Exposure to diverse content is not enough to prompt a critical discussion. “What matters instead are the ways in which such picturebooks and representations within them are interrogated and how they are used as springboards for deeper explorations of the issues at hand” (Enriquez, 2014, p. 34). Critical literacy raises questions of the power dynamics in publishing, authorship, and book distribution. Furthermore, critical literacy prompts readers to not just consider issues of representation in the pages of the texts but how those representations intersect with a reader’s social identity and the context of the reading. A few of these adapted from Janks et al. (2014) and included in the study’s Critical Literacy Discussion Guide include:  Where was the text written? Where is it being read? (p. 23)  What other texts do you, as readers, have to compare with this picturebook?  Does this picturebook legitimate any groups or ideas? (p. 29)  Does this picturebook support the unity of, or fragment, any groups of people? (p. 29)  What, if anything, is presented as natural or unnatural? (p. 30) Without explicit exposure to diverse, social issues books, scholars ask who is being protected? However, without a consideration of power in text, representations of difference can be produced as unchallengeable truths. Preservice teachers need to not only become acquainted with and appreciate diverse literature, but also be able to critically read all literature, even diverse literature. Otherwise, preservice teachers are left with an unnuanced celebration of diversity. For example, although Thunder Boy Jr. by Sherman Alexie3 offers a representation of diversity in children’s literature, one of the titles that made up just 0.9% of published books in

3 At the outset of this study, I would like to acknowledge that in February of 2018 and early March of 2018, at the end of the Critical Literacy Book Club, Sherman Alexie was accused of sexual abuse by at least 5 women (Perry, 2018). At the end of February, Reese (2018) removed 47

2015 (CCBC, 2015) that have Native / Native American characters. However, Native scholars like Debbie Reese who edits American Indian Children’s Literature, a blog that “provides critical perspectives and analysis of indigenous peoples in children's and young adult books, the school curriculum, popular culture, and society” (2018, n.p.) critiques the text Thunder Boy Jr. saying, By not being tribally specific, his story obscures the diversity that Native writers, scholars, activists, parents, teachers, librarians, lawyers... have been bringing forth forever. We aren't monolithic. We're very different in our histories, religions, material cultures, and yes, the ways that we give names. Moving into that name play collapses significant distinctions across our nations. (Reese, 2016, n.p.) This criticism troubles the premise of Thunder Boy Jr., a book about naming, and without this background knowledge readers may come away with unnuanced understandings of naming traditions among Native American tribal groups. Even though it is a book that technically fits the criteria of diversity of characters does not mean that the representation of the characters is accurate or appropriate. In Chapter Four, Nicole considered the important role of critique: “… just because it’s being talked about doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good way to talk about it … Do we stop here? Like with our social justice and our learning and our curriculum? Or should we keep pushing to keep it better?” Diverse, social issues books are certainly needed. The call for them from social media campaigns like We Need Diverse Books ™ (2018) is a demand that should be taken seriously. The testimonies of individuals, such as Lesléa Newman, author of Sparkle Boy, compellingly argue the importance of readers seeing themselves reflected in books that they read and wanting

Alexie’s from AICL’s gallery of Native writers and illustrators and apologized for promoting his work because his … books don't give readers the depth of understanding that they need to know who we are, what our histories have been, what we face on a daily basis, and what gives us the strength to carry on. Far too many people adore him and think that they're hip to Native life because they read his books. If you're one of those people, please set his books aside. Read other Native writers. Don't inadvertently join him in hurting other Native writers. (Reese, 2018) I also apologize for “inadvertently join[ing] him in hurting other Native writers” (Reese, 2018).

48 the same for others. Lesléa Newman, spoke candidly about reading her first Jewish children’s book at age 32 in an independent bookstore in Massachusetts I don’t remember what I was looking for, but I do remember what I found: The Carp in the Bathtub, written by Barbara Cohen and illustrated by Joan Halpern. The family in the book was very similar to mine: they came from Brooklyn, they celebrated Passover, they ate gefilte fish! As I stood in the bookstore reading a children’s book about a Jewish family, tears streamed from my eyes. I was astonished at my strong reaction to the story. After all, I was now a grown woman. And yet the little girl inside me was seeing something she had never seen before and never even knew she so desperately needed: a reflection of herself and her family in a work of children’s literature. The message I received upon reading that book was that I matter. I am valuable. I have a place in the world. I belong. (Newman, n.d.) It is important that preservice teachers understand the ways that their efforts to find a wide variety of representations of individuals may positively impact students, especially in an ‘all- white world of children’s books’ (Larrick, 1965).

Critical Literacy Meets Social Justice in This Study: A Critical Literacy Book Club and the Importance of This Study The standards, which have become the curriculum in the eyes of many preservice teachers (Cooper, Jenkins & Winn, 2015), “portray U.S. society as fundamentally harmonious, with laws designed to promote fairness and progress. Today’s wars don’t exist. Nor does hunger or poverty” (Alexie, 2014, p. 96). Messages of meritocracy and individualism are the hallmarks of standards design (Alexie, 2014) and picturebooks that disrupt these norms also disrupt the beliefs that social groups, be they organized by race, class, gender, ability, language, or citizenship, have a natural right to those positions of privilege (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. 68). “All texts are positioned and positioning” (Janks, 2010, p. 61) and “every text is just one set of perspectives on the world, a representation of it” (Janks, 2010, p. 61). Diverse, social issues picturebooks are limited to just one representation of the world as much as mainstream texts. Promoting diverse, social issues texts is important, but how they are viewed and analyzed are just as important. Therefore, critical literacy and diverse, social issues picturebooks books are both made stronger together, rather than apart when pursuing social justice work.

Organization of the Dissertation In this section the organization of the dissertation as a whole is explained for ease of reading and clarity of direction. First, the research questions are reiterated to refocus attention on the narrow focus for the study, despite the broad range of issues and topics that could be addressed in either the field of critical literacy or social justice and the use of diverse, social issues picturebooks with preservice teachers. The research questions for this study are:  How does a critical literacy book club serve as a social space for preservice teachers to construct critical literacy?

 How do preservice teachers narrate their positionality while participating in a critical literacy book club reading social issues picturebooks? Chapter Two is comprised of two separate literature reviews. The first is a review of literature on doing critical literacy research with preservice teachers. The second review is of literature on critical book clubs in education, generally. The participants in this study are preservice teachers and so the broader field of critical literacy is narrowed to studies that include preservice teachers. However, the literature on book clubs, reviewed as book clubs and literature circles, for just preservice teachers was a much smaller selection of literature and so the review was expanded to education generally from preschool to adult learners. In conclusion, the discussions from each separate literature review describe the way that the research questions contribute to new knowledge in both fields. Chapter Three addresses the research design in detail. Beginning with a consideration of qualitative research generally, I write about the research study in terms of theory and design. The discussion begins with a consideration of qualitative research generally and the constructivist- interpretivist paradigm specifically. I discuss the choice of an intrinsic case study methodology, delineate the type of data collected for the study, explain text selection for the critical literacy book club, and expand upon the pedagogical philosophies guiding the implementation of the critical literacy book club. Issues of ethics in terms of voluntary participation and consent are addressed through the Institutional Review Board approval documentation and other ethical concerns are woven throughout the chapter. Chapter Four is a discussion of how the data from this study answers questions about how the participants in this study Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole, and Stephen considered the book

50 club a social space where they generated ideas about texts together and how their understandings of the texts were influenced by one another. The analysis provides evidence of the ways in which the participants in the book club constructed critical literacy as traditional reading (Andreotti, 2011), despite a research design that prompted critical literacy responses to texts based on critical literacy theory and the guiding pedagogy of Janks et al. (2014). Finally, the question of how preservice teachers narrate their positionality during a critical literacy book club is discussed in two parts: how they understand themselves and how they understand diverse others encountered in texts. Chapter Five concludes the study with a discussion of the data presented in Chapter Four as it relates to the socio-cultural context of preservice teachers. Then, I make recommendations for future practice including reflections on the role of the researcher in critical literacy work and recommendations for future critical literacy texts and conclude the study with reflections on the process of learning by writing throughout the dissertation process.

Chapter Two: Literature Reviews on Critical Literacy with Preservice Teachers and Book Clubs in Education

Introduction to Literature Review on Critical Literacy with Preservice Teachers The purpose of this literature review is to discuss the major findings in peer-reviewed research from 2002 to 2017 on critical literacy research with preservice teachers. In this introductory section, I will begin with the methods I used for selecting this literature to review including rules of inclusion and exclusion, a review of the search terms used, and the journals where the studies for this review were published. In the next section, I discuss how the researchers position their research as critical literacy theoretically and why the researchers suggest that studying critical literacy with preservice teachers is important. After that, I discuss the findings in the research in three general types of responses: how preservice teachers accept critical literacy and how they reject critical literacy, and recommendations for critical literacy practice with preservice teachers. Finally, I discuss the gaps in the literature.

Methods of Research Study Selection 2002 - 2017 In 2002, Lewison, Flint and Van Sluys (2002) reviewed 30 years of critical literacy research and synthesized the range of definitions for critical literacy into four dimensions: (1) disrupting the commonplace, (2) interrogating multiple viewpoints, (3) focusing on sociopolitical issues, and (4) taking action and promoting social justice (p. 382). Lewison et al.’s (2002) review is part of the introduction to a research study that investigates how early career inservice teachers use critical literacy in their classrooms, but the four dimensions of critical literacy as stated in the introduction for Lewison et al.’s (2002) research is a widely cited range of definitions that scholars in critical literacy use to situate their research in the broad fields that use critical literacy. Because of the frequency of the citation of this work as well as the neat demarcation of 15 years of research, 2002 is the earliest year of publication in this literature review. The most recent articles in the review are published in 2017 to include the most current research on critical literacy with preservice teachers.

United States Context The context of the research studies included in this review are limited to the United States. Critical literacy is contextual. As a scholar and individual, I can reasonably assume that I am familiar with the nuances of social and institutional systems and experiences in the United States, or that I can become familiar with them, but outside the United States I cannot make the same assumption. Therefore, there is a limited scope by geographic region in this review.

Search Methods From July 2017 – August, 2017, I searched the Miami University Library system for peer-reviewed research articles on critical literacy with preservice teachers. Boolean phrases included the following terms and phrases: “critical literacy with preservice teachers,” and “critical literacy.” The results of these searches as well as searches for “critical literacy” and “critical literacy with preservice teachers” in the Critical Literacy: Theories and Practice journal and the Journal of Language and Literacy Education, particularly productive journals in the search results, also generated more studies to include in this review. Next, I read articles referenced in the first round of research studies to generate a second wave of research study reading. Finally, I submitted the list of references that I read for this review to two separate colleagues who do critical literacy work with preservice teachers. At their suggestions, I added more articles to this review not previously found in my library and database search results. Included in this review are 40 articles on critical literacy with preservice teachers from 2002- 2017.

Types of Studies, Preservice Teacher Preparation & Journals of Publication Of the research articles reviewed, all of the research was conducted using qualitative methods including: eight case studies, one interpretive case study, two longitudinal case studies, one teacher researcher study, one grounded theory study, one self-study, one critical language analysis, two narrative studies, one action research study, and one combined action research and narrative study. Two studies were explicitly mixed-method. The remainder of the studies use research gathered from preservice teachers on course assignments to reflect on pedagogical practices, investigate remarkable teaching moments in classrooms with preservice teachers,

53 and/or develop specific pedagogical methods or frameworks for critical literacy practice with preservice teachers. All of the research in this review was done in the context of coursework with preservice teachers. The majority of the studies were conducted in English Methods and English Language Arts courses for preservice teachers. The courses have a variety of names from “English Methods and Adolescent Fiction” to “Content Area Literacy.” However, what is important to note is that they have centered English and Language Arts as the course content focus for 28/40 studies. Furthermore, the majority of the preservice teachers who were exposed to critical literacy in their coursework, and in turn included in these research studies, were preservice teachers preparing for teaching adolescent students. The exceptions to the general focus on English Language Arts coursework is as follows: three studies collected data across the scope of students’ entire preservice teacher programs. Two studies focused on Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) preservice educators. One study conducted coursework and gathered data from two different universities in one study. One study included preservice and inservice teachers. And one study included preservice teachers in a web-based forum from US and Swedish preservice teacher programs in what they call a “glocalized English classroom” (Myers & Eberfors, 2010). Journals included in this literature review are as follows. Three articles came from each of the following journals: Action in Teacher Education, Critical Literacy, Journal of Language and Literacy Education Multicultural Education, and Theories and Practice. Two articles came from each of the following journals: English Education, Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, and The Social Studies. And one article came from each of the following journals: Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Brock Education, Curriculum Inquiry, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, English Language Teaching, International Reading Association, Journal of Children’s Literature, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Journal of Literacy Research, Journal of Reading Education, Journal of Research in Education, Language Arts, The Language and Literacy Spectrum, Linguistics and Education, Mid-Western Educational Researcher, Race, Ethnicity & Education, Reading Horizons, Reading Research Quarterly, Teaching Education, Teacher Education Quarterly, and Teaching and Teacher Education.

Findings in the Literature For every single study in this review, there is different definition of critical literacy. It is evident from this literature selection that the assertion that Luke and Dooley (2011) claimed is true: “multiple and competing versions of critical literacy are at play in education” (as cited in Cho, 2014, p. 678). It is important to first understand how course instructors are framing critical literacy theoretically and how the researchers discuss preservice teachers’ ideas about critical literacy because both foreground the results of the studies.

How Critical Literacy is Theorized in Current Research on Critical Literacy with Preservice Teachers The differences in definitions of critical literacy are owed at least in part to the reality that critical literacy is a term that is used in several academic fields as demonstrated in the conceptual framework in Chapter One of this proposal. Many scholars in this literature review connect critical literacy practices directly to the philosopher Paulo Freire and claim that critical literacy is a continuation of Freire’s literacy work in Brazil (Soares, 2013; Schieble, 2011; Souto-Manning, 2017). Others connect their definitions of critical literacy to Freire and Macedo’s (1987) scholarship on literacy as “reading the word and the world” (Bender-Slack & Young, 2016; McNair, 2003; Lesley, 2004; Saunders, 2012, Van Sluys et al., 2005; Wetzel & Rogers, 2015). In these references, critical literacy is tied to the field of critical pedagogy. However, critical literacy is also taken up by scholars who place less emphasis on Paulo Freire’s conscientization efforts and critical pedagogy, and instead place greater emphasis on the social nature of texts and multiple literacies (Morrell, 2011), and the social consequences of literacy pedagogy. These fields are literacy as a social practice (Bender-Slack & Young, 2016; Schmidt, Armstrong & Everett, 2007) and multiliteracies (Robertson & Hughes, 2012; Schieble (2011). The theoretical openness of critical literacy in this research is unsurprising, considering the careful attention to texts as “social, political, and historical” (Schmid, et al., 2007; Cho, 2014) and critical literacy as a power laden pursuit (Lesley, 2004; Soares, 2012; Soares, 2013; Cho, 2014; Papola-Ellis, 2016) and social practice (Schmidt, et al., 2007). In this body of research, critical literacy is described as a pedagogy (Lesley, 2004; Soares, 2012; Soares, 2013; McNair, 2003), a theory (Soares, 2013), and an educational movement (Lazar & Offenberg, 2011). Critical literacy is described as ideological (Albright,

2002) and political (Soares, 2012; Cho, 2014). The activity of critical literacy is to acknowledge issues of power (Rogers, 2013, as cited in May, 2015). It is a practice of critique (Van Slys et al., 2005; Saunders, 2012). And it has no agreed upon best practices (Lesley, 2004; Van Sluys et al., 2005; Herbeck, Beier, Franzak & Stolp, 2008; Cho, 2014). However, when it comes to how critical literacy is done, at least one strategy is consistent throughout most of the research. That is, asking questions is a central practice of critical literacy (Van Sluys et al., 2005; Soares, 2012; Herbeck et al., 2008; Schieble, 2011; Groenke, 2008; Cho, 2015) and questions are a part of the pedagogical approach to critical literacy in all of the studies read. My personal notes for this essay include 100 references when searching for the word “question” in my notes for this review, so they are not all included here. These questions are asked of readers, of texts, and of text production. The act of questioning is central to almost all of the studies, whether it be through direct question prompts or the course assignments studied in the research. The purpose of engaging preservice teachers with critical literacy are diverse and include: fostering social justice (Cho, 2015; Souto-Manning, 2017), exercising and hearing voice(s) (Lesley, 2004; Robertson & Hughes, 2012), promoting democratic inquiry (Herbeck et al., 2008), promoting social action or social change (Soares, 2013; Wolfe, 2010; Laraz & Offenger, 2011; Souto-Manning, 2017), and “negotiate[ing] multiple ‘partial cultural truths’” (Myers & Eberfors, 2010, p. 152) in a social context. But for the students individually, the goals are to “shape students’ lives” (Soares, 2012, p. 28) and to “understand and affect the world around them” (Wolfe, 2010, p. 371). These purposes are diverse, yet, they are united in being uniquely concerned with non-marketable, socially oriented purposes for literacy. These outcomes stand in contrast with Bender-Slack and Young’s (2016) goal of fostering “savvy consumers” (p. 106) which is an outlier and a distinctly neoliberal goal not aligned with the other researchers in the literature.

What Preservice Teachers Believe about Reading and Literacy Prior Experience for Preservice Teachers Matters In the literature presented, many of the course instructors found that preservice teachers’ prior experiences in education have prepared preservice teachers to think about literacy, not critically, but as an individual, skill-based endeavor. Preservice teachers have “in-their head

56 models” of traditional literacy: teachers ask questions and students read texts for the answers (Van Sluys et al., 2005, p. 18). Uncovering and understanding these preconceived notions are important because preservice teachers are likely to enter teacher preparation programs with past experiences that “significantly shaped their perspectives on and attitudes toward literacy” and “preservice teachers need opportunities to unpack these … experiences to assess their constraints and affordances” (Riley & Crawford-Garrett, 2015, p. 71). At times, habits of literary analyses of texts, were so common that preservice teachers were reluctant to move “beyond the personal into the social” (Van Sluys, et al., 2005, p. 20).

Critical Thinking and Critical Literacy One misunderstanding that preservice teachers have about critical literacy is that critical literacy is the same as critical thinking. Lee (2011; 2016) attributes this “myth” (2011, p. 97) to confusion between learning taxonomies such as Bloom’s Taxonomy and critical literacy. When preservice teachers situate critical literacy as a higher order thinking skill appropriate for the “high ability students, who are supposed to be capable of higher order thinking” (Cho, 2011, p. 40), students misunderstand the difference between critical thinking and critical literacy (Matteson & Boyd, 2017). Preservice teachers have been found to use the term critical to mean critical thinking with “no clear connection to hallmarks of critical literacy such as power or marginalized perspectives” (May, 2015, pp. 9-10).

Reading and Critical Literacy If preservice teachers intend to do critical literacy, “it is absolutely necessary that the participants, or pedagogies… have an explicitly critical purpose” (Myers & Eberfors, 2010, p. 153). Literacy, unless explicitly made critical, is narrowly defined from a modernist perspective as a “cognitive, skills based process,” (Groenke, 2008, p. 226), as decoding (Schmidt et al., 2007; Flores-Koulish, Deal, Losinger, McCarthy & Rosebrugh, 2011; Soares, 2017), and “assumes a single meaning of a text resides solely in the text “(Groenke, 2008, p. 226). Literacy instruction that focuses solely on reading as decoding “is lopsided and does not take into consideration the social ramifications of literacy” (Lee, 2016, p. 40) or “identify unequal power relationships and [serve] social justice” (Lee, 2011, p. 97). This focus on literacy as reading, and

57 reading as a set of isolated skills, is antithetical to the social and critical lens that critical literacy exercises.

Literacy is Epistemological It is important that preservice teachers recognize that all literacy practices are embedded in “beliefs, values, and ideologies” (Bender-Slack & Young, 2016, p. 120). Critical literacy is not an add-on instructional strategy that is compatible with all other literacy approaches. Lee (2011), using Michael Crotty’s (2003) scholarship, agrees with and reasserts his claim that critical pedagogy isn’t just a pedagogical technique, “It intimately reflects Freire’s philosophy of existence” (p. 148 as cited in Lee, 2011, p. 100). As a part of Freire’s philosophy of existence, critical literacy is a way of understanding and knowing the world. Instructional strategies are tools of the craft of teaching, but goals of the approach reduced to prompting students to ask questions about books in addition to answering comprehension questions falls short of the epistemological goals of critical literacy. Albright (2002) makes a similar argument that more clearly articulates the idea that critical literacy, as pedagogy, isn’t just a set of how-to guidelines …each pedagogical practice is committed to a different sense of what kind of knowledge is most worthy, what it means to know something, what subject positions are enacted in the pedagogical exchange, and to what vision of social relations it is committed. (pp. 300 – 301)

Beliefs about what literacy is and how one defines literacy are crucially intertwined. An individual model of reading and critical literacy are not compatible. A preservice teacher cannot add on critical literacy to a traditional reading model. The philosophies of both models make profoundly different assumptions about learners and literacy. Namely, learners in critical literacy work are “language users, not language recipients” (Van Sluys, 2005, p. 2 as cited in Lee, 2011, p. 100). And literacy is “a social practice” not “skills to master” (Lee, 2011, p. 100). Cho (2015) highlights these differences in how literacy is defined and how literacy positions readers and texts, particularly in schools with standards-based reading as “always a tense process because critical literacy operates within a socio-cultural definition of literacy while standards define literacy proficiency in individual students” (Avila & Moore, 2012 as cited

58 in Cho, 2015, p. 72). Critical literacy allows “all of us – in our roles as teachers, students, researchers – to imagine how literacy education could open new possibilities for students to know themselves, their circumstances, and their ability to act on their worlds” (Riley & Crawford-Garrett, 2015, pp. 64-64). An individual model makes no such claims. Furthermore, it is not just that an individual model makes no emancipatory claim; it is not empty or neutral, literacy in an individual model is for the individual, and individuality, rooted in notions of meritocracy, is a political position as well.

Research Results: How Preservice Teachers Respond to Critical Literacy After reading and sorting the research questions posed in each of the following studies, I conclude that there are three overarching questions about how preservice teachers receive and respond to critical literacy instruction. How do preservice teachers experience critical literacy in the higher education classroom (Lesley, 2004; Soares, 2012; Souto-Manning & Prince-Dennis, 2012; Flores-Koulish et al., 2011)? How do their responses to critical literacy instruction illuminate their ideas about what literacy and reading are in schools (Lesley, 2004; Albright, 2002; Van Sluys et al., 2005; Soares, 2012; Wolfe, 2010; Riley & Crawford-Garrett, 2015)? And how do preservice teachers who learn about critical literacy envision, or plan, to use critical literacy in classrooms with PreK-12 students (May, 2015; Skerrett, 2009; Schmidt et al., 2007; Cho, 2015; Jones & Enriquez, 2009; Flores-Koulish et al., 2011)? Each researcher asks nuanced versions of these bucketed questions specific to the assignments and course context. However, by creating these overarching questions, the results of the research can be synthesized into the following categories: ways that preservice teachers reject and accept critical literacy after experiencing critical literacy in course assignments; ways that preservice teachers negotiate critical literacy; an acknowledgement of how preservice teachers are in the process of developing their professional identities; and recommendations for how to do critical literacy with preservice teachers that informs further practice and research.

Ways that Preservice Teachers say “No” to Critical Literacy The researchers in these studies designed course assignments and activities for preservice teachers to participate in critical conversations or design critical literacy lesson plans for K-12 students. All of the preservice teachers enrolled in higher education are traditionally literate

59 adults in an individual literacy model and have generally been successful in traditional schooling, otherwise they could not be enrolled in most higher educational settings. As Daniel Lortie (1972) reminds us, each preservice teacher has an “apprenticeship of observation” (as cited in Poetter, 2017, p. 25). And preservice teachers have approximately 15 years of experience in literacy education with literacy defined as skilled reading and responses to text in line with literary analyses, not critical analyses. These years of observations are particularly relevant to preservice teachers who are enrolled in teacher preparation programs today because they “came of age during the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)” and so “instructors who take sociocritical perspectives face unique challenges” (Riley & Crawford-Garrett, 2015, pp. 58-59). And it is within this context that preservice teachers do not always receive critical literacy instruction warmly. Albright (2002) reminds us that learning new information and reordering previously held concepts about literacy is difficult work (p. 300). Reidel and Draper (2011) describe critical literacy as “not easy” and confronting inequities and injustices as “difficult and painful; and it can make us uncomfortable with ourselves and others” (p. 129). It is important to note at this point that these are the responses of the preservice teachers, not K-12 students in schools. Van Sluys et al. (2005) found that the young children in their study “were more willing to discuss issues of homelessness, racism, status, and disparity than the undergraduate teacher education students” (p. 13). The research on preservice teachers does not show that they are ready to engage in critical literacy with students of any age group. Paola-Ellis (2016) found that preservice teachers in her study were “reluctant to use texts that dealt with ‘tough topics’” (p. 18) and Norris, Lucas, and Prudhoe (2012) found that one the challenges preservice teachers see in teaching critical literacy is their personal “anxiety or discomfort in addressing ‘touchy subjects’” (p. 62). In response to not wanting to do critical literacy, reluctance and resistance to engage with critical literacy in preservice coursework is expressed in two forms: (1) technical reasons why it cannot be done in public schools and (2) strategically avoiding critical engagement with texts in coursework.

Standards are the Curriculum Preservice teachers cite the importance of official curriculum standards and standardized testing as two institutional reasons why critical literacy cannot be taught in schools with students (Skerrett, 2009) and thus why it is unrealistic to engage with in preservice teacher programs. Norris et al. (2012) found that students routinely report “practical issues” including “school district curricula, resources, and time” that “would make engaging in critical literacy difficult” (p. 62). Cho (2015) reports that her preservice teachers primary concern is the “standards-based and test-driven educational environment” (p. 69). Critical work also takes “too much time” (Holloway & Gouthro, 2011) in schools that already have mandated curricula to manage (Herbeck et al., 2008).

Keeping it Personal The personal is always political (Sprague, 2016). Yet, not all preservice teachers want to get involved with something so “political” (Cho, 2014). One of the strategies that underlies the resistance of preservice teachers to critical literacy is an attempt to keep literacy personal, not political. In critical literacy pedagogy, readers connect texts to themselves as well as social and political systems. In coursework, preservice teachers did make personal connections to the reading texts (Van Sluys et al., 2005; Soares, 2017; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; Robertson & Hughes, 2012; Schieble, 2011) but neglected to connect their responses to systemic forms of privilege and oppression (Van Sluys et al., 2005; Schieble, 2011; Robertson & Hughes, 2012; Saunders, 2012). Resistance to acknowledging racial oppression was specifically named in the research (Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; Schieble, 2011), but other forms of privilege and oppression were not. A vaguer assertion of keeping the responses to texts personal rather than political is taken up by preservice teachers who express concern with “potential parental opposition to the issues being addressed [and]… overstepping their boundaries” (Norris et al., 2012, p. 62). Some preservice teachers assume that they will experience resistance from parents and community (Cho, 2015). Thus, the preservice teachers participated personally, but by doing so avoided the political aspects of critical literacy and placed social issues raised by critical literacy in the realm of private politics as well.

Other Strategies of Avoidance Course instructors found a variety of other ways that preservice teachers avoided engaging in critical literacy assignments including: “apathetic or sullen responses; unfinished readings, superficial revisions to written reflections, dominant students, silent students, reductive summaries of theory, [and] unwillingness to apply theory to new situations” (Holloway & Gouthro, 2011, p. 30). Specific to engaging with social issues books, the strategies were more specific according to Schmidt et al. (2007) and included offering literal responses to texts (p. 51); creating distance between themselves and the text response by using an alternative perspective such as a parents’ perspective, or a collective “we,” or third person voice (p. 52); claiming that they needed to create “safe classrooms” to “protect the innocent child” (p. 52); and finally displacing power onto the text (p. 53). Displacing power onto the text is a particularly unique “twist on the issue” of power and text (Schmidt et al., 2007, p. 53). By giving power to the text, the teachers said “a text holds power in itself” (Schmidt et al, 2007, p. 54). But Schimdt et al. (2007) reject this notion and claim an alternative assumption that “only when a reader connects to a text in some way does the potential for a powerful reading exist” (p. 54). Here again, how texts and readers are positioned epistemologically is an important part of how sense is made of texts and critical literacy. A final insight into why critical literacy and critical engagement are perceived as challenges by preservice teachers includes a concern about being perceived as a rookie novice by other teachers in the school buildings where they plan to work (Riley & Crawford-Garrett, 2015).

Ways that Preservice Teachers say “Yes” to Critical Literacy The majority of studies in this literature review discuss the ways in which preservice teachers do not take up critical literacy, either in the course classroom or in curriculum planning. However, one research study reported that preservice teachers perceive benefits to critical literacy instruction including the belief that critical literacy “enhances critical thinking and understanding of different perspectives,” “allows children to be exposed to or aware of problems in their community,” and “engages children in learning about different cultures and difficult issues such as homelessness and hunger” (Norris et al., 2012, p. 62). Interestingly, these benefits are attributed as benefits to students, not as benefits to preservice teachers.

Enriquez (2014) writes a critique of social issues picturebooks in which preservice teachers, who consider themselves critical educators, criticize the shallow portrayal of the social issues presented in texts. Jones and Enriquez (2009) studied two preservice teachers over four years, and suggest that in order to see something besides “resistances,” researchers need to engage in long-term studies to see more student “growth and development” (p. 165). Yet, even in short term studies, this orientation towards preservice teachers as developing is further elaborated upon in the next section of this review because it is an issue raised by teacher educator researchers in their writing.

Recommendations: If You Want to do Critical Literacy with Preservice Teachers The researchers in these studies discussed below are educators as well as researchers. As such, although the findings of the research largely name the ways in which preservice teachers do not overcome their socialization of traditional reading and literacy, there are two aspects of reflection that are frequently raised. The first is an acknowledgment that coursework that includes critical literacy is just one step in a long series of courses and teaching experiences that they will have in their time as preservice and inservice teachers. And the second type of notes that researchers include are their thoughts about how they think critical literacy work with preservice teachers can be more successful.

Preservice Teachers are Becoming Teachers Critical literacy is not a part of mainstream, status-quo educational experiences. Teacher educators hope that preservice teachers are ready to serve the public, and conceptualize their work as socially oriented. But it should not be, and is not surprising that preservice teachers have limited knowledge of historical and structural inequality, racism particularly (Brown, 2011; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011), and that they resist criticality because, according to Kincheloe (2008), to ask students to do critical pedagogy is “to ask students to start over” (p. 10). Several researchers complicate the duality or binary between critical/not critical as I bifurcated the research in the sections above by discussing student development over time and reframing preservice teachers as “complex beings negotiating various spheres of their past, present, and future lives” (Jones & Enriquez, 2009, pp. 148-149). Cho (2014) describes her research participants’ identities as “in constant negotiation within individuals and with others in

63 varying social and discursive contexts” (p. 690). They are forming their views and “experimenting with what it means to enact the identity of a critical teacher within a political context” (Wolfe, 2010, p. 384). What these researchers do when they consider preservice teachers in fluid, changeable ways is open up opportunities for critical literacy learning to be a part of becoming a teacher who teaches critical literacy. Jones and Enriquez (2009) did the only longitudinal study with the same participants, and the results of their research were strikingly different than the others. Some of the most interesting conclusions that they came to at the end of their four-year study is a caution against making assumptions about who will and who will not become a critical educator, caution against assuming that being a critical individual translates into critical practice with students, and the caution mentioned above about assuming a paradigm shift in thinking about literacy from isolated experiences with critical literacy (Jones & Enriquez, 2009).

Feelings Matter Albright (2002) argues that preservice teachers will not want to do critical literacy and critical pedagogy unless teacher educators give students opportunities to engage with critical literacy in ways that give them a chance to value critical literacy above and beyond their existing models of literacy (p. 300). And to some degree, wanting to do critical literacy has something to do with accepting critical literacy instruction. Students who were already interested in social justice or wanted to do critical literacy work were more accepting and successful in their attempts (Albright, 2002; Wolfe, 2010; Skerrett, 2009; Myers & Eberfors, 2010). Conversely, when students experienced conflict or had strong emotional responses to the assignments, preservice teachers rejected critical literacy more strongly (Reidel & Draper, 2011; McNair, 2003; Papola-Ellis, 2016).

Do as we say, and as we do, and do it again It would be inherently uncritical to assume that preservice teachers should take critical literacy to heart and cause with no hesitancy or questioning. Cho (2014) reflects on her work with TESOL preservice teachers with the astute observation that her students responded thoughtfully and personally to her version of critical literacy. Cho (2014) describes her instruction as another “authoritative discours[e] of curriculum and instruction” (p. 694). If it

64 were so easy to start over, what would be the depth? Preservice teachers need modeling (Groenke, 2008; Reidel & Draper, 2011; Robertson & Hughes, 2012;), support (Matteson & Boyd, 2017; Mosley, 2010; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; Groenke, 2008), and frequent opportunities to do critical literacy (Wolfe, 2010; Mosley, 2010).

Reading social issues books is not enough Specific to my research project is a focus on social issues texts in the preservice teacher and critical literacy research. A social issues text is defined as “a distinctive and powerful genre of children’s literature that invites the reader, whether child or undergraduate, into a world of tough, real-life issues… selected as tools to foreground issues for critical conversations” (Van Sluys et al., 2005, p. 16). Others describe these books as “social justice picture books” and describe the way that they “center plot and development of central characters around issues of equity, human rights, cultural diversity, and environmental justice so the reader gains some insight about the challenges and possibilities involved… to contemplate and address these issues in their lives” (Enriquez, 2014, p. 27). While many of the authors who use social issues books argue that they can “facilitate provocative and productive multi-tiered inquiries into social justice topics” (Enriquez, 2014) and “explore how difference can make a difference” (Van Sluys et al., 2005, p. 16), exposure to social issues texts alone does not prompt criticality. In some instances, nostalgic attachment to picturebooks inhibits critical literacy (McNair, 2003), and strong feelings of anger or sadness elicited by texts discouraged some preservice teachers from planning to use social issues texts in classrooms with PreK-12 students (Herbeck et al., 2008; Papola-Ellis, 2016, p. 10). Furthermore, Enriquez (2014) argues that what makes conversations critical are not the flawless portrayals of social issues in picturebooks; in reality, there are many critiques of the ways that children’s literature misses the mark on representation of difference (Enriquez, 2014; Malcolm & Lowery, 2011). “What matters instead are the ways in which such picturebooks and representations within them are interrogated and how they are used as springboards for deeper explorations of the issues at hand” (Enriquez, 2014, p. 34).

Discussion When reviewing this literature, I found a few things striking. First, the myriad of definitions for what critical literacy is and how authors’ build their foundational framework for their coursework with preservice teachers was really interesting. The diversity of definitions for and ways that critical literacy was practiced as pedagogy points to the importance of the role of theory in critical literacy. Research articles that clearly articulated their theory of critical literacy and how those theories complement other theories of design and interpretation of use in the research were the easiest to read conceptually and reported much narrower, more concise findings as well. I was also struck by the other theories and methods used to complement critical literacy work including but not limited to critical discourse analysis (Lesley, 2004; Wetzel & Rogers, 2015; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011), multiliteracies (Schieble, 2011; Morell, 2011), socio-cultural theories of literacy (Mosley, 2010; Van Sluys et al., 2005; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; Saunders, 2012; Lee, 2016), feminist theory (Riley & Crawford-Garrett, 2015; Jones & Enriquez, 2009), and racial literacy (Brown, 2011; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; McNair, 2003). The “weaving together” (Jones & Enriquez, 2009) of critical theory with other frameworks is described by May (2015) as bricolage for the purpose of using what theoretical tools are needed to make sense of critical literacy experience with preservice teachers. Although the explicit naming of every complementary theory is unnecessary, the range of the theories chosen reminds me that even though the researchers here all took the same topic under study, none of them approached the research in an identical way. This liberates me from choosing the “right” complementary theory of design or analysis, but reminds me of the importance of maintaining methodologic consistency.

The Gaps The way forward for research in critical literacy is open in many directions in terms of what types of preservice teachers are being studied. First, most of these research studies are embedded in official coursework in preservice teacher programs. Doing research outside of the context of course assignments with preservice teachers would contribute to the field. Also, there is little attention paid to what Tatum (2000) refers to as the “complexity of identity” which includes “race or ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, and

66 physical or mental ability” (p. 11). The social issues texts selected and the research findings largely discuss how preservice teachers respond to critical literacy texts about race and seek to understand their understandings of race, but few other social identities are the focus of critical literacy with preservice teachers. The number of studies that reported how preservice teachers resist critical literacy were interesting and informative. But it was the articles with nuanced discussion about how critical literacy is one part of a larger teacher education program, prior experience, and how the critical literacy experience intersects with other aspects of teacher identity and power that were the most interesting. In some ways, much of the research presented here frames critical literacy as a set of beliefs and pedagogical lenses for preservice teachers to take up. As Cho (2014) acknowledges, our curriculum as preservice teacher educators are in and of themselves authoritative discourses on curriculum (p. 694). Yet, thinking about critical literacy as a part of power relations more broadly offers a depth of analysis that the bifurcations of saying “no” and saying “yes” to new ideas about literacy cannot address. There is evidence of structural notions of power where teachers are tasked with helping preservice teachers read the word and the world to “reveal hidden ideologies of the text” (Janks, 2010, p. 35) in order to emancipate themselves from dominant forms of power, generally called social and racial injustice in this literature. Yet, this research with preservice teachers is primarily designed for preservice teachers to take part in and then transfer the effects to the emancipatory project for PreK-12 students, not to themselves. This tension between learning about critical literacy, for the sake of the social justice and emancipatory process of PreK-12 students versus themselves, is an interesting one and presents an opportunity for more research. Finally, I am interested in what Lewison, Leland, and Harste (2015) describe as the “critical stance” of critical literacy that “consists of the attitudes and dispositions we take on that enable us to become critically literature beings” (p. 13). Taking a “critical stance” (Lewison et al., 2015, p. 13) consists of four interrelated dimensions: “entertaining alternate ways of being, taking responsibility to inquire, consciously engaging, and being reflexive” (p. 13). Thinking about the research with preservice teachers here assumes that a critical literacy course assignment will augment this “critical stance,” yet the way that Lewison et al. (2015) discuss this is more closely tied to notions of critical identity and the feelings aspect of the research rather

67 than discovering whether preservice teachers are doing or not-doing critical literacy or planning to do this with future classrooms. Looking for evidential support of this “critical stance” in the research would be really interesting and perhaps beneficial to a field that is interested in social change.

Introduction to Literature Review on Book Clubs in Education I have had the idea for a while to do a book club style meeting as my research site. Book clubs are places where I think about going to have a good snack, which many book clubs offer, and to find some friends to discuss the things I am interested in reading and talking about. So much of the critical literacy research that investigates how preservice teachers experience critical literacy is collected in coursework. What makes a book club unique? Furthermore, as I look forward to proposing a critical literacy book club as a research site, I need to know: What is the literature about book clubs on critical topics and social justice in education and book clubs in education more broadly? The purpose of this literature review is to answer these questions. In the introductory section, I discuss methods of research selection: the context of the studies, search methods, and the journals in which the research was published. Next, I discuss findings in the research that are practically oriented and helped shape the research design for the critical literacy book club in this study as discussed in Chapter Three. Other findings from the literature include learning about oneself and learning about others. The metaphor of books as mirrors, doors, and windows is used to shape this section of the findings and discussion. In conclusion, I discuss the gaps in the book club research.

Methods of Research Study Selection 2003-2017 The boundaries of the search for book clubs on critical topics in education, referred to as critical book clubs in this essay, was a broad search as described in the search methods section below. The results of the search were not limited by date of publication for peer-reviewed articles. The earliest study relevant to this review in my search was 2003 and the most recent article was published in 2017. These publication dates are similar to the 2002-2017 time boundaries for the critical literacy with preservice teachers literature review, therefore I am

68 letting the time boundaries stand without expanding a search specifically outside of this 14-year timeframe.

Context of Studies The critical book club literature research is located in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Unlike the critical literacy with preservice teachers literature review, I included two studies on professional development with inservice teachers using book clubs in this review in Canada and Australia. At this point in time, Canada and Australia have similar enough experiences in the literature presented here and the topics addressed are ones of professional development that are similar to a United States context, therefore they are included.

Search Methods In September, 2017, I searched the Miami University Library system for peer-reviewed research articles on critical book clubs. Boolean phrases included the following terms and phrases: “book clubs & education,” “book clubs & education & critical,” “book clubs & education & critical literacy,” “literacy circles & education & critical,” “literacy circles & education & critical literacy,” “consciousness raising circles & education,” “book clubs & preservice teachers or student teachers or pre-service teachers & critical,” and a finally a “book clubs” search to scan for any articles missed in the initial findings. From these searchers, I downloaded and skimmed 31 peer-reviewed articles. For the purposes of this literature review, 8 of the studies were decidedly uncritical, that is, they did not address any critical social issue topics nor engage in critical reading in a sense of examining power, and are therefore not included in this review. I also solicited feedback from a colleague who is familiar with this literature and requested items to add to the list. I initially reviewed 23 peer-reviewed articles on critical book clubs. Under further advisement, in November, 2017, I expanded my search on book clubs to include the following Boolean terms and phrases: “literature circles,” “literature circles & social justice,” “literature circles & social justice, & teacher education or teacher training or teacher preparation,” “literature circles & picture books,” “literature circles & picturebooks,” and “literature circles & preservice teachers or student teachers or pre-service teachers.” Fifteen

69 additional peer-reviewed articles on social justice literature circles were located and 9 were added to this review. The new number of studies included in this review is 32.

Types of Studies & Journals of Publication Of the peer-reviewed articles, all of the studies are qualitative. Four are case studies. Three are interpretive case studies, and the remainder of the studies feature book clubs or literature circles as the central activity of the research and do not place book clubs within other research methods. Book clubs were formed and studied in a variety of educational settings with a wide range of participants. Two studies employed book clubs for professional development with inservice teachers (Gardiner & Cumming-Potvin, 2015; White, 2016). Six research teams hosted book clubs with middle grades (Grades 4 – 8) girls outside of regular school hours (Hall & Piazza, 2008; Park, 2012(a); Park, 2012(b); Taber, Woloshyn & Lane, 2012; Taber, Woloshyn & Lane, 2013; Thein & Schmidt, 2017). On team studied a book club with high school boys (Choi & Sachs, 2017) and another studied a book club with high school girls (Polleck & Epstein, 2015). Two studies took place with school age students and family members at home (Fain & Horn, 2006; Van Duinen, Hamilton & Rumohr-Voskuil, 2017). One took place in a men’s prison with incarcerated men (Geraci, 2003). One took place as a part of a state developed home caregiver of young children program (Reyes & Torres, 2007). One designed literature circles for middle grade students (Batchelor, 2017). And seventeen of the studies took place in preservice teacher coursework classrooms with preservice teachers (Alger, 2007; Clark, 2014; Hall & Piazza, 2008; Harlin, Murray & Shea, 2007; Hays, 2017; Heineke, 2014; Madhuri, Walker, Landmann-Johnsey & Laughter, 2015; McCall 2010; Mensah, 2009; Mosley, 2010; Mosley & Rogers, 2011; Rogers & Mosley, 2008; Pytash, Morgan & Batchelor, 2013; Saunders & Ash, 2013; Skerrett, 2010; Strong-Wilson, 2007; Thein, Guise & Sloan, 2012; Vaughn, Kologi & McGowan, 2015). The only research reference used in both the critical literacy with preservice teachers literature review and this review is the Mosley (2010) article. Several researchers have research studies in both reviews (e.g. Rogers, Mosley, Saunders, and Skerrett), but different research studies are included in each review. Journals where the research was published include four articles in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, two in Language Arts, The Reading Teacher, and Voices from the Middle. And one in each of the following: Action in Teacher Education, Australian Journal of Teacher

Education, Brock Education, Childhood Education, Children’s Literature in Education, Dimensions of Early Childhood, Educational Studies, English Education, International Education, Journal of American Indian Education, Journal of Correctional Education, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Journal of Reading Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Journal of Youth Studies, Linguistics and Education, Middle School Journal, Perspectives on Urban Education, Reading Horizons, Social Studies Research and Practice, Teaching Education, The Social Studies, and Race Ethnicity and Education.

Findings in the Literature The findings from the literature on critical book clubs offer a range of information to share about how book clubs are structured and three organizing purposes and findings for book clubs: understanding oneself, understanding others, and imagining.

What is a book club? Book Club Format Book clubs do not have an exact format or guidelines. In this literature, book clubs are called “a structure” (Mosley, 2010), “instructional design” (Mosley & Rogers, 2011), “literature circles” (Alger, 2007; Batchelor, 2017; Daniels, 2002; Hays, 2017; Heineke, 2014; Madhuri, et al., 2015; McCall, 2010; Pytash, et al.; 2013; Strong-Wilson, 2013; Taber et al., 2002; Thein, et al., 2012; Vaughn, et al., 2015; Wells & Batchelor, 2017), “space” (Polleck & Epstein, 2015) and “vehicles for discussion” (Mosley & Rogers, 2011). Book clubs and literature circles are often interchangeable terms. They have the same format, yet the terms imply a difference by age and degree of voluntary participation. Strong-Wilson (2007) affirms this when she writes, “Teachers often use literature circles with students, while adults regularly meet in book clubs.” (p. 119). I use the term book club in this research study, not literature circles, because the preservice teachers are adults who are voluntarily engaging in the book club with no compulsory attendance requirement or academic carrots. However, for a more comprehensive literature review, I have included studies that use the term literature circle exclusively as well.

Book Club Texts Generally, the term book club in this literature is an organized group of participants who gather to discuss texts, whether they be monomodal or multimodal texts, in classrooms or in unique spaces outside classrooms; book clubs are places to discuss texts. Furthermore, from this literature, book clubs in education share some similar features including: small group organization; semi-regular meetings over an agreed upon period of time; meetings of about 1-2 hours per session; and shared texts (monomodal and multimodal) or shared genres that participants are responding to in conversation with one another.

Book Club Participants The smallest number of participants in this literature selection is three (Mosley & Rogers, 2011) and the largest number of participants is a range of mother and daughter pairs that can be as many as 10-12 (Van Dunien et al., 2107). Most of the groups range from 4-6 participants (Alger, 2007; Batchelor, 2012; Batchelor, 2017; Clark, 2014; Geraci, 2003; Fain & Horn, 2006; Madhuri, et al., 2015; Mensah, 2009; Park, 2012(a); Park, 2012(b); Choi & Sachs, 2017; Rogers & Mosley, 2008; Polleck & Epstein, 2015; Taber et al., 2012, Taber et al., 2013; Thein et al., 2012; Thein & Schmidt, 2017; White, 2016). Book clubs can be held monthly (Gardiner & Cumming-Potvin, 2015; Van Dunien et al., 2017; White, 2016), every two weeks (Choi & Sachs, 2017; Park, 2012(a), Park, 2012(b); Reyes & Torres, 2007), or weekly (Polleck & Epstein, 2015). But the regularity of the group meetings is a more important factor than the actual time between meetings. Book clubs, “need to meet on a regular, frequent, predictable schedule” (Daniels, 2002, p. 81).

Logistics of Meetings The repeated meetings also have the same participants so that a consistent community of people meet to discuss texts from session to session. The shortest estimated time for a book club in this literature is 40-90 minutes (Choi & Sachs, 2017) and the longest is 2 hours (Reyes & Torres, 2007; Taber et al., 2012, Taber et al., 2013; Thein & Schmidt, 2017). All of the others have time durations between one and two hours (Gardiner & Cumming-Potvin, 2015; Mensah, 2009; Park (a) 2012; Park (b) 2012; Polleck & Epstein, 2015; Van Dunien et al., 2017; White, 2016).

In my initial search terms for this literature review, I used the terms “book club” and “critical” as primary search terms. In this expansion of the review, I was advised to include the terms “literature circles” and “social justice.” This expansion of terms also expanded the types of questions asked of the data and the types of results in which the researchers were interested. The studies that incorporated book clubs as a part of preservice teacher coursework (Alger, 2007; Clark, 2014; Hall & Piazza, 2008; Harlin et al., 2007; Hays, 2017; Heineke; 2014; Mensah, 2009; Mosley, 2010; Mosley & Rogers, 2011; Rogers & Mosley, 2008; Saunders & Ash, 2013; Skerrett, 2010, etc.) did not solicit voluntary participation. Participation was a part of planned coursework in the preservice teacher preparation program.

Voluntary Book Clubs Conversely, in the initial search for “book clubs,” most research participants in the studies voluntarily opted into book club participation. Sometimes participants, particularly young adult participants, chose the texts for the book club (Park, 2012(a); Park, 2012(b); Polleck & Epstein, 2015; Taber et al., 2013; Van Dunien et al., 2017). The importance of choice is frequently emphasized by one of the touchstone authors on literature circles, Harvey Daniels (2002).

Book Clubs are Social Book clubs are also distinctly social engagements. Reading and responding to a text individually does not require negotiation (Gardiner & Cumming-Potvin, 2015) or conflict from challenging viewpoints (Choi & Sachs, 2017; Rogers & Mosley, 2008). While these may be difficult aspects of book clubs, participants in book clubs claim as often as they experience challenge that they also receive support (Gardiner & Cumming-Potving, 2015), the benefits of collaboration (White, 2016), rapport and trusting spaces (Taber et al, 20012; Gardiner & Cumming-Potvin), and rewarding interpersonal relationships (Polleck & Epstein, 2015).

Mirrors, Windows and Doors: Self, Others, and Imagining Within these learning spaces where members of the book club discuss texts together, three primary results are found in the research. The first is that book club members learn about themselves. The second is that book club members learn something about others, whether that be

73 other people in the book club or other people outside of the book clubs’ collective experiences. And last, there is an aspect of book clubs that provides space for participants to imagine, practice, and rehearse themselves through texts and in book club conversations about texts.

Learning about Oneself Studies in this review included some discussion of how the participants learned something about themselves in the process of participating in a book club. Mensah (2009) and Taber et al. (2012; 2013) specifically designed their research such that participants would interrogate their own beliefs. Mensah (2009) wanted preservice teachers “to reveal ideological beliefs and assumptions about issues of diversity in science… [and] reflect on their role as teachers” (Mensah, 2009, p. 1055). Taber et al. (2012) wanted adolescent girls to “discuss the gendered aspects of their lives which they may have previously taken for granted” (Taber et al., 2012, p. 36). And, by their own assessments, they were successful in both cases. Mensah’s (2009) students did “broaden their definition of diversity” (p. 1052) and “gain a deeper understanding, awareness, and sensitivity about issues of diversity in science education” (p. 1055). And Taber et al.’s (2012) claim that they were “successful in promoting girl empowerment” (p. 36) by helping the girls discuss issues of gender in their lives. Other researchers write about how participants in book clubs are prompted to examine more closely their ideas and assumptions about a range of topics: race, class, and gender (Polleck & Epstein, 2015); religion (Choi & Sachs, 2017); deficit assumptions about students (Thein & Schmidt, 2017); and racial identity (Mosley, 2010; Mosley & Rogers, 2011; Rogers & Mosley, 2008). Some participants appreciated the opportunity to gain a greater self-awareness of biases and assumptions (Hall & Piazza, 2008; Polleck & Epstein, 2015; Thein & Schmidt, 2017). Furthermore, in some of the research these realizations and clarifications about themselves prompted more “agentic” dispositions (Polleck & Epstein, 2015), disrupted deficit thinking (Thein & Schmidt, 2017), and helped “make generalizations about … [how] they are positioned in society” (Fain & Horn, 2006, p. 316).

Learning about Others Geraci (2003) started a multi-cultural book club with incarcerated men in prison because he felt that, “the inmates needed a way to interact socially with other cultures in a non-

74 threatening and open setting” (p. 54) and he planned to “use literature as a way to create a safe environment in which students can bring their own lives and perspectives into the classroom” (p. 54). This desire to “expand… understandings of other cultures” (Hall & Piazza, 2008) and raise “awareness of social issues” (Alger, 2007) is a common theme of book clubs. In many cases, the researchers planned to do so with multicultural texts (Alger, 2007; Batchelor, 2017; Choi & Sachs, 2017; Geraci, 2003; Hall & Piazza, 2008; Harlin et al., 2007; Hays, 2017; Heineke, 2014; Mosley, 2010; Mosley & Rogers, 2011; Rogers & Mosley, 2008). However, the ‘others’ whom participants learn about in book clubs are not just other cultures, but often the other people in the book club. No one’s social experiences or identities are identical, even if they share commonalities. Encountering difference is not reserved for cross- cultural meetings. Even other book club members’ views on the same topics can prompt reflection and learning about viewpoints, biases, and assumptions (Mensah, 2009; Park, 2012a; Park, 2012b; Thein et al, 2012). In other cases, distancing learning about oneself by learning about a character in literature created the distance needed to explore new ideas (Mosley, 2010). Particularly in preservice teacher education, one of the goals for participation in book clubs is to facilitate a greater understanding of diverse students and disrupting assumptions about those students’ experiences (Harlin et al., 2007; Hays, 2017; Heineke, 2014). Mensah’s (2009) book club for teaching about issues of diversity in science is one example of this. Another is Thein and Schmidt’s (2017) research on critical witnessing and the opportunity that preservice teachers have to learn about the lives of their students in book clubs, and the consequent disruption of deficit assumptions about students (p. 316). Hays (2017) investigates whether reading Indigenously authored young adult literature prompts preservice teachers to engage in culturally sustaining pedagogy with Indigenous students. By learning about others, there is an assumed connection between better understanding others and “prepar[ing] learners to work and live with people from different religious, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds in schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods, which are all becoming more diverse” (Choi & Sachs, 2017, p. 420). But Reyes and Torres’ (2007) research cautions against assuming that one understands an “other.” These assumptions are a potentially colonizing endeavor. If an individual is interested in understanding “others” … one has to understand colonization and issues of power in educational frameworks (Reyes & Torres, 2007; Strong- Wilson, 2007). Strong-Wilson (2007) suggests that rather than use stories about ‘others’ to

75 decolonize the thinking of primarily White preservice teachers, that rather White teachers might have more productive decolonizing encounters when they reexamine their own touchstone stories.

Imagining The last major finding in the research is a difficult aspect to tease from the research, but it is evidentially supported. Through the conversations about texts in book clubs, individuals sometimes “practice” (Mosley, 2010), “[move] between ‘what is’ and possibility” (Mosley & Rogers, 2011, p. 307), “explore the different options and possibilities for existing” (Park, 2012(a), p. 637), “rehearse roles” (Rogers & Mosley, 2008, p. 127), “consider” (Skerrett, 2010, p. 77), and muse. In book clubs, participants “wonder aloud how we would react to the situations” (Van Dunien et al., 2017, p. 71). These terms describe the actions that book club participants take up in their speech, dialogue, and discussions of texts. Put another way, “reading clubs have provided re-imaginings of the social world and the potential for such clubs to be places of transformation and social change” (Twomey, 2007, p. 398). And “In a complex world, students are in ‘desperate need of these rehearsals’ that books offer” (Gallagher, 2009, p. 66 as cited in Pytash et al., 2013, p. 15). Practicing critical conversations (Vaughn et al., 2015) and “imaginative rehearsals for their future interactions and conversations with students” (Pytash et al., 2013, p. 15) are difficult results of book clubs to quantify. Yet, these rehearsal spaces are some of the steps towards a hopeful ideal where, “… the magic of talk, in the company of good literature, with the gift of honest sharing, we become better readers, better colleagues, better friends, and better people” (Daniels, 2002, p. 177). This final finding, although brief in evidential citations, is present throughout the research goals and results. In a book club, the discussion is the ontological focus. And so, it is through the ways that book club participants use their speech and bodies to convey how they interact with the text; this is how the “re-imagining” (Twomey, 2007) can be more than just reading, viewing, and listening, etc., to a text.

Discussion: Hopes of Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors The dominant themes of the research results for these book clubs are organized as follows: learning about oneself, learning about others, and a practicing / imagining space for

76 trying on new ways of thinking and being. In 1990, Rudine Sims Bishop wrote an article called “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” In this brief, two-page article, she calls upon mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors as metaphors for reading in the following way: Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection, we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. (Bishop, 1990, p. ix) Texts as mirrors offers a way of seeing ourselves reflected back to us, texts as windows allow the reader to learn about others, and by walking through the sliding glass door, a reader has a chance, perhaps like Alice, to enter a world of imagining, practicing, and rehearsing what one might be in fictional spaces. Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors was an article that was very popular, so much so that the metaphors have been absorbed into common sense notions about reading as well as other scholarship on book clubs (Heineke, 2014). Bishop (1990) wrote this article to highlight the lack of books as mirrors for readers who are not White. She wrote about how children who cannot find mirrors in books “learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in society of which they are a part” (Bishop, 1990, p. ix). She also writes about the disadvantage of children from dominant social groups who have always had mirrors in books, but no windows. She writes, “If they only see reflections of themselves, they will grow up with an exaggerated sense of their own importance and value in the world – a dangerous ethnocentrism” (Bishop, 1990, p. ix). Finally, she writes about the transformative power of sliding glass doors, “it could, however, help us understand each other better by helping to change our attitude toward difference” even if it “has its limits.” The limits she writes about are strong ones, “It won’t take the homeless off our streets; it won’t feed the starving of the world; it won’t stop people from attacking each other because of our racial differences” (Bishop, 1990, ix). Here is where critical literacy comes in to play. Of the research articles reviewed here, issues of power, for the purpose of this review called “critical” and “social justice” were addressed in direct and indirect ways. Geraci (2003) had some general multicultural exposure

77 goals. Fain and Horn (2006) found that students and their families discussed issues of power in their literature circles at home. And Skerrett (2010) discusses in her conclusions the importance of dialogue about gender, male privilege, and hegemonic power structures (p. 81), yet these go unaddressed in the actual research study with preservice teachers. Other goals about challenging ageist assumptions are indirect goals of the study by Van Dunien et al. (2017). And Choi and Sachs (2017) found that issues of power and identity, in this particular case surrounding issues of religion, influence the reading of texts even if not explicitly requested by book club facilitators. Studies that explicitly call for critical conversations were about half of the studies in this review (Mensah, 2009; Hall & Piazza, 2008; Park, 2012(a); Park, 2012(b); Mosley, 2010; Mosley & Rogers, 2011; and Rogers & Mosley, 2008; Taber et al. 2012; Taber et al. 2013). And of the research in these studies, the articles came from just 5 book club research sites. The authors of these studies used the same book clubs for multiple publications. I agree with Park (2012) who asserts, “simply asking students to form a group and discuss a book will not guarantee critical and communal reader responses” (p. 207). Each of these authors theorize specifically about how their criticality is rooted in explicitly planning for critical conversation. They claim “the value of structured discussion for initiating engagement in critical thinking and encouraging youth to begin to recognize and problematize sociocultural gendered issues” (Taber et al., 2013, p. 1034) … “for not only reading comprehension but critical literacy” (Taber et al., 2012, p. 37). Critical literacy is a way of engaging with texts in book club settings in ways that highlight issues of power. What critical pedagogues might hope for critically literate citizens is that literacy might be an avenue for imagining a world in which, for example, “readers imagine social spaces where racial justice is the norm rather than the exception” (Rogers & Mosley, 2008, p. 110). There is a potential connection between literary imaginings and the material realities of justice.

My Research Niche: A Critical Literacy Book Club What is unique about my inquiry in the book club literature is that I am using critical literacy prompts to guide book club discussion. Although social issues are addressed in several of the studies, just one of the studies in this review used critical literacy as a guiding pedagogy for book club design (Reyes & Torres, 2007). And particularly unique to work with preservice

78 teachers is that I am not primarily focused on how preservice teachers plan to use critical literacy or book clubs in their future teaching endeavors. Enriquez’s (2014) caution about doing critical literacy with preservice teachers from a small selection longitudinal data, highlights the potential danger of assuming that because preservice teachers responded either in favor or not in favor of critical literacy does not indicate that they will use, or not use, critical literacy as a pedagogy with their future classrooms. Furthermore, many of the books read during book clubs are young adult novels (Hays, 2017; McCall, 2010; Mosley, 2010; Mosley & Rogers, 2011; Park, 2012(a); Park, 2012(b); Saunders & Ash, 2013; Taber et al., 2013; Van Dunien et al, 2017) and adult novels (Polleck & Eptsein, 2015; Skerrett, 2010; Thein et al., 2012). Picturebooks are taken up by few authors (Batchelor, 2017; Heineke, 2014). However, Batchelor (2017) argues that picturebooks are a “multimodal reading experience” (p. 14) and that they have an important place in curriculum with older audiences.

Critical Literacy Literature, Book Club Literature, and the Research Questions for This Study The research questions posed in this study are:  How does a critical literacy book club serve as a social space for preservice teachers to construct critical literacy?

 How do preservice teachers narrate their positionality while participating in a critical literacy book club reading social issues picturebooks? These research questions address gaps in the research, as uncovered in both literature reviews. First, the research questions focus on preservice teachers at the time of the critical literacy book club, not on the potential future practices or discussion of future practices of doing critical literacy with K-12 students. The social issues addressed in the picturebooks chosen address a variety of socially diverse identities, and do not focus solely on race and racism. The questions draw attention to Tatum’s (2000) “complexity of identity” as discussed during book clubs. Furthermore, in Chapter 5 of this study, the discussion of the research findings connects to the ways in which the preservice teachers in this study are influenced by powerful socio-cultural discourses about literacy. And in the context of book club research, this study explicitly employs

79 critical literacy as a way to foster critical conversations with picturebook texts, also an under researched text form for book club studies.

Overview of Chapter Two In this chapter, I reviewed two bodies of preexisting literature that informed the development of the research questions for this study and delineated the ways in which this study can contribute to the research on doing critical literacy with preservice teachers and critical book clubs in education. The conceptual frameworks as discussed in Chapter One provide background knowledge on the fields of critical literacy, social justice, and social issues picturebooks. It is my intention that those initial discussions made reading these literature reviews and the jargon of the fields more transparent and available to the reader of this study. In the next chapter, Chapter Three, I discuss the research design of the study.

Chapter Three: Methodology In the previous two chapters, I discussed the motivation for the study, conceptual frameworks that support terminology for this study, argued for the importance of the study personally as well as the importance of the study in the current socio-political context, and synthesized existing literature on doing critical literacy with preservice teachers and critical book clubs in education. I have established that my research questions are:  How does a critical literacy book club serve as a social space for preservice teachers to construct critical literacy?

 How do preservice teachers narrate their positionality while participating in a critical literacy book club reading social issues picturebooks? The relevance of these questions to the preexisting literature is established at the end of Chapter Two. In this chapter, I discuss qualitative research broadly and the qualitative research design for this inquiry specifically. The chapter begins with a brief synopsis of the nature of qualitative research work and why qualitative research is a the “better fit” (Creswell, 2013, p. 48) for the research interests. Then in the Research Methodology section that immediately follows the discussion of qualitative research below, I provide another roadmap to the specific qualitative research design for this study. One last roadmap to the chapter is further delineated in the Data Production section which helps the reader anticipate specific aspects of Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, participant selection, development of critical literacy book club pedagogy, etc., in detail. Because the considerations for research range from the very broad to very specific, these roadmaps along the way are provided to support an easier reading experience for the range of content in Chapter Three.

Qualitative Research What is Qualitative Research? A broad, definitive definition of qualitative research is difficult to find (Creswell, 2013). However, there are a few shared characteristics of qualitative research. According to Hatch (2002), qualitative research studies “the lived experiences of real people” in natural settings, and the participants and the meanings they make are the “objects of study” (p. 6). Qualitative

81 research seeks to understand the research participants’ perspectives and meaning making from an experience (Creswell, 2013; Hatch, 2002). Next, the researcher, in a qualitative study, is the data gatherer. Rather than gathering data from instruments of measure, for example, a questionnaire or scale in quantitative research, the qualitative researcher is responsible for gathering the data through observation and analysis (Hatch, 2002, p. 7). Dicks, Mason, Coffey and Atkinson (2005) critique the use of the term “data gathering,” because “data are not ‘simply inert materials lying around in the field, waiting for the researcher to come along and collect them’ (p. 115 as cited in Glesne, 2016, p. 44). Dicks et al. (2005) suggest the term “data recording” (as cited in Glesne, 2016, p. 44) to emphasize the role of the researcher and the selectivity of choosing what counts as data and what is recorded as data. However, Glesne (2016) furthers this critique of the role of the “data gatherer” and “data recorder” and suggests the term “data production4” (p. 44) to refer to the generation of data in qualitative studies by the researcher. The shared concern amongst Hatch (2002), Dicks et al. (2005 as cited in Glesne, 2016) and Glesne (2016) is that the role of the researcher, who the researcher is, and what counts as data to record and analyze are important parts of qualitative research. To emphasize this, the researcher’s positionality should be acknowledged, and disclosed in qualitative research. Hatch (2002) describes positionality as the researcher’s “subjectivity,” and explains that “most qualitative researchers would deny the possibility of pure objectivity” (p. 9) because of each person’s individual subjectivity. Researchers are “reflexively applying their own subjectivities in ways that make it possible to understand the tacit motives and assumptions of the participants” when they gather data (Hamilton, 1994; Jacob, 1987; Lincoln & Guba, 1985 as cited in Hatch, 2002, p. 9). Creswell (2013) also asserts that who the researcher is matters and that qualitative research requires reflexivity: to do this, researchers should “convey... their background, how it informs their interpretation of the information in a study, and what they have to gain from the study” (p. 47) to research participants. Creswell (2013) suggests that researchers “position themselves” (p. 47) by discussing: “work experiences, cultural experiences, [and] history” (p. 47) as general guidelines. Hatch’s (2002) use of the term “reflexivity,” describes “the process of personally and academically reflecting on lived experience in ways that reveal deep connections between the writer and his or her subject” (Goodall, 2000, p. 137 as cited Hatch,

4 The term “data production” (Glesne, 2016, p. 44) is the term used in this study. 82

2002, pp. 10-11). Both Creswell (2013) and Hatch (2002) acknowledge the importance of the individual researcher, but position the researcher as a complement to the research. Madison (2012), however, argues that qualitative researchers should acknowledge their “positionality,” that is their “power, privilege, and biases” (p. 8). The purpose of making a positionality statement is so that researchers cannot claim “objectivity,” particularly acknowledging that “many early researchers, particularly during the colonial and modern period, did not recognize that their stalwart ‘objectivity’ was already subjective in the value-laden classification, meanings, and worldviews they employed and superimposed upon peoples who were different from them” (Madison, 2012, p. 8). By making one’s positionality explicit, it makes qualitative research “vulnerable to judgment and evaluation” (Madison, 2012, p. 9). Madison’s (2012) attention to issues of power and privilege is important because it is consistent with the focus of my research in critical literacy and social justice. Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) emphasize the importance of educators’ positionality in their work on social justice and emphasize that much of a social justice educators’ work begins with an understanding of the educator’s own positionality; that is, understanding one’s own positionality as an educator means “the recognition that where you stand in relation to other in society shapes what you can see and understand about the world” (p. 8). With these critiques and ethics in mind, my positionality statement is included in this chapter. The final aspects of qualitative research are time and an emergent design process. Qualitative research requires significant time in social settings in order to produce data (Hatch, 2002; Glesne, 2016; Creswell, 2013). Researchers spend significant time on understanding complicated wholes, and embrace the complexity of social meaning and experiences rather than isolate single factors or variables in a study (Creswell, 2013; Hatch, 2002). Finally, qualitative researchers use emergent design strategies in their studies (Creswell, 2013; Hatch 2002). An emergent design strategy requires that qualitative researchers ask literature-based research questions and thoughtfully design research methods, but the purpose of qualitative data is to learn about an experience from participants and the best methods to obtain that data, or questions to elicit particular aspects of the experience, may change in context and in process (Creswell, 2013, p. 47). As it will be made evident in Chapter Four of this research, the research plans for the study were emergent and “progressively focused” (Parlett & Hamilton, 1976 as cited in Stake,

1995, p. 9) throughout the research process. The following method and methodological plans reflect how the research was designed and conducted.

Why Qualitative Research for Me, as a Researcher? As an early childhood educator in kindergarten and first grade in private and public settings respectively, I slowly came to realize that after leaving my undergraduate teacher preparation program, I was more interested in the metaphorical forest, rather than the trees in education. In my professional role, I attended conferences about how to teach more effectively. I evaluated and helped select math and reading curriculum programs to implement in the schools where I worked. And I participated in all of the professional development that was available. Yet, I was increasingly dissatisfied with the notion that a new classroom learning strategy or curriculum program would help my students be more successful in school. These seemed to me to be the trees. As the opening vignette asks: Whose definition of success was I using? Who developed the math and reading programs and whose interests were at stake in their use? Why was I only discussing math and reading, not science, social studies, and creative arts? And why wasn’t I considering the intersection of our elementary school experience with students’ linguistic, racial, gender, ethnic, and national identities? How did I encounter speech and language pathologists who counseled against speaking more than one language at home? Why were the curriculum plans almost identical in two very different economic, social, geographic, racial, and linguistic contexts at the two schools where I worked? Why did the private school students have 30 minutes of reading instruction and 120 minutes of recess while the public-school students had 90 minutes of reading instruction and just 20 minutes of recess? These questions do not just have best-practices and best-program differences. The students’ social and political contexts matter, yet, these were not explicitly addressed in the educational plans for either context. I came to graduate school with a myriad of “issues, uncertainties, dilemmas, [and] paradoxes” that intrigued me (Glesne, 2016, p. 32). In my graduate work, it was qualitative research that often offered the most complex answers to these questions that both clarified my experiences and prompted new questions. I was particularly interested in qualitative research practices generally because they seek to create a “holistic account” (Creswell, 2013, p. 47). Holistic accounts develop a “complex picture of the problem, …generally sketching the larger

84 picture that emerges, [and] identifying the complex interactions of factors in any situation” (Creswell, 2013, p. 47). Here, I found that doing qualitative research helped place me in the forest, the social and political context, of education. Qualitative researchers’ investment of time, the rejection of objectivity, and value in my own position as a researcher restored my sense of professionalism slowly stripped away by mandated curricula and too little time spent attending to the specific needs of children in my classrooms. Quantitative researchers make significant contributions to educational research, and I do not disparage their contributions. However, when it comes to the way that I want to spend long amounts of time with people, intimately understand specific experiences, and write about the nuances of educational experience, I am personally better suited to qualitative research pursuits.

Methodology: The Research Process Denzin and Lincoln (2018) suggest five phases of the research process: a consideration of the researcher as a multicultural subject; choosing a theoretical paradigm and perspective; choosing a research strategy; selecting methods for data collection and analysis; and interpretation and evaluation of the research (p. 19). In the remainder of this chapter, I begin with my researcher positionality and follow with a discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of the constructivist-interpretivist paradigm and the choice of case study as the research strategy. Next, I discuss the critical literacy curriculum for preservice teachers during the critical literacy book club, including the process of text selection and developing the critical literacy guiding questions by Janks, Dixon, Ferreira, Granville, and Newfield (2014). This curriculum planning also includes a discussion of the role of the participants and my role as a researcher. Then, I present ethics of compliance in Institutional Review Board (IRB) Exemption Approval and direct the reader toward appendices that include full IRB approval, the lay summary (Glesne, 2016) of the research distributed to participants, and participant consent forms. I discuss site and participant selection, data production (Glesne, 2016) methods, the use of pseudonyms and participant consent. In these sections I include a short biographical sketch of each of the research participants and expand on the picturebook selection process. Lastly, I

85 discuss data interpretation using a selection of Saldaña’s (2016) first, second, and third cycle coding methods.

A Multicultural Subject: My Positionality Statement According to Beverly Tatum (2000), there are seven categories of “otherness” commonly experienced in U.S. society: race or ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, and physical or mental ability (p. 11). These categories of “otherness” that Tatum (2000) describes are social groups in which there are dominant groups, sometimes called “agent groups” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 47) and oppressed or “minoritized and targeted groups” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 47). These two social groups exist in relation to each other through the mitigating effects of “isms” that “describe the relationships of inequality between dominant and minoritized groups” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 48). For example, in terms of race, White is the dominant or racial “agent group” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 47). People of color are the racially “minoritized/target group” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 47). And racism is the term for the racial system of inequality, or oppression. DiAngelo (2012) includes religious oppression, nationalism, and adultism to the types of oppression that can generate “otherness” (Tatum, 2000) or “minoritized/target groups” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 47). And names Christians, citizens or perceived citizens, and adults as dominant groups. Using these 10 categories of dominance and “otherness” (Tatum, 2000) (race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status / class, age, physical or mental ability, religion, and citizenship) as a starting point, I describe myself in the following way. I am a White, upper-class, cisgender, heterosexual woman who is, at this time, physically and mentally able, and 32. I have a Christian religious background and I am a U.S. citizen and have been perceived as such in institutional spaces such as schools and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. In each of these social identities, I have social power by my membership in the dominant social group. In other words, most of my social identities afford me social and institutional power. Only in my identity as a woman is my positionality not defaulted to as the most powerful category of identity. For this study, I also add my identity as a mother in addition to the 10 aspects of identity Tatum (2000) and DiAngelo (2012) identify. This is another significant aspect of my identity, a “lens,” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 22) that DiAngelo (2012) describes as an individual

86 experience that I bring to bear on my study, particularly in the motivation for the study as expressed in Chapter One. This positionality is one that I have been writing and re-writing for the past few years. The notion that knowledge is socially constructed, socialized, and can be (re)constructed is one of my foundational beliefs about knowledge. And because of this belief, I am always aware that who I am as I write this positionality statement is not inherently stable or “true.” I have an 18-year history of writing myself into understanding and positioning. As an early teenager, I began to write in a journal in order to better understand myself, my feelings, my responses, and my underlying assumptions about my life experiences. The process of writing myself into these understandings has always been an essential tool for understanding myself and my experience. With a written record, I can provide evidential support for how much I have changed over time and developed new vocabulary for my experiences and responses. I have written myself into narratives of meritocracy and individualism as I attended my undergraduate university. I have narrated myself as a classed woman who was systematically disadvantaged by my working- poor class identity and later rewrote those narratives to understand myself as a beneficiary of affirmative action, and as an economically disadvantaged White woman, I had the greatest chance of being a part of those reparative social programs. I have taken up narratives of the White savior as a White teacher, and re-written those narratives as narratives of White supremacy from a well-intentioned but naive and deeply racialized and racializing position. And one day, maybe sooner than later, I will reflect on this study and note its naivete as I develop as a more skilled and nuanced researcher. These changes in the way I think about myself are a bit unnerving to unveil. However, this partial transparency into the ways in which I have not always been who I am now are part of the foundational hope that I carry for education and teaching in critical literacy and social justice with preservice teachers. I was not a social justice educator at the beginning of my teaching career. Who we are does not have to be who we are forever, we can become more critically conscious, we can better understand our world as we experience it, and more fully understand that our experiences are different than others’ experiences. My role in the research process - in the ontological beliefs about knowledge the constructivist / interpretivist paradigm says this about research - “To me this means that we

87 construct knowledge through our lived experiences and through our interactions with other members of society. As such, as researchers, we must participate in the research with our subjects to ensure we are producing knowledge that is reflective of their reality” (Lincoln, Lynham & Guba, 2018, p. 114) also - “This means we are shaped by our lived experiences, and these will always come out in the knowledge we generate as researchers and in the data generated by our subjects” (p. 116)

My Literacy Positionality Within the context of literacy, my positionality has more dimensions of nuance and is a story about my literacy “lenses” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 22). Literacy, in my immediate family was varied. As a child, my mother read parenting books about how to raise children. In them, she read about the importance of reading to children before bed. So, my sister and I had bedtime books from toddlerhood through middle elementary school. My mother and father both read to us at night. Little Golden Books and Bernstein Bears were my favorites. We went to the library to pick out our books, usually once a month, as a young child. These bedtime books were not a universal norm for children in the town where I grew up, but it was my normal. As I got older, I eventually learned to read, but the bedtime books dwindled and my interest in reading was not high. However, when I was in fourth grade, I had a friend, Brittany, who read entire novels from the school library. To make a long story short, if she could do it, I could do it. So, I picked up Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls and I loved it. Afterwards, I became interested in what else the library might offer and I enjoyed reading. I read several books a week and I pursued them solely for my own pleasure, not spurred on by academic or interpersonal expectations. Later in high school, my advanced vocabulary and working knowledge of many “classic” (read: Western Canon) books, which I read simply because they were “classics,” put me on a pre-college path that probably would not have been available to me otherwise. Attending college was not an option for many of my peers and not a widespread expectation for most students at my school. My interest in the “right” kind of literacy worked to my academic advantage. However, my literacy interests usually stood in contrast to my family’s literacy. My mother reads frequently, but mostly informational texts. My father reads the daily local paper, but has not in my lifetime finished a book. They pursued literacy interests that were instrumental

88 to completing home renovation projects, gardening, and knowing more about our town and community news. In an enormous group of people that is my immediate extended family of which there are many (50+), I have one uncle, two aunts (sisters), and two cousins (children of the aunts) who read for pleasure. They are also the only other people in my immediate and extended family who have attended college in addition to my sister. While many of the folks in my family are brilliant, resourceful people, only a few have literacy interests that align with academic literacy interests. I have always known within my family that there are many different ways to be smart, but also there are the kinds of smart that include being “bookish,” which create access to social power via school. And in my case, I attended college, which facilitated my movement in socioeconomic status away from agriculture and service work towards professional work with higher earning potential. When I think now about how I value literacy, I often think not of my own childhood, but how I raise my children in literacy traditions. I believe it is important that they understand traditional models of socially powerful literacy as discussed in Chapter One, but that they also understand how literacy is a diverse set of skills. I want my children to know that although school, and I, will teach them the importance of traditional reading, it is also important that they understand how to be literate in other ways. I want them to understand the ways in which my family is literate without needing to live the same life that we live and read in the same ways that we read. I hope that my mother will teach them the importance of skimming a magazine article and that my father teaches them how to read between the lines of the police reports and land sales so that they can appreciate the nuance of reading these texts as well as canonical ones.

Constructivist-Interpretivist Paradigm Sorting out tension and conflict between the assertions about the nature of knowledge, the nature of reality, and how research methods and the researcher interact with those beliefs was difficult personal and academic terrain. What Guba (1990) calls paradigms or interpretive frameworks (as cited in Denzin & Lincoln, 2018, p. 19), Glesne (2016) and Hatch (2002) call paradigms. Creswell (2013) discusses research methodologies as interpretive frameworks, and research methodologies are also called “nets” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018, p. 19) and “figured worlds” (Kamberelis, Dimitriadis & Welker, 2018, p. 692) by other scholars. Paradigms range from positivist to postpositivist and there many options for postpositivist work. While

89 acknowledging the diversity of choices, this study is situated in a constructivist-interpretivist paradigm. Particularly, after reading critiques of qualitative research that include Denzin and Lincoln’s (2011) assertion that “from the very beginning, qualitative research was implicated in a racist project” (p. 3) and Smith’s scholarship on colonizing methodologies, when she writes that “what makes ideas ‘real’ is the system of knowledge, the formations of culture, and the relations of power in which these concepts are located” (Smith, 2012, p. 50), I am acutely aware that choosing a paradigm is located in a history of paradigm wars (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018) and that “the many histories that surround each method or research strategy reveal how multiple uses and meanings are brought to each practice” (p. 12). “The constructivist paradigm assumes a relativist ontology (there are multiple realities), a subjectivist epistemology (knower and the respondent co-create understandings), and a naturalistic (in the natural world) set of methodological procedures” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018, p. 20). After reading widely, I settled this study into a constructivist-interpretivist paradigm because it aligns most closely with the research questions I raised for engaging with critical literacy. Creswell (2013) writes that in social constructivism, his interpretive framework for the constructivist-interpretivist paradigm, “individuals seek understanding of the world in which they live and work” (p. 24). Janks, et al., (2014) the authors of Doing Critical Literacy, which is the foundation for the critical literacy inquiry discussion guide, also write about how the ways that one speaks and writes are “socially constructed” and socialized. Furthermore, Stake (1995), a case study scholar, writes that from a constructivist understanding, “Infants, children, and adults construct their understandings from experience and from being told what the world is, not by discovering it whirling there untouched by experience” (p. 100). The research questions assume that there are multiple ways of understanding critical literacy within social contexts, such as book clubs, and that critical literacy happens in the context of the natural world. Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) write more concisely about this understanding of knowledge: “When we refer to knowledge as socially constructed we mean that knowledge is reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it. This term captures the understanding that all content and all means of knowing are connected to a social context” (p. 7). In this statement about knowledge, there is an open acknowledgment that knowledge is not neutral and that it is a social construction. Furthermore, knowledge produced in social context is

90 not static. This invites me, as a researcher, to consider what happens when new social experiences, such as a critical literacy book club is introduced to the social lives of preservice teachers. This project is also a social one. My interests in single participant studies simply never arose as a research consideration. This predilection for a study that included a social group also revealed to me how I endeavor to understand social constructions of knowledge. Personally, a book club sounds and feels like a social event. This is why I chose the term “book club,” rather than “literature circle.” And I have purposefully chosen a social event as a research site because I believe that I learn more and differently when I learn in a social context. I cannot help but see now how my own interpretation of knowledge construction is playing out in my assumptions that the research participants will have similar experiences. Furthermore, book clubs, in focus group research practices, have been conceptualized as social constructivist spaces as well. A social constructionist epistemology that “views the reception process - both of individuals and groups - as dynamic and emergent” (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2013, p. 12) is complementary with my research questions and design, even though I have chosen a case study as a research design, not focus groups. Individuals, even when not interacting in social groups, are shaped by social histories. However, in social spaces such as critical literacy book club, the interactions between individuals and their socialization generate knowledge in different ways. Despite asserting that this inquiry is a constructivist-interpretivist study overall, I have allowed myself to be influenced and informed by scholars in other paradigms. I believe my project is richer and more nuanced for these influences. I am influenced by critical theory in critical literacy pedagogy. And I am influenced by postcolonial scholars when thinking about research on social issues, particularly in terms of ethics of research.

Research Design: Case Study Research Case Studies and a Constructivist-Interpretivist Paradigm Denzin and Lincoln (2018) describe the research design as, “a flexible set of guidelines that connect theoretical paradigms, first, to strategies of inquiry and second, to methods for collecting empirical material” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018, p. 21). The theoretical paradigm for the research is a constructivist-interpretivist paradigm as discussed above. The methods of

“collecting empirical material” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018, p. 21), or data production (Glesne, 2016) are case study research methods. Denzin and Lincoln (2018) identify case studies as one strategy for constructivist- interpretivist research. And Stake (1995) firmly connects case study research to constructivism, rooted in the belief that “knowledge is constructed rather than discovered” (p. 99). A constructivist view “encourages providing readers with good raw material for their own generalizing” (p. 102) and “justify lots of narrative description in the final report” (p. 102). Other case study scholars, such as Yin (2014) opens case study up to a variety of epistemological orientations and claims that as a research design it is an “all-encompassing method” (p. 17). Whether case studies and constructivist-interpretivist paradigms are exclusively compatible or not, the potential for a case study to maintain a “holistic and real-world perspective” (Yin, 2014, p. 4) is what anchors this inquiry to a case study research design.

Case Study Research Case studies are empirical inquiries that Yin (2014) describes using a scope of what qualifies as a case as well as the features of a case study. Case study research “investigates a contemporary phenomenon (the ‘case’) in depth and within its real-world context” (p. 16). Therefore, case study inquiries rely on multiple sources of evidence and benefit from prior theoretical guidelines for data collection and analysis (Yin, 2014, p. 17). For this project, the “What is this a case of?” (Schwandt & Gates, 2018, p. 348) question is answered with: the critical literacy book club including all of the participants, engaging in critical literacy pedagogy with diverse, social issues picturebooks during each meeting over six weeks. Stake (1995) describes case studies in two categories: intrinsic and instrumental. For an intrinsic case study, the researcher is interested primarily in a single case for the sake of better understanding just the particular case (Stake, 1995). An instrumental case study is an approach to case study that uses the case study research strategies to better understand specific aspects of the case or experience (Stake, 1995). For this project, the book club case is an intrinsic study. My effort as a researcher will be spent understanding just this particular case as is reflected in my overarching research question: How does a critical literacy book club serve as a social space for preservice teachers to construct critical literacy? My questions of the data also question the positionalities of the preservice teachers while engaging in the book club each week: How do

92 preservice teachers narrate their positionality while participating in a critical literacy book club reading social issues picturebooks? These research questions led me to an intrinsic case study approach. Case studies answer “how” and “why” questions (Yin, 2014, p. 11). With this in mind, I chose to keep my primary questions “how” questions and acknowledge that I brought “etic issues” (Stake, 1995) to the critical literacy book club. Relying on existing literature about critical literacy, book clubs, and social justice, I anticipated the ways in which the critical literacy book club would prompt preservice teachers to narrative their positionality. However, case study research requires flexibility, “progressive redefinition” of the issues in the case, and “seiz[ing] opportunities to learn the unexpected” (Stake, 1995, p. 29). The critical literacy book club was dynamic and complex and I heeded Stake’s (1995) advice that “in a flood of happenings, the researcher grasps for something to hold on to” (p. 33). These were the research questions.

Data Production At this point in the chapter, there is transition from the philosophical underpinnings of qualitative research, the constructivist-interpretivist paradigm, and the case study research approach generally to the practical details of the research inquiry that are called for by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and the execution of those plans. In the following sections I discuss data sources, the research site, participant selection, and present a short biographical sketch of the 5 participants selected, the criterion and process of selecting the diverse, social- issues texts used for critical literacy book club meetings, and the pedagogical planning for critical literacy book club meetings. Finally, I discuss the ways in which the data produced was transcribed, coded and re-coded, and the ways in which I organized the data for analysis in Chapter Four. Throughout the research design process, I discuss the ethics that inform the decision-making process in research design to show the way in which considerations of ethics were made throughout. However, at the end of this chapter, there is also a discussion of the limitations of this study and the ethics of credibility, transferability, dependability, confirmability, and generalizability.

Institutional Review Board In January, 2018, plans for this research study were submitted to the Office for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship at Miami University. On January 9, 2018 the Office for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship determined that the Human Subjects research project, as proposed, met at least one category of exemption for full Internal Review Board approval. Upon receipt of email correspondence on January 9, 2018, research approval was granted. A copy of the IRB application and approval can be found in Appendix A. This project reference number is: 02688e.

Data Sources The data collected for case study research includes documents, observations, physical artifacts, and interviews. Yin (2014) writes that in order to make an argument about the topics or findings of the case study, there needs to be as much evidence of each finding as possible. Therefore, good case studies “rely on as many sources as possible” (Yin, 2014, p. 105). Because the case is bounded by the critical literacy book club sessions, the audio and video recordings and the transcripts produced from them are the primary documents of interest. The discussion guide and the diverse, social issues picturebooks are also included in some data analysis for context. In addition, I kept field notes during sessions using a participant-observation method, conducted individual interviews after all of the book club sessions were completed, and recorded reflections on the whole research project in a researcher journal that blended researcher journaling with analytic memoing.

Documents During the critical literacy book club, participants used the Critical Literacy Discussion Guide (Appendix D) and diverse, social issues picturebooks for discussion. Content from the discussion guide and these books is included in some data analysis. In addition, each critical literacy book club conversation was transcribed from audio and video recording. These 6 transcripts and an additional 5 individual interviews for each participant were the primary documents used for data analysis. One paper from The Literacy Course, from which the participants were selected, was collected from each of the participant. This paper is called the “Life As a Reader” paper. The

“Life As a Reader” paper was initially collected to provide insight into the participants’ social identity positions, however, that was not the outcome of the papers as written. The “Life As a Reader” paper primarily contributes to the brief biographical sketches for each participant and constructs a literacy positionality rather than a broad social identity positionality.

Video and Audio Recording During book club sessions, I set up and used audio and video recording equipment in order to create transcripts of the sessions for data analysis review. Audio recordings were collected using a digital voice recorder and omni-directional conference microphone. One audio file was recorded for each critical literacy book club session. After each session, the audio file was downloaded to a password-protected computer. Video recordings were collected using a video camcorder. One video file was recorded for each critical literacy book club session. After each session, video files were downloaded to a password-protected computer.

Field Notes and Researcher Journal In addition to audio and video recording the book club conversations, I kept a field note journal in which I jotted interesting observations and questions that I wanted to follow up on during sessions. These notes were transcribed into my researcher journal after each critical literacy book club session. All notes recorded in my field journal and research journal used pseudonyms for each participant. These notes were quite subjective. Stake (1995) writes about this “privilege and obligation: the privilege to pay attention to what [researchers] consider worthy of attention and the obligation to make conclusions drawn from those choices meaningful…” (p. 49). Making field notes and producing data in the form of a research journal, and analytic notes (Glesne, 2016) during book club sessions requires “sensitivity and skepticism” (p. 50). Each of these descriptors cannot be quantified or measured. However, the notes facilitated the evolving process of “progressive focusing” (Parlett & Hamilton, 1976 as cited in Stake, 1995, p. 9) that was needed during conversation, especially as it became evident that there were a wide range of topics that participants raised during each book club conversation. My goals for field notes from participant observation were twofold. First, I wanted to capture moments that I deemed important and noteworthy for further refinement of my research

95 questions and “progressive focusing” (Parlett & Hamilton, 1976 as cited in Stake, 1995, p. 9) of the study. When I noticed patterns of conversation, storytelling, or themes in their responses to the picturebooks, I noted those when I saw and heard them. The second goal was to have strategy in place for personally maintaining a “learning stance” (Glesne, 2016, p. 67) towards my research participants. “To maintain this stance, you need to be flexible and open to changing your point of view” (Glesne, 2016, p. 67). As an individual, I generally approach learning through writing. I write about what surprises me. I write about what catches my attention. I write about what startles me. By notating aspects of the book club that I needed to learn more about, I was better able to see the ways in which I was framing my ongoing analyses and maintain Stake’s (1995) recommendation of “sensitivity and skepticism” (p. 50) when producing data. In order to make my field notetaking the most comfortable for participants, I shared on the first day of the book club my intention of writing throughout the entire book club. Glesne (2016) suggests that researchers, “make it known that, as a researcher, you will write” (p. 73). In an increasingly surveilled world, it would make me uncomfortable if I did not understand why someone close to me were writing down notes on a group in which I was a participant. Who has our information and how it will be used is of increasing concern in what Bratich (2018) calls the “surveillance era.” Bratich (2018) also argues that observation is pervasive and has a complicated, often colonizing, history in research. The role of the researcher in observation and to what ends the observations are employed are essential questions to ask. The role of acknowledging subjectivities of observers, or positionalities, does not erase the lenses that they bring to observation, nor does it account for why or to what end the researcher chooses to use hir observations (Bratich, 2018). Although I have no ethical right answers to the complications of observation, I do acknowledge that I cannot account for all of my positionality fully and that I am always an interpreter while observer. Thus, this is a qualitative analysis open to critique because of my subjectivity that I cannot erase or fully bracket.

Ethnographic Participant-Observations My field notes were taken while acting primarily as an “observer as participant” (Glesne, 2016) in the book club. After an introduction to critical literacy and prompting participants to

96 participate using the critical literacy prompts, I purposefully withdrew to an “observer as participant” role. In this role, I was attentive to conversation, made notes in my field journal, and actively listened to the conversation, however, I kept verbal participation in the book club to a minimum. I did not wish to add my own interpretations of the text to the conversation because my own lenses are always at play and my probing question might have encouraged an analysis of the texts similar to my own. I usually started each critical literacy book club conversation with a prompt for discussion for the whole group, but did not continue to act as a discussion guide or facilitator. Particularly during the first three out of six sessions, when students digressed from the critical literacy prompts to focus on discussing the literary merits of a text or the use of a picturebook for classroom curriculum, I redirected students in conversation back towards a critical literacy approach to the diverse, social issues texts. A discussion of the outcome of these redirections is discussed at length in Chapter Four: Constructing Critical Literacy in a Book Club. Furthermore, I chose an “observer as participant” (Glesne, 2016) stance in this study because I had an opportunity to act as an observer, not as a teacher educator, which has traditionally been my role when working with preservice teachers. In the past, I made a concerted effort to intervene in conversation and facilitate conversations in directions that I decided were appropriate. However, in a book club setting outside of classroom activities, I wanted to perform less like a teacher educator and spend more time listening than talking. This was achieved by intentionally choosing to be an “observer as participant” (Glesne, 2106), not an active participant.

Analytic Notes In addition to field notes, I also kept analytic notes. Glesne (2016) describes analytic notes as “a form of data analysis conducted throughout the research process; its contributions range from problem identification, to changes in research design, to question development, to identifying patterns and themes” (p. 77). A version of analytic notating has already been kept to date beginning in March, 2017, at the outset of the first dissertation proposal draft. In one running document, I have kept thoughts about project development, potentially compatible research methods, journaling on the process of dissertation completion from discouragement to excitement, and notes about interesting conversations with colleagues that

97 helped me direct my project. These ongoing analyses of the project as a whole, as well as notes on data collection and decision making, were kept in a chronologically organized, password- protected file and continued to be kept throughout the research and writing process.

Interview Strategies Interviews are often suggested in case study research. Yin (2014) claims that interviews are “one of the most important sources of case study evidence” (p. 110). Interviews for case studies are generally “fluid rather than rigid” (Rubin & Rubin, 2011 as cited in Yin, 2014, p. 110) and are conversational in style and tone. Yin (2014) suggests that interview data should be produced in order to better understand specific aspects of the case. These interviews may be conducted throughout a case study or at the conclusion of field work. Interviews may be used to “corroborate certain findings that you think already have been established” (Yin, 2014, p. 111) or to ask more specific questions about “people and events or their insights, explanations, and meanings related to certain occurrences” (p. 111). Individual interviews were conducted with each participant after the completion of all six critical literacy book club sessions. The purpose of the interviews was to better understand how they prepared for book club sessions, how they thought they participated in the book clubs, and to clarify my interpretations of how they made meaning of critical literacy in the book club. Each individual interview was scheduled within two weeks of competing the critical literacy book club. I traveled to campus at times that were convenient for each participant to meet in private classrooms. The classrooms were scheduled for the interviews through the academic department in order to secure a private location that would not be in use at the time of the interview and a setting where the audio recorder device could clearly capture the interview conversation. Individual interviews ranged from 25 to 40 minutes in length and each interviewee was asked the same set of interview questions, although the order of the questions varied based on the rhythm of the conversation with each participant. The conversation with each participant also varied based on what the participants decided to share with me in response to my questions. Glesne (2016) recommends that researchers “follow up on what respondents say with probes, remaining open to the learning what you should have asked but didn’t know enough to consider” (p. 114).

For example, when I asked Jane there was anything else she would like me to know. She picked up The Black Book of Colors and said, “still mad at this book.” In response I probed, “tell me about that.” Her response was that she felt betrayed by the book because she really liked it until she critiqued it. She then followed it up with a reflection that “The book club really, like, has made me open my eyes more to issues instead of just getting focused all on the story.” After the critical literacy book club meetings, she started looking up critiques of books that she chose for her own reading. Furthermore, Jane has a job at a public library and she recommended that the children’s librarian begin looking up book critiques before reading picturebooks for story hours at the library as well. This information was shared at the end of the interview, but in response to a prompt from me about what her feelings of anger meant to her. While this finding does not change the themes of the data analysis or significantly contribute to the critical literacy book club impact overall, it was an encouraging, concrete example of the ways in which this research project impacted the lives of adults who select books for children and read with children. Because I asked probing questions, this is information that I have as a researcher.

Participant Selection For this study, I solicited 5 preservice teachers from a course called The Literacy Course (pseudonym name for the course) to join me for a critical literacy book club for approximately one hour prior to the course sessions already scheduled on the university calendar for The Literacy Course. I was graciously invited to solicit participants for this research from The Literacy Course by the course instructor. In The Literacy Course, the preservice teachers were reading young adult novels in the following genres, topics, and qualifications: bullying, a graphic novel, LGTBQ, social justice, disabilities, and an award winner for the first 6 weeks of the class. Both the course instructor and I anticipated that the critical literacy book club may be more consistently attended if it aligned with an already established commitment of the participants’ schedule. And The Literacy Course instructor had the research participants from the critical literacy book club share their reflections on our sessions with the rest of students enrolled in The Literacy Course each week. This reinforced her assertion in the course that picturebooks are beneficial for adolescent classrooms

(Batchelor, 2017) just as they are appropriate for early childhood classroom contexts. Data from how the research participants represented the critical literacy book club conversations was not observed or recorded for data analysis purposes. However, access to The Literacy Course allowed me to solicit participants, with whom I was not already familiar, in a context that allowed me to do homogenous sampling of participants by teaching certification cohort. Furthermore, my interest as a researcher was in how students understood and made meaning from experiences with critical literacy in the book club. Therefore, the choice of topics for the diverse, social issues picturebooks was held loosely, debated frequently, and I was content to align myself with The Literacy Course in order to make participation in the study as helpful and meaningful to participants as possible. On January 31, 2018, I visited the first class session for The Literacy Course. The Literacy Course instructor invited me to share the books that I pre-selected for the critical literacy book club, a short synopsis of what critical literacy is, and the lay summary of the research that described: the way that the critical literacy book club aligned with The Literacy Course, the selection of texts, dates for the critical literacy book club meetings, an invitation to dinner each week during book club, and a written overview of the benefits and risks of participating in the critical literacy book club. A copy of the lay summary is found in Appendix B. At the end of the class, volunteer participants were asked to sign the critical literacy book club consent form if they desired to join the critical literacy book club. The consent form for this study can be found in Appendix C. Of the students enrolled in The Literacy Course, 10 students volunteered to be participants. It can be frustrating to experience the delays and denial of participation that accompany large groups (Jackson, 1990). Literature circle scholar Harvey Daniels (2002) writes that when creating groups for book clubs, choosing the number participants is an exercise of “balancing active participation against diversity of ideas” (p. 77). In years of research and experience with literature circles in the Chicago area, the best group size “seems to be four or five” (p. 76). This aligns with most of the literature on critical book clubs in education from Chapter Two. The sample sizes for the studies in the literature review ranged between three and seven or were described as “small groups” (Thein & Schimdt, 2017; Van Dunien et al., 2017; White, 2016), which I assume fits into the three-seven range. The IRB submission requested four-six

100 participants in order to have enough participant perspectives while promoting participation by all preservice teachers. To select participants, I decided upon homogeneous sampling to “describe some group in depth” (Glesne, 2016, p. 51). The majority of students enrolled in The Literacy Course were part of two cohorts of students. One cohort was preparing for licensure in Middle Childhood education and the second cohort was enrolled in coursework for an Integrated English / Language Arts degree that prepared them to be licensed by the state in grades 7-12 classrooms. Of the 10 participants, six of them were a part of the Integrated English / Language Arts cohort preparing to teach in grades 7-12. I selected this group because six participants were available and I hoped that of six participants available, the study would have at least four participants. After sending an email to 5 of the 6 participants in the Integrated English / Language Arts cohort welcoming them to the critical literacy book club study, one of the selected participants discovered a conflict in her schedule that interfered with critical literacy book club participation. After that, I invited the 6th participant in the cohort to join the study. After this invitation was sent, the final participant confirmed his ability and interest to join the critical literacy book club and all 5 participants were selected. Because the case study features the voices of the participant so heavily, rather than have the participants remain anonymous, I prepared a brief biographical sketch of each participant included in Table 3 Biographic Sketches of Participants. These biographic sketches are based on their individual interviews and their “Life As a Reader” papers for The Literacy Course. The participants are organized alphabetically by their chosen pseudonyms. A note on participation is included at the end for every participant as well.

Table 3: Biographic Sketches of Participants Ashley – A pseudonym Francis – Francis is a Jane – Jane describes her picked because she always middle-class, heterosexual, class status as “sorta middle- named her pretend dolls, cisgender, White man raised class” or a “tiny bit below “Ashley,” Ashley self in a Catholic home who middle-class” and a first- identifies as an activist and “walks around in the world generation college student. ally. She is a straight-white with a lot of privileged Arriving at college later than woman who was raised in a identities.” Self-identified as the rest of her peers, Jane

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Catholic home and she is the an activist, he has spent describes herself as a older sibling of a younger significant time in his responsible person and more sister. She was an eager undergraduate years learning mature than others her age, participant and sometimes more about social justice and especially in her role as worried that she was talking pursuing social justice stand-in mother for her two too much, but she contributed endeavors beyond the siblings that has shaped her often to conversation. preservice teacher classroom. identity significantly. She describes her hometown Ashley began reading at 4 or Francis describes himself as context as “diverse” racially 5 and Rainbow Fish was her “getting into” reading in late and socially. favorite book to read with her elementary school. father. As a child she tried Competition with friends Jane loves to read. Her first sneaking books under the fueled his love of reading and word was “book,” and she covers in her bed to continue To Kill A Mockingbird has loved to read since she reading engaging books like sparked his interest in social was a child. In high school the ones in the Harry Potter justice during his middle influential titles included The series. Once an avid reader, school years. Once an avid Great Gatsby, but assigned she began to lose the time for reader, he kept up assigned reading in high school pleasure reading, not assigned reading in high school but crowded out pleasure reading. for classes, in high school and shifted his pleasure reading to That is no longer the case and this trend continued into social media. He has plans to she reads avidly for pleasure. college. To motivate her read more for pleasure in the She hopes that there are investment in pleasure future, but has disassociated books in heaven. reading again, she created and some from the social media participates in a friend-based news he used to enjoy book club in college. because it can be overwhelming. Attendance 6/6 Sessions Attendance 3/6 Sessions Attendance 6/6 Sessions Nicole – Nicole is a straight, Stephen – Stephen is an Note – White woman who has been upper middle-class man who These biographies are both upper-middle-class and grew up in a largely White, comprised of information

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“lower of the top middle- upper middle-class suburban shared in their ‘Life as a class” in her life experiences neighborhood and describes Reader’ biographies and in so far. She describes a rich his education as significantly individual interviews. They friend group who are diverse influenced by the population are not complete portraits of in LGBTQ identities and of his community. He any of the participants, but “does not feel uncomfortable” identifies as gay and these small biographies may discussing her social specifically mentioned that he help contextualize the identities. Nicole was raised did not read a book with a participants of the study. in a home that was both gay protagonist until a few Jewish and Catholic. months before this study Furthermore, all of the began. He is eager to find participants are either in their Nicole is the daughter of a more books with gay third or final year in the four- teacher and was a reader by protagonists in the future. year English / Language Arts three. Academically As a theatre major he feels program. At the time of this advanced, she skipped that his capacity for empathy study, only one participant kindergarten because of her with “an experience [he] had already student taught. third-grade reading might not be familiar with, The other four were proficiency. In high school but that is still valuable” is anticipating student teaching and college, assigned reading one of his strengths as a in the Fall 2018 semester. obliterated the avid, pleasure future educator. reading she used to enjoy. Each of the preservice She still enjoys reading but As a child, he was an avid teachers, although licensed in has not reestablished the habit reader and another fan of The 7-12 intended to teach of pleasure reading in her Harry Potter series, sharing a traditional high school grades personal life, yet. memory of reading the last 9-12. Harry Potter book rather than participate at summer camp. In high school and college, assigned reading dampened his speed and volume of pleasure reading but he still

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reads for pleasure when school assignments do not demand his time, such as during university breaks. Attendance 5/6 Sessions Attendance 6/6 Sessions

Site Selection The critical literacy book club was held in the same reserved conference room each Wednesday. The room was selected because it was: available for use, offered one conference table large enough to seat all the participants in close, but not tight, proximity, and in the same academic building as The Literacy Course to create a convenient transition. The room was also quiet enough to allow clear digital audio and video recording. The book club literature review included time commitments to book clubs that range between 40 minutes and 2 hours per meeting. However, most of the book clubs lasted for about one hour. Therefore, I planned for approximately one-hour critical literacy book club sessions. The time was restrained by The Literacy Course that began approximately an hour and a half after the critical literacy book club began and I committed to giving students time to transition between the critical literacy book club and The Literacy Course. Each session began at 5:00 p.m., or a little later if a participant was late, and ended by 6:15 p.m. Although I cannot find any exact citations to support the importance of dinner during a book club, my own experience is that sharing food makes social spaces more welcoming and comfortable. Many of the authors of research on book clubs include food as a background for book clubs. Daniels (2002) even makes it a part of his tableau for book clubs A circle of chairs at the end of a hallway. A basket of pan dulce. A pot of coffee steaming, scenting the quiet air with its rich flavor. It is SSR time for this parent book club at Waters Elementary School, in Chicago. (p. 182) After considering dietary restrictions, I brought dinner for all participants along with me to the critical literacy book club. Their favorite dinners included: quesadillas, tamales, and pizza. A department dissertation funding grant was used to pay for dinner.

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Diverse, Social Issues Picturebook Criterion In Chapter One, I wrote in my motivations for this study about my interest in engaging with critical literacy because Janks (2010) describes critical reading as a way to “uncover the social interests at work [and] to ascertain what is at stake in textual and social practices” (pp. 12- 13). This is a productive means for discovering how texts are both “positioned and positioning” (Janks, 2010, p. 61) and setting preservice teacher participants up for reflection on the ways in which they are socially position, thus prompting a narrative of their own social identities, as embedded in the research questions for this study. In addition to my motivation for generating conversation that would address the research questions I considered: diversifying the literature to elicit discussion of a wide range of social identities, timeframe of copyright and publication for relevancy to the current socio-political context, and used Harste, Breau, Leland, Lewison, Ociepka & Vasquez (2000)’s “guidelines for identifying critical books” as selection criterion for each of the texts (as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73). I also read reviews from the Social Justice Books: A Teaching for Change Project website, where I selected from booklists on specific social issues for the study. Selecting social issues picturebooks was purposefully done to facilitate this research study. Social issues books are designed to, “focus on difficult social issues and [involve] situations where characters [are] marginalized in some ways as a result of the existing systems of power” (Leland & Huber in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 70). I hoped that explicitly reading and engaging in conversation about a wide range of social issues, as can be found in the diverse, social issues picturebooks selected, would draw participants’ critical literacy conversations toward reflecting on the positions available to them as readers, and extend those roles into how they are socially identified in larger social contexts as well. A critical literacy approach to reading can be used to approach any and every text (Vasquez, 2004/2014). The questions that critical literacy asks of texts are as easily applied to picturebooks that are not diverse, social issues texts such as a Clifford5 book by Norman Bridwell as much as any of the diverse, social issues texts selected. For example, questions about how power works in texts developed by Janks et al. (2014) and adapted for the critical literacy

5 I selected Clifford because Clifford is a well-known and prolifically published series of books for American children. Readers unfamiliar with the Clifford series may consider other books that are widely published and shared in relevant social and educational settings to extend this example. 105 book club discussion guide includes: Does this picturebook legitimate any groups or ideas? (p. 29). As an example, I considered Clifford’s Halloween. The answer to Janks et al.’s (2014) critical literacy prompt is yes. The book begins with a review of other significant holidays, aside from Halloween, that Emily Elizabeth and Clifford enjoy that includes: Christmas and Easter. By including these holidays, Christian religious traditions and their coordinating holidays are legitimated as “fun” holidays (Bridwell, 1986, p. 3). There is no mention of other religious holidays or traditions in Emily Elizabeth’s recitation of fun holidays that she and Clifford enjoy together. This text legitimates Christian holidays. Furthermore, there is a culturally unspecific and stereotype driven costume for Clifford as “an Indian” (Bridwell, 1986, p. 30) with a feathered headdress and smoking pipe as an imagined Halloween costume in the following years. This portrayal of Native Americans as an identity caricatured and assumed by children, and dogs, for dress-up play, with no attention to specific tribal dress or consideration of the history of colonizing effects of the image legitimate White children’s colonizing discourses about “Indians.” The group of preservice teachers selected as participants all identified as White, middle- class or higher, able, English speaking, citizens. They have lived in and continue to live in the “monocultural settings” that Leland and Huber (as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 71) describe. And for individuals who live in monocultural settings, social issues books can make “issues of diversity that [seem] invisible in [largely] monocultural settings” (Leland & Huber as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 71) more visible. Also, participants may hold nostalgic attachments to picturebooks like the Clifford series and the nostalgic attachments sometimes inhibits critical literacy (McNair, 2003). Therefore, I selected texts that were copyrighted within the last 1-12 years, such that the texts would most likely fall outside of the timeframe of their childhood reading experiences. The texts selected, with the exception of The Black Book of Colors were also selected because they were published within the last 4 years so that the issues discussed would be relevant to the current socio-political climate. For example, The Hoodie Hero re-appropriates the hoodie as hero garb. The significance of the hoodie, after the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February 2012 in which the shooter validated his claim that Trayvon Martin was “suspicious” based upon the way he

106 wore a dark hoodie pulled over his head, raises issues that are recent and relevant in the current socio-political context when discussing issues of race and racism in the United States. The hoodie as a cultural sign is described by Nguyen (2015) is part of “the landscape of protest and punditry… Million Hoodie Marches [and]… the viral spread of the hoodie photograph across mediascapes [was] a gesture of solidarity and critique” (p. 791). Considering the recent tension that conversations about the hoodie generate when discussing racial profiling and racism in the United States, the use of the hoodie as hero attire by Cooper, Golden, and McCard (2014) had the potential to raise considerations of the way that texts are racially positioned and positioning (Janks, 2010, p. 61) in this study. Furthermore, while critical literacy can be used to interrogate any text, I also wanted to select books that could serve as reasonably sensitive and respectful of the social identities and social issues addressed by the authors and illustrators of the texts. Therefore, I used a website SocialJusticeBooks.com, developed by Teaching for Change (2018), as a guide for selecting books whose purpose is … to identify and promote the best multicultural and social justice children’s books, as well as articles and books for educators. It builds on the tradition of the Council on Interracial Books for Children which provided a social justice lens to reviews of children’s literature. (Teaching for Change, 2018, n.p.) Furthermore, they argue It is not enough to simply diversify the characters in children’s literature. We are also concerned with who is writing the stories, what the characters are doing, how issues of power and activism are introduced, and representations of people in community rather than in isolation. (Teaching for Change, 2018, n.p.) In addition to the mission statements guiding their work, Teaching for Change (2018) uses the scholarship of anti-bias educator Derman-Sparks (2013) to select books that are anti- bias children’s books. Her guidelines for selecting anti-bias books are quick checkpoints for making initial evaluations of bias representations of social identities. In 1980, the Council on Interracial Books for Children published a pamphlet “Ten Quick Ways to Analyze Children’s Books for Racism and Sexism” that was “one of the first guides written for teachers and families” (Teaching for Change, 2018, n.p.) about how to check books for racism and sexism. This guide was updated in 2013 by Derman-Sparks (2013) and suggests

107 that when checking books for bias, which includes racism and sexism but also bias based on “various social identities (e.g. racial, ethnic, gender, economic class, sexual orientation, and disability” (Teaching for Change, 2018, n.p.), teachers and families should:  Check the Illustrations o Look for Stereotypes o Look for Tokenism o Look for Invisibility  Check the Story Line and the Relationships Between People  Look at Messages about Different Lifestyles  Consider the Effects on Children’s Self and Social Identities  Look for Books About Children and Adults Engaging in Actions for Change  Consider the Author’s or Illustrator’s Background and Perspective  Watch for Loaded Words  Look at the Copyright Date  Assess the Appeal of the Story and Illustrations to Young Children (Derman-Sparks, 2013, n.p.) In summary, “as you choose books or critically examine your current book selection, always keep in mind the power of books – their words and their images – to nurture or, conversely, to undermine a child’s sense of self, positive attitude toward others, and motivation to act for fairness” (Derman-Sparks, 2013, n.p.) In addition to selecting anti-bias children’s books, critical literacy scholars offer “guidelines for identifying critical books” that Harste et al. (2000, as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73) recommend for “identifying books that can easily be used to begin critical conversations” (p. 73). The book selection guidelines suggest that the books have at least one of the following aspects:  They do not make difference invisible but rather explore how differences can actually make a difference. In this case, the differences noted might relate to culture, language, history, class, gender, race, age, or disability.  They enrich our understanding of history and life by giving voice to those who have traditionally been silenced or marginalized. We call them the indignant ones.  They show how people can begin to take action on important social issues.

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 They explore dominant systems of meaning that operate in our society to position individuals and groups.  They help us question why certain groups are positioned as others. (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73). All of these evaluative tools from considering the importance of anti-bias in children’s literature to specifically choosing books that represent various social identities, as well as the reviews written by the See What We See (SWWS) coalition members who, “[provide] critical analyses of popular, classic, and award-winning books and [fight] to reduce the many barriers that [prevent] people of color from participating in the children’s publishing industry” (Teaching for Change, 2018, n.p.) on the Social Justice Books.org website come together in this study to inform the diverse, social issues text selection. It is important to note that even with such criteria in hand, most books fall short of being unanimously recommended or the right selections in every context. Every text in the selected literature has unique aspects that conform to the anti-bias and critical criteria, however, there is always something to critique, or critically inquire further about in each book as well. For example, when I read Sparkle Boy, I enjoyed it. Yet, I wondered how being gender nonconforming in the context of White liberals impacts the portrayal of acceptance of gender nonconforming children. The educational toys that Casey plays with, the reading leisure activities of the parents, and the mid-century modern décor imply a middle or upper-class setting. Also, the hip responses that the parents offer “I don’t have a problem with that,” (Newman, 2017, p. 3) “there’s no harm in it,” (Newman, 2017, p. 10) and “he isn’t hurting anyone” (Newman, 2017, p. 18) imply that how Casey dresses is simply a personal choice that it has no social aspects. This type of nonchalance allows the reader to position themselves in agreement with the mom, dad, and grandmother and engage no further in social or legal implications of LGBTQIA identified individuals. Furthermore, how might the story be read differently if the setting of Sparkle Boy were in a different geographic region, such as the Appalachian town where I grew up? When I asked the critical literacy book club to consider this, their response was that the book might not work overall if it were in a different geographic region and implied social class context.

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To clarify, I am not interested in changing the book, but because the book is positioned one way, I wonder how it might be read or received differently in another. This is what critical literacy does with texts. There are always questions to ask of texts and there are always ways in which they can be improved upon in one way or another. In short, there are no perfect books to select for diverse, social issues picturebooks. However, keeping the criteria above in mind when making selections are means to justify selections, while simultaneously acknowledging issues in each text. The books ultimately selected for this study are described in the Table One below. I acknowledge that all of them have aspects for recommendations as well as limitations on recommending them for reading. However, critical literacy can take any text under consideration and with critical reading, the texts take shape as always “positioned and positioning” (Janks, 2010, p. 61). Janks (2010) does not see anything sinister in this. It simply is. There would be no point in using language if we did not want people to take our views seriously and be persuaded by them… Judgments about whether such effects are good or bad are ethical judgments based on standards of fairness, equity and compassion. (p. 98) As readers one can discern if they want to agree or disagree, comply with or work against the way that a text positions us as readers. Furthermore, with ethics of social justice in mind, one can read for social issues such as the colonizing portrayal of Clifford’s Halloween costume and choose not to use that book when Halloween story times come around. Or, if reading Clifford’s Halloween, readers might have a conversation about how the representation of an indigenous group of people as a costume for children has a colonizing effect on the reader and respond to that effect. The power is not in the texts; “only when a reader connects to a text in some way does the potential for a powerful reading exist” (Schmidt et al., 2007, p. 54).

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Table 1: Picturebook Summaries Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis The Hoodie Ashley Lucia Liu Da’Monte is a student at Reach Middle Hero Cooper, School. When his friend Jasmine is bullied Daequan by Marco and his sidekicks, Da’Monte has to Golden & decide if he is going to a bystander or Rico advocate for Jasmine. With his Granny’s gift McCard of an identity concealing hoodie, Da’Monte assumes the role of ally for Jasmine, but he soon realizes that he can confront Marco’s bullying behavior without the help of Granny’s hoodie.

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father, and why did her mom leave him behind? But Pri’s mom avoids these questions- the topic of India is permanently closed. For Pri, her mother’s homeland can only exist in her imagination. That is, until she finds a mysterious pashmina tucked away in a forgotten suitcase. When she wraps herself in it, she is transported to a place more vivid and colorful than any guidebook or Bollywood film. But is this the real India? And what is that shadow lurking in the background? To learn the truth, Pri must travel further than she’s ever dared and find the family she never knew. In this heartwarming debut, Nidhi Chanani weaves a tale about the hardship and self- discovery that is born from juggling two cultures and two worlds.” Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2017 First Second Graphic Novel  Indian  Patriarchy 2/14/2018 Protagonist  Capitalism  Female  Classism Protagonist  Education of  Religion: Hindu Women and  Languages Girls Used: English  Transnational & Hindi Identities  Setting: United  Citizenship / States & India Nationalism  Bi-Cultural Characters  Bi-Lingual Characters  Colonialism Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They help us question why certain groups are positioned as others (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis (Flyleaf Synopsis)

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Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis (Flyleaf Synopsis)

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Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2016 Little, Award Winner  Native  Native Brown and 3/14/2018 American American Company Protagonist Identity  Identity Negotiation  Naming Practices Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They enrich our understanding of history and life by giving voice to those who have traditionally been silenced or marginalized (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis The Hoodie Ashley Lucia Liu Da’Monte is a student at Reach Middle Hero Cooper, School. When his friend Jasmine is bullied Daequan by Marco and his sidekicks, Da’Monte has to Golden & decide if he is going to a bystander or Rico advocate for Jasmine. With his Granny’s gift McCard of an identity concealing hoodie, Da’Monte assumes the role of ally for Jasmine, but he soon realizes that he can confront Marco’s bullying behavior without the help of Granny’s hoodie.

Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical

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Literacy Book Club Meeting 2014 Shout 2/7/2018  Black  The Hoodie as Mouse Protagonist Hero Garb Press, Inc.  Setting:  Heroes Multiracial  Bullies Student Body at  Bystanders Middle School  Teen  Wheelchair User Authorship  Multiracial  Diversifying Friend Groups Publishing Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They help us question why certain groups are positioned as others (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis (Flyleaf Synopsis) Pashmina Nidhi Nidhi Chanani “Priyanka Das has so many unanswered Chanani questions: Why did her mother abandon her home in India years ago? What was it like there? And most important, who is her father, and why did her mom leave him behind? But Pri’s mom avoids these questions- the topic of India is permanently closed. For Pri, her mother’s homeland can only exist in her imagination. That is, until she finds a mysterious pashmina tucked away in a forgotten suitcase. When she wraps herself in it, she is transported to a place more vivid and colorful than any

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guidebook or Bollywood film. But is this the real India? And what is that shadow lurking in the background? To learn the truth, Pri must travel further than she’s ever dared and find the family she never knew. In this heartwarming debut, Nidhi Chanani weaves a tale about the hardship and self- discovery that is born from juggling two cultures and two worlds.” Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2017 First Second Graphic Novel  Indian  Patriarchy 2/14/2018 Protagonist  Capitalism  Female  Classism Protagonist  Education of  Religion: Hindu Women and  Languages Girls Used: English  Transnational & Hindi Identities  Setting: United  Citizenship / States & India Nationalism  Bi-Cultural Characters

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 Bi-Lingual Characters  Colonialism Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They help us question why certain groups are positioned as others (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis (Flyleaf Synopsis) Sparkle Boy Lesle á Maria Mola “Casey loves to play with his blocks, Newman puzzles, and dump truck, and he also loves things that shimmer, glitter, and sparkle. Casey’s older sister, Jessie, thinks this is weird. Shimmery, glittery, sparkly things are only for girls, right? When Casey and Jessie head to the library for story time, Casey proudly wears his shimmery skirt and sparkly bracelet. His nails glitter in the light. Jessie insists that Casey looks silly. It’s one thing to dress like this around the house, but going outside as a ‘sparkle boy’ is another thing entirely. What will happened when the other kids see him? This sweet and refreshing story speaks to all of us about the acceptance, respect, and the simple freedom to be yourself. Shimmery, glittery, sparkly things are fun – for everyone!” Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria &

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Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2017 Lee & Low LGBT  Gender Non-  Heteronormativity Books, Inc. 2/21/2018 Conforming  Transgender Casey Oppression  Languages Used: English & 1 Spanish Word  Perceived Bi- racial Family Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They help us question why certain groups are positioned as others (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis (Flyleaf Synopsis) Separate is Duncan Tonatiuh “When her family moved to the town of Never Equal: Westminster, California, young Sylvia Sylvia Mendez Mendez was excited about enrolling in her & Her neighborhood school. But she and her Family’s brothers were turned away and told they had Fight for to attend the Mexican school instead. Sylvia Desegregation could not understand why – she was an American citizen who spoke perfect English. Why were the children of Mexican families forced to attend a separate school? Unable to get a satisfactory answer from the school board, the Mendez family decided to take

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matters into its own hands and organize a lawsuit. In the end, the Mendez family’s efforts helped bring an end to segregated schooling in California in 1947, seven years before the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in schools across America. Using his signature illustration style and incorporating his interviews with Sylvia Mendez, as well as information from court files and news accounts, award-winning author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh tells the inspiring story of the Mendez family’s fight for justice and equality.” Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting 2014 Abrams Social Justice  Female  Racism Books for 2/28/2018 Protagonist  Linguicism Young  Mexican  Citizenship / Readers American Nationalism Protagonist  Languages Spoken:

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English & Spanish Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They show how people can begin to take action on important social issues (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).  They explore dominant systems of meaning that operate in our society to position individuals and groups (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73). Title Author(s) Illustrator(s) Plot Synopsis (Flyleaf Synopsis) The Black Menena Rosana Faria “It is very hard for a sighted person to Book of Cottin imagine what it is like to be blind. This Colors groundbreaking, award-winning book endeavors to convey the experience of a person who can only see through his or her sense of touch, taste, smell, or hearing. Raised Black line drawings on Black paper, which can be deciphered by touch, accompany a beautifully written text describing colors through imagery. The text is translated into braille, so that the sighted reader can begin to imagine what it is like to read by touch, and there is a full braille alphabet at the end of the book.” Year Publisher The Literacy Representations of Diverse Social Published Course Identities and Social Issues Raised in the Selection Text Criteria & Critical Literacy Book Club Meeting

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2006 Groundwood Disability  Writing  Ableism Books / 3/7/18 Systems:  Blindness House of Alphabetic  Sightedness Anansi Press & Braille Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They enrich our understanding of history and life by giving voice to those who have traditionally been silenced or marginalized (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

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2016 Little, Award Winner  Native  Native Brown and 3/14/2018 American American Company Protagonist Identity  Identity Negotiation  Naming Practices Critical Book Selection Criteria Met:  They enrich our understanding of history and life by giving voice to those who have traditionally been silenced or marginalized (Harste et al, 2002 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015, p. 73).

Pedagogy for the Critical Literacy Book Club As stated in the literature review on critical book clubs in education, the term book club generally refers to a group of people discussing texts. Yet, book clubs do not have an exact format or guidelines. Whether they by monomodal, multimodal, assigned, self-selected, facilitated, or organic, book clubs are “small, functional discussion groups of people reading the same stuff” (Daniels, 2002, p. 76). For design, I looked to primarily teaching texts on literature circles, book clubs by another name, and texts on facilitating critical discussion. Literature circle scholarship helped me design the structure of the group, timing of the meetings, and ways of facilitating conversation flow between participants. Visual Thinking Strategies (Yenawine, 2014) was chosen for visual analysis because it is an introductory approach to visual analysis that relies primarily on viewers’ responses to visual images, color, etc., rather than leading research participants through analysis of images using semiotics. And critical pedagogy research was used to consider planning for critical conversation. The critical literacy book club is a social, voluntary community that is intentionally not “banking” them with knowledge, but rather considered a space of knowledge production. hooks (1994) writes eloquently about Freire’s influence on her own teaching when she reconceptualized Freire's work to the conviction that “education can only be liberatory when

124 everyone claims knowledge as a field in which we all labor” (p. 14). More on my role and the role of students will elaborate upon this foundational principle.

Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) There are guides to visual literacy that help decode aspects of visual design in picturebooks including: color, line and shape, and placement of objects by authors like Peggy Albers and Molly Bang (Batchelor, 2017). However, as I designed this critical literacy book club study, I was most interested in understanding what sense the preservice teachers made of the images. Even if research participants “misinterpreted” the use of color, that interpretation is interesting to me. In my early readings on postcolonialism in children’s literature, I had a moment of cognitive dissonance that I have never been able to shake as an example from my mind that partly informs this decision as well: Eurocentric threes. The dominance of three as a symbol of completion is one example of my internalized Western way of thinking. Bradford (2007) highlights the symbolic significance of threes in her analysis of Jingle Dancer by Cynthia Smith when she writes, “Three is what ‘feels right’ is … a highly Eurocentric view of what is normal, build on a lifetime of narrative experience incorporating Western folktales (three wishes) and Christian traditions (the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost)” (Bradford, 2007, p. 46). In the midst of selecting the means for facilitating conversation about both the words and images in the graphic novel and the picturebooks, an art educator recommended VTS (Yenawine, 2014) because it places primary emphasis on how viewers interpret the visual images while providing prompts for drawing attention to and lingering on images. Needing to find or create threes is normalized in my experience, yet I want there to be an allowance for three and four, or whatever number feels like completion, in the meanings made from visual images. I was interested in preservice teachers’ explanations and interpretations, whatever they may be. Part of how I planned to do this was by using VTS (Yenawine, 2014), as opposed to using visual theory or art theory to inform analysis.

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The Roles of the Researcher and Participants Teacher Researcher Designing a critical literacy book club adds an additional layer of value-laden decision making to the research process. I am not observing a book club that already exists; I am acting as organizer and facilitator of this book club, yet, this is not an action-research project - a research method that often takes the form of teaching. As noted in my writing about “participant as observer” (Glesne, 2016), my intentional role as a researcher and facilitator of the book club, without planning to override preservice teacher participation with the “right way,” aka “my way,” to participate in the book club, was a primary concern of design. In both VTS (Yenawine, 2014) and in literature circle guides for teachers, the role of the teacher is minimized as much as possible. Both curriculum models for classroom teaching hold explicit goals of student involvement and student decision making. Yenawine (2014) writes that a teacher implementing the VTS program with students should be a “neutral facilitator” (p. 35). The argument made for this neutral role is that if teachers want students to learn they have to have their own experiences with VTS; VTS is “a chance to let students explore a complex subject without direction” (Yenawine, 2014, p. 34). As a researcher, I reject the notion that an educator, or researcher can be “neutral.” All curriculum is political (Kincheloe, 2008; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 2008, p. 244) and all teaching acts that make up curriculum are political as well. However, there is some merit in considering how to best “steer around the ego iceberg” (Daniels, 2002, p. 221). Daniels (2002) writes that successful literature circles do not need a teacher to facilitate the conversation at every moment. “The most prevalent problem that teachers face as they try to implement literature circles is patience” [emphasis in the original] (Daniels, 2002, p. 220). Too frequently teachers intervene in conversations before students get into conversation that the teacher deems successful. Daniels (2002) counsels, If you really want to transfer responsibility and authority to your students, you are taking a significant break with kids’ past experience with school - and yours. Changes this large require some transition time, and you’d better be ready to live through it. (p. 220) This frank call to trust that students can and will have critical conversations is an important reminder to myself. I am a teacher by training and I intimately understand the “ego iceberg” (Daniels, 2002, p. 221).

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Furthermore, although I believe that the use of the term “neutral facilitator” is a troublesome one, the VTS curriculum has 3 beginning questions that are specifically chosen to maximize “collaborative peer interaction” and “let the students do the thinking independent of [the teacher/facilitator]” (Yenawine, 2014, p. 35). For example, one of the questions for VTS visual analysis is “What more can we find?” (Yenawine, 2014, p. 26) when the conversations need a prompt to keep going. This was chosen instead of “What else can you find?” (Yenawine, 2014, p. 27) because when students were asked “what else” they “shut down” (p. 27). According to Yenawine (2014), “They thought I was asking them to find something specific that they weren’t mentioning” (p. 27). This careful awareness and attention to ways in which teachers make intentional choices to support student participation and minimize their own contributions is quite thoughtful, if not neutral. Minimizing my role in determining how to have the “right” kind of conversation in the critical literacy book club is important. However, I cannot “deny the role of authority” as a teacher in this situation (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 17). Kincheloe (2008) argues that ignoring the authority of the teacher in a learning setting is “insincere at best, dishonest at worst” (p. 17). The role of critical teachers is to “relinquish the authority of truth providers” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 17) and by restricting my own role as a researcher, I hope that research participants will take up the role of engaging in “critical analysis of the forces that shape the world” (p. 16). A simple, yet experientially proven way of decentering the teacher and creating a more student-centered or participant-centered learning space is for me to allow ample wait time and patience. When the teacher is not talking, students can begin to talk. Daniels (2002) gives a final set of suggestions for troubleshooting common problems in book clubs. The first is that teachers need to avoid “crummy books” (p. 222). “The success of literature circles depends above all on the quality of the books; you simply must have significant, valuable, rich, and meaty books to work with” (Daniels, 2002, p. 180). Second, there has to be some type of preparation for book clubs. For high school students (the oldest age group), Daniels (2002) suggests that students can learn to do literature circles while doing them. Rather than assign role sheets to individuals, which can result in mechanized participation, Daniels (2002) suggests that readers keep response logs. The books selected are, by the measures defined above, carefully selected and hold the potential for rich critical discussions. In order to facilitate some thinking about the book club

127 before meetings, I made copies of the critical literacy discussion guide available to participants in three paper copies and a digital copy. At the first meeting, I also distributed a pack of post-it notes to each participant so that they could take fast notes and prepare for conversation in a way similar to the response logs suggested by Daniels (2002).

Participants My guiding theories about students that support critical conversations are drawn from Freire (1993) and Lewison et al.’s (2015) analysis of how teachers’ theories about students inform productive critical conversations in classrooms. Both share the assumption that students are capable (Ranciere, 1987 as cited in Lewison et al., 2015). Teacher educators emphasize the importance of resisting deficit perspectives of public school students, yet sometimes miss the mark on assuming that preservice teachers are capable (Vaughn, et al., 2015). The research participants are not just coming to the book club to be filled up with knowledge; “... to teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge” (Freire, 1998, p. 30). When McCall (2010) reflects on her use of literature circles with preservice teachers in her social studies courses she writes When I ﬁrst began using literature circles in my social studies methods class, I was uneasy about sharing power with preservice teachers in leading discussions about crucial social studies ideas. I assumed their questions and connections would not be as profound, their discussions not as thoughtful, and their understandings not as signiﬁcant. What I actually found is that when preservice teachers have a leadership role in the class through literature circles, powerful social studies teaching and learning can happen. (p. 158) With this in mind, the goal of creating the critical literacy book club was to create an opportunity for critical conversations amongst capable, preservice teachers.

Guidelines for Discussion The handout with guiding questions for visual thinking strategies (Yenawine, 2014) and critical literacy, attached as Appendix D are intentionally selected from the discussion guides that Yenawine (2014) and Janks et al. (2014) designed for doing VTS and critical literacy pedagogy respectively. The direction of each discussion that these questions might have surfaced

128 was not possible to predict, so I designed an open-ended discussion guide that had room for affective responses, attention to interesting aspects of the reading that participants found salient, and questions that arose in the group. It is also a set of questions designed to be used with each text. I did not develop guides specific to each text. When readers encounter a set of diverse, social issues in the texts, preservice teachers sometimes choose safe, comfortable, and personal readings as opposed to critical ones (Van Sluys et al., 2005; Soares, 2017; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; Robertson & Hughes, 2012; Schieble, 2011). According to Kumashiro (2000), crises occur when educators encounter uncomfortable and controversial material that may upset students, parents, and community members (p. 6). Rather than avoid crises, which keeps teaching “safe” but uncritical and frequently reifies already oppressive norms, Kumashiro (2000) argues that crises in education have the potential to create liberating change if there is space in the curriculum to work through the crisis in ways that challenge oppression. Schieble (2012) reinforces the importance of engaging with material in ways that are not “safe” because the safety implied in this desire effectively keeps conversations safe and comfortable for privileged social groups and reinforces the status-quo (Fox, 2007, as cited in Schieble, 2012). The questions that I posed in the critical literacy book club discussion guide are intended to position readers as accountable parties in continually reconstructing social norms that reify privilege and oppression. Rather than seek a rational discussion about the topics at hand, students may get “stuck” (Kumashiro, 2000) inside their response to the readings and have to grapple with their role in socially unjust educational settings. This getting “stuck” may be frustrating but it has the potential to lead to more socially just practices, more so than the rationality of learning new terms, reading some new books, and responding to a set of easily answered questions. However, rather than induce crisis initially, Hermann-Wilmarth (2010) stresses the importance of connecting with students and their worldview in dialogue. The facilitator of a dialogue should be willing to accept and value the input of all of the participants. Hermann- Wilmarth (2010) asserts that the diversity of voices in a dialogue is an important part of authentic dialogue, even when those initial contributions to discussion are not critical or socially justice oriented. This does not preclude raising discussion that elicits crisis. However, it does raise considerations about how the facilitator begins with openness towards students, their

129 experiences, and their preexisting assumptions and beliefs. Everyone is socialized and the internalized socialization of cultural norms is not often perceived as a choice by those who participate; our initial beliefs seem natural (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2014, p. 19). However, “... our beliefs need not be inherently true to have very real consequences”; “the effect and consequences of or socialization are real” (p. 18). This balance between the critical literacy book club being safe enough to begin conversation with the tension of promoting a critical but open dialogue was complex.

Intervention in the Critical Literacy Book Club McCall (2010) cautions that teachers need to be “ready to raise significant issues ignored in the literature circle discussions” (p. 152). As a participant in the group my primary interest in intervention into conversation was to keep the conversation critically oriented. The type of conversation that VTS and the broader literature on book clubs supports are personal responses to text. However, in order to be critical, one cannot only be personal (Soares, 2013). One of the significant themes from the literature on critical literacy with preservice teachers is that preservice teachers attempted to avoid discussing systemic injustices by keeping the responses to texts personal, not social. As stated in the literature review, during coursework preservice teachers did make personal connections to the reading texts (Van Sluys et al., 2005; Soares, 2017; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; Robertson & Hughes, 2012; Schieble, 2011) but neglected to connect their responses to systemic forms of privilege and oppression (Van Sluys et al., 2005; Schieble, 2011; Robertson & Hughes, 2012; Saunders, 2012). The conversations can be redirected using the critical literacy book club discussion prompts if the conversation is too “safe.” These critical questions can be difficult to raise. However, “tension drives the learning process” (Lewison et al., 2015, p. 75) and “everyone grows by being pushed beyond his or her comfort zone” (p. 129). A discussion of the times that I intervened in conversation to prompt the criticality of the book club is discussed in the Chapter Four data findings.

Summarizing the Critical Literacy Book Club Pedagogy Planning Rather than a set of lesson plans for each text, the pedagogical approach to the critical literacy book club was more theoretical than specifically detail oriented. Discussion about how

130 the participants took up critical literacy during the book club and how they positioned themselves as readers during book club conversations are discussed in the data analysis in Chapter Four. A reflection on how the planning for discussions is an asset and how planning more specific to the texts may expand opportunities for critical conversations in future studies are discussed in Chapter Five. Making Sense of the Data The approach to data analysis that I used leaned primarily on Saldaña’s (2016) coding manual for qualitative research. This portion of the chapter will discuss coding generally and my specific coding methods used for the data analysis in this study.

Coding According to Saldaña (2016), coding is a “heurist,” “linking,” “a cyclical act,” “a ‘live’ rather than inert action,” and “a dynamic and malleable process” (p. 9). Furthermore, the process of coding is “researcher generated” (p.4) and an “interpretive act” (p. 5). These attributes of coding that Saldaña (2016) describes make it clear that coding, like qualitative research generally, is not a straightforward process to be followed but a process of interpretation that is “vulnerable to judgment and evaluation” (Madison, 2012, p. 9). Therefore, transparency with how the research coding was done facilitates an evaluation of the data findings in Chapter Four.

Generating and Organizing Transcripts After audio recording the critical literacy book club sessions, I used Express Scribe ® Transcription Software to listen to the audio recordings at 50% of the normal speed and I transcribed each session to written text in a Microsoft Word ® document. Each new speaker’s speech is denoted by the first letter of his or her pseudonym and the transcripts are organized by speech clause, rather than transcribed into full sentences. The conversations were often not constructed in full sentences, so this made the transcription process easier and also prompted my memory of the rhythm of the speech in conversation. The individual interviews were transcribed in the same manner with the same software. Each of the interviews and book club transcripts were kept as separate documents to minimize confusion.

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Round One Coding: Codifying and Categorizing At the beginning of the coding process, I found that codifying and categorizing the data was a helpful way to reorganize large sections of text from each of the individual critical literacy book club sessions into broad categories that transgressed the division between weekly session transcripts. Codification is a process that allows “data to be divided, grouped, reorganized and linked” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 9). This round of coding was really a process of “decoding” which is “when we reflect on a passage of data to decipher its core meaning” (emphasis in the original) (Saldaña, 2016, p. 5). Because each of the transcripts were divided separately by chronological week, but not by content, my initial attempts at “in vivo” coding felt scattered and difficult to pull together. Therefore, I switched approaches to a codifying first round of coding that brought together large parts of the transcripts under very broad categories using brief descriptors for what the topics of conversation were during the session: race, stereotypes, age of text readers, personally identifying with the character, noticing/noting ability or disability of characters, noticing/noting gender of characters, noticing noting language use, noticing/noting social class of characters, windows/seeing others, mirrors/seeing self, perceived doors, how the books might be used, remembering childhood picturebooks, connections to social world / social issue / social theory (capitalism, feminism, etc.), feeling challenged, defining social justice, discussing social justice education, improving the books, ‘I feel’ statements, when books are ‘good enough,’ about the book club, and kinds of reading (academic, pleasure, etc.). Each of these topics were brought up across more than one critical literacy book club session, but that did not mean that each of the categories was precise or necessarily productive of a theme across the study or shared among participants. These were initial categories of data that “look[ed] alike” and “[felt] alike” when putting them together (Lincoln & Guba, 1985, p. 347 as cited in Saldaña, 2016, p. 10). This was also the first time the transcript texts were ever comingling, so to be clear which chunk of text came from which week, and thus from which diverse, social issue book referenced for the week, the text of the transcripts were color coded before the copy and pasting of large pieces of text from the transcripts: The Hoodie Hero (Black), Pashmina (Red), Sparkle Boy (Orange), Separate is Never Equal (Green), The Black Book of Colors (Blue), and Thunder Boy

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Jr. (Purple). I skipped yellow, an unreadable color, for black at the beginning and kept the rest of the books organized by chromatic as well as chronological order.

Round Two Coding: In Vivo Coding In vivo coding captures “participant-generated words” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 105). Recorded as direct quotes from participants, and kept in quotation marks to indicate this, in vivo codes were the second round of coding that I used to better understand how the participants understood critical literacy and narrated their social identities during critical literacy book club sessions. The in vivo coding method I selected was one that continued to “lump” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 107) the data. Rather than select in vivo codes for every line of data, a “splitter” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 106) approach, my goals for understanding how they narrated their understandings in the critical literacy book clubs was more easily done with fewer in vivo codes that captured the “dimension of categories” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 108) that I initially codified. Next, across categories, the in vivo codes were more easily re-grouped together. The third round of coding, conceptual coding, allowed me to manipulate and reclassify the in vivo codes into categories once again.

Round Three Coding: Conceptual Coding A conceptual code assigns “a short word or phrase that symbolically represents a suggested meaning broader than a single item or action – a ‘bigger picture’ beyond the tangible and apparent” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 119). Some of these conceptual codes were initially conceptualized in analytic notes from my researcher journal throughout the study. Other concepts were drawn from the literature reviews, and still others became apparent through the first and second round coding process. Ultimately, the number of conceptual codes became diversified, not refined, as I moved through the third round of coding and I began to lose sight of the purpose of the data collection. Therefore, I returned to the research questions, as posed in this study  How does a critical literacy book club serve as a social space for preservice teachers to construct critical literacy?

 How do preservice teachers narrate their positionality while participating in a critical literacy book club reading social issues picturebooks?

133 and worked to combine conceptual codes that constructed broader themes to address the questions of the research study specifically. It is important to note that themes are “an outcome of coding, categorizing, or analytic reflection… not something that is, in itself, coded” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 15). This distinction is made clear by Saldaña (2016). However, returning to the research design and narrowing my scope of attention to the research questions in study design was an important step for deciding what was important to include in the data analysis, as themes, for Chapter Four.

Limitations, Generalizability, Credibility, Transferability, Dependability, and Confirmability Case Study Limitations As a research study that used a case study method, there are limitations inherent to this study based on research design. First, the generalizability of the study is limited to simply “theoretical propositions” (Yin, 2014, p. 21), not other populations. The findings from this study will influence and inform my future practice, but the actions and understandings that this group made of critical literacy and social justice are not generalizable to all preservice teachers who might participate in a critical literacy book club. Furthermore, the questions asked in this study are etic issues, brought to the study my myself, the researcher. Emic issues raised in the case study, by the participants themselves, were different than my own interest in positionality. If the etic and emic issues raised throughout the case study were more closely aligned, perhaps understanding the way that the participants understood particular issues, shared by participants and the researcher, would be richer in detail and depth. Also, the case, for this study, was the book club meetings and all of the participants were bounded inside the same case. Case studies, however can focus on just an individual person as a unique case (Yin, 2014, p. 31). The depth of understanding, if each participant had been considered an individual case, might yield more specific results different than the small social group. If, in the future, I return to this data, however, each participant could be separated out as an individual case because of the way that the data was produced. Finally, there are several interesting moments and events that happened during the critical literacy book club that are not represented in the data, or discussion. In a case study, “full

134 coverage is impossible” (Stake, 1995, p. 84). There were short discussions, and side comments, during large group conversations that drew my attention and interest, but were not substantial enough to include as a shared group theme from the data analysis.

Credibility, Transferability, Dependability, Confirmability and Generalizability: Critical Literacy Knowledge, Difference, and Power Arguing for the credibility, transferability, dependability, confirmability, and generalizability of this research demands that I prove that I am producing some “truth” in this research. There are “strong [beliefs] in the power of a universal rationality in service of an objectivist, theoretical (i.e., generalizable) knowledge as the only real form of knowledge worth taking seriously” (Schwandt & Gates, 2018, p. 354). However, what case study research, and constructivist-interpretivist paradigms posit about knowledge is that knowledge is “socially constructed not discovered” (Class Notes, 2008 as cited in Lincoln, et al., 2018, p. 120). Furthermore, constructivist-interpretivist paradigm thinking “[refuses] to adopt any permanent standards by which truth can be universally known” and “inquiry from a constructivist viewpoint is to yield to multiple perspectives on the same data” (Lincoln et al., 2018, p. 128-129). Specific to case studies, when queried about the generalizability of case study research, Schwandt and Gates (2018) offer four possible responses, one of which is “the question is irrelevant because establishing typicality is not the intent of the researcher. The case is simply the case” (p. 347). My intent as a researcher is not to present a research study in which considerations of truth and knowledge are not considered, particularly because critical literacy raises the issue of power and text and power/knowledge and texts specifically. This concern about power and text is at the core of critical literacy as theory and pedagogy. And as a research study in its final form, a written text, how I employ language to describe the truthfulness of my arguments is of interest and importance. However, based on the paradigmatic assumptions about knowledge that this study is built on, this research study is only one of “multiple perspectives on the same data” (Lincoln, et al., 2018, p. 129). Critical literacy also takes seriously the epistemological claim that knowledge is “partial, dynamic, contingent and provisional” (Andreotti, 2011, p. 195). This type of critical literacy work is found in the scholarship of Janks (2010) who argues for the importance of drawing on

135 critical theories as well as poststructural theories to consider power, knowledge, and difference in critical literacy pedagogy and research. The pedagogical focus of critical literacy is a social critique, not just of what the author intended but the connections between knowledge, power, and text even if the author never intended this. To do critical literacy, a reader reflexively engages in a critique of power and knowledge; language is ideological but the meaning is created in the interpretation of language, not inherent in the language itself. And reality exists but it is only accessible through language, so in order to be a knower, to be knowledgeable, one understands that all knowledge is “partial, dynamic, contingent and provisional” (Andreotti, 2011, p. 195). Research that generates knowledge is always caught up in power/knowledge from a Foucauldian lens. As such, Foucault’s notions of power as productive and everywhere implicates this research study in power/knowledge relations. The emphasis of this notion of power is not to abdicate the power of this research or to legitimate that this research study is a sharing knowledge outside of power. Power is not a thing to be escaped or to win or forfeit, but an ever- present aspect of learning and teaching and literacy. Janks (2010), who embraces both Freirean and Foucauldian notions of power, argues that both are necessary in critical literacy and that critical literacy is always needed, “Even in a world where socially constructed relations of power have been flattened, we will still have to manage the little p politics of our daily lives (p. 203); “there would still be a need for critical literacy” (p. 203). In this study, the production of knowledge is enmeshed in the relations of power always present in my word choice and dominant discourses available to make sense of this text. Some of the limitations of this type of critical literacy work are elaborated on in Chapter Five in the discussion of the data analysis as well as ways that the findings from the study are shaped by the power relations of race, colonialism, and other systemic forms of privilege and oppression. Critical literacy analyses do not produce texts more truthful than others, “all texts are positioned and positioning” (Janks, 2010, p. 98) and I hope that readers of this study consider the ways in which my text, as designed, does this positioning work when considering the knowledge produced from the study.

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#We Need Diverse Books ™ and Issues of Representation One specific aspect of the ethics of this research not previously addressed are the ethics of representation in diverse, social issues picturebooks selected for the study. In the critical literacy with preservice teachers’ literature review from Chapter Two, Reyes and Torres’ (2007) research cautions against assuming that one understands an ‘other’ by participating in book clubs. These assumptions about understanding others, after encountering as little as one book on the topic, is a potentially colonizing endeavor. And in the literature selected for this study, the diverse, social issues picturebooks were specifically chosen to represent a diverse range of social identities and social issues. A few years ago, I was drawn into the social media campaign We Need Diverse Books ™. I was encouraged by the way that teachers, students, parents etc., took to social media to lobby for racial, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and ability representation in books that are missing from book publishing. The mission of the project is “Putting more books featuring diverse characters into the hands of all children” (We Need Diverse Books ™, 2018) and their vision is “A world in which all children can see themselves in the pages of a book” (We Need Diverse Books ™. n.p.). The importance of representation to individuals who seek mirrors in books they read is elaborated upon in Chapter One. They also share how they define diversity: We recognize all diverse experiences, including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities*, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities *We subscribe to a broad definition of disability, which includes but is not limited to physical, sensory, cognitive, intellectual, or developmental disabilities, chronic conditions, and mental illnesses (this may also include addiction). Furthermore, we subscribe to a social model of disability, which presents disability as created by barriers in the social environment, due to lack of equal access, stereotyping, and other forms of marginalization. (We Need Diverse Books ™. n.p.) The mission and vision of We Need Diverse Books ™ is an interesting one. Smith (2012) writes that “Representation is important as a concept because it gives the impression of ‘the truth’” (Smith, 2012, p. 37) and “reading and interpretation present problems when we do not see ourselves in the text” (Smith, 2012, p. 37). Projects like We Need Diverse Books ™ as a publishing initiative make sense in these arguments for greater representation.

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Making books more diverse is an important project, but perhaps not the decolonizing project. Selecting diverse books does not destabilize the imperial, universalizing, Western gaze of the preservice teacher in the research context. This means that reading diverse books alone is not an adequate decolonizing method. Critical literacy approaches can destabilize readers, yet this is not guaranteed and the risk of considering themselves knowledgeable about others through reading books is a potential downfall of this type of study design.

Summary In this chapter, I wrote about this research study in terms of theory and design for research. The discussion began with a consideration of qualitative research generally and the constructivist-interpretivist paradigm specifically. I discussed the choice of an intrinsic case study methodology, delineated the type of data collected for the study, explained and justified text selection for the critical literacy book club, and expanded upon the philosophies guiding the implementation of the critical literacy book club as a pedagogical experience for the research participants. Furthermore, issues of ethics in terms of voluntary participation and consent are addressed through the Institutional Review Board approval documentation and issues of ethics are woven throughout the study in terms of my role as a researcher and a consideration of this study as contextually embedded in power/knowledge relationships. In Chapter Four, the data analysis, as produced through three cycles of coding, also described in this chapter, is presented. The data is generally organized by theme.

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Chapter Four: Data Analysis Data Analysis Organization

In this chapter, the data findings from the book club are discussed thematically. These themes address the two guiding research questions:  How does a critical literacy book club serve as a social space for preservice teachers to construct critical literacy?

 How do preservice teachers narrate their positionality while participating in a critical literacy book club reading social issues picturebooks?

Broadly, the first four thematic findings include: preparing for book club, getting personal, relying on each other, and understanding critical literacy. These findings address how the research participants Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole, and Stephen engaged in critical literacy discussions during the book club sessions. The second theme aligned with the second overarching research question in the study: narrating positionality, with two subthemes: positioning self and positioning others. Finally, I included an additional emergent finding: promising moments that are not a thematic finding, but tell small narratives of emerging criticality during the book club sessions. As a reminder, the literature review for book clubs includes references to book clubs as well as literature circles in Chapter Two. Book clubs and literature circles are terms often used interchangeably in research, however, I chose to use the term book club to indicate the voluntary nature of the group outside of a course, and that is how the participants: Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole, and Stephen referred to our meetings. Therefore, when discussing the book club, although research on literature circles informed the research design, just the term book club is used in this chapter.

Preparing for Book Club In this subsection, I discuss the ways in which participants allocated time to prepare for book club meetings, and how most of the preparation for book club meetings took the form of quick-reads for text content before meetings. It seems that preparation time for book clubs has some impact on the conversations had during book club meetings. This theme also stands out as

139 particularly interesting because while the literature on book clubs and critical literacy with preservice teachers discuss the nuances and benefits of participation in book clubs, little is said about how participants in the studies prepared for book club meetings. Reflections on the way that participants prepared for meeting was answered directly in response to the question: ‘How did you prepare for book club meetings?’ during individual interviews6. As a researcher, I asked this question specifically to each participant because it was my understanding that the participants reserved the book club space as the specific time they spent discussing the books. Moreover, not only was it reserved as a special time, but it seemed as if this was the exclusive time that the participants thought the most about the picturebooks introduced in the book club sessions. Throughout the sessions, I considered this in contrast to the way that I prepared for the book clubs. Of course, as the researcher and designer of the book club, I spent a lot more time before the book club meetings thinking about these texts, at least by generally selecting the books using a variety of criterion, as discussed in Chapter Three. I also estimate that I previewed and read reviews of at least five or more books for each book selection category: bullying, etc. before I down selected to the six books for the study. Therefore, I was well acquainted with the way that the books were specifically selected and with what reasons in mind, also elaborated upon in Chapter One and Chapter Three. I am the researcher in this study, but I was a participant in the study as well. It is difficult for me to disconnect the role of the researcher, the role of a teacher, and my recent experiences in graduate school as a student myself preparing for class discussions and I drew on all of these roles: researcher, teacher, and student to prepare for book club meetings. In my experience preparing for group discussions, I tend to prepare extensively, sometimes to the point of being exhaustive. For each picturebook, I spent at least one hour reading the texts, making notes on the plot, characterization, etc. in the books, and reflecting on the book using critical literacy theory. To illustrate my preparation, I include the example Sparkle Boy here7. I do not include my analysis for each of the picturebooks in the study findings because the emphasis of this research is on how the participants understood the book club. This is how I,

6 Individual interview questions can be found in Appendix E. 7 Sparkle Boy is first just because when the books arrived in the mail at my house, my two-year-old daughter wanted to read it first from the selection and it is first, chronologically, in my researcher journal. 140 as a participant, prepared for the book club and how I prepared for book club sessions with my own positionality in mind. However, preparation seems to have influenced the scope of understanding and meaning making available to the book club participants. In my researcher journal, under the heading “Initial Reflections on Sparkle Boy” I wrote: I read Sparkle Boy last Saturday. I read it aloud to my two-year-old daughter who was pleased with the texture of the sparkly skirt on the cover. Her attention span for picturebooks is short, and about half way through, she wanted to close the book and run her finger nail of her pointer finger along the glitter texture skirt. Like the protagonist Casey, my so-far and mostly-by-parental-design-and-dominant-social-norms, cisgender female is fond of sparkly things. As I read Sparkle Boy with Zolie, I was cognizant of my role as a parent reading her the picturebook. My female daughter, who is now three at the completion of this study, has a wardrobe, play spaces, and friendships that have become increasingly feminized over the years. And I have to acknowledge the impact of socialization in my own house and the ways that I am complicit in her feminine socialization. I am not living in a world outside of gender norms. And, at this point in time, I have no outstanding ways in which my daughter does not conform to gender norms. I feel this is an important part of my personal lenses approaching Sparkle Boy. After initial impressions, I went on to make lists of the characters, including the skirt that Casey the protagonist wears, which I decided took on characterization of its own in the text. I made notes about the way that the characters are portrayed, discussed, and the way that I interpreted the visual and written representations of the characters in the text. I include here my analysis of the skirt, Casey, and the parents in Sparkle Boy as a few examples. My full preparation notes include more characters; this is a subsection as a sample. The Skirt  The skirt is a dominant olive and gold color. It is not pink or purple, more closely aligned with traditionally feminized colors. Without the title Sparkle Boy, I would guess that one might pass this book on the shelf without realizing that this androgenized child is a boy.

Casey  Preschool (stacking rings, puzzles & blocks)

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o The Stacking Rings toy places Casey in a preschool age bracket, even though this is a toy often purchased for infants. These infant toys linger in homes until about preschool age before getting packed away or donated.

 Perhaps even younger? Casey basically never says anything but “Ooh, shimmery, shimmery” and “I want shimmery”

 Always visually positioned shorter/lower than the rest of the characters (even at the library when other kids are sitting down)

 Called “little guy” by sister Jessie

 Casey expresses a desire for a sparkly skirt, glitter nail polish, and a bracelet, but the adults in his life are the ones who do the actions of actually giving (or trying to deny, those objects)

 “Sparkle Boy” is what his Abuelita calls him, affectionately (image shows affection in her physical contact with Casey as she gives him a sparkly bracelet)

Mama & Dad  Looked dressed for professional / upper class work (J Crew-ish)

 Look like me & my husband when we’re going to work

 Colors are muted, not too “loud”

 The parents are “Thoughtful” -- they think before they respond to the conflict between son and daughter

 Their responses feel like an attempt at “neutrality” “I don’t have a problem with that.” [Mama] and “There’s no harm in that.” [Dad] and “He isn’t hurting anyone.” [Abuelita]

o There’s no open consideration (verbal, or visual space) given to the consideration that to be gendered is a political act that others often do care about (case in point -- the boys at the library)

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In the process of preparing for book club meetings, I wanted to do some taking stock of the specific ways that the characters were presented in the written text, and visually in the illustrations, by the author and illustrator. I acknowledged the way that the characters were presented, but I foregrounded the way that I interpreted the book. I did not do a visual analysis that required some justification of the colors as “not too loud” or the way that the way that the parents are dressed communicates a social class setting. I designated my own sense, and the sense that participants made of the images, as the audience (Rose, 2016), my primary research interest. My preparation also included a reflection on which questions I thought might generate critical literacy conversation about the book. Continuing this example using Sparkle Boy, I composed this list: Questions About the Text:  How would this text be different if the words stayed the same, but the setting were different (urban, rural, American South)?

 How do we tell stories of gender nonconformity for girls?

 How might this story be different if the protagonist were Jessie’s age?

 How might this story be different if the protagonist were a middle or high school age student?

 In what ways has the illustrator classed, raced, and geographically located this family? How might a different illustrator have classed, raced, or geographically located this family differently? Would it change the reception of this narrative?

 In what ways does the skirt assert itself as its own character?

 Mama, Dad & Abuelita talk about Casey’s skirt, nail polish, and bracelet as not “hurting” anyone? What, if anything is at risk by Casey wearing a skirt, nail polish, and a bracelet?

 (As a parent) Would you walk away from a boy, in a skirt, wearing nail polish, and jewelry in a public library in Ohio? In your hometown?

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 Who do the author and illustrator expect you to be?

 What do the author and illustrator expect you to value?

 Who is the intended audience for this book?

I drew some of these questions from the Janks et al. (2014) handout that I put together for the group, but I also adapted the prompts to ask questions specifically about Sparkle Boy. I can see in my analysis, my identification with Casey’s parents and the way that implications of social class were important to me. I felt that was important to acknowledge my own positionality, as a parent and someone quite interested in class backgrounds in books, before joining the book club conversations. For each of the texts selected for the book club, I had a similar scope and content of notes before meeting each week in book club sessions. I kept these notes digitally on my personal computer, which I kept out during book club sessions and I referred to my notes as needed during conversation. However, I did not engage in lengthy descriptions of my process of text selection, as referred to in Chapter Three, or the ways in which I critically engaged the texts before meetings with participants. In hindsight, I wonder if sharing this process might have had an impact on their own preparation, particularly with unfamiliar socio-cultural content. I also wonder if sharing the intentional choice of selecting texts with unfamiliar socio-cultural content, as discussed in Chapter One, might have provided space for the participants to acknowledge their need for preparation as well. Even, perhaps, an example of explicitly narrating my positionality might have also prompted the same from participants. Answers to these questions cannot be found in the data from this study, but my emergent understandings of critical literacy theory indicate that this type of modeling may have been helpful to fostering critical engagement. When the participants discussed their methods of preparation, most shared the ways that they prepared for book club by reading the text but planned to think about the text more thoroughly during book club discussions. Nicole shared, “I started to read it just an hour before, like on my couch, really quickly, since they are pretty quick reads …just so it would all be fresh in my mind and so none of my initial thoughts would go away. Like, I didn’t want to come in already having developed a bunch of things. Like, I wanted the book club to be where I developed my thoughts 144

further instead of coming in with a bunch of already like constructed, you know, feelings and thoughts about the books. ‘Cause I feel like if I had done that I wouldn’t have gotten as much out of this.” The way that Nicole describes holding off on developing too many ideas about the book before coming to book club captures the essence of the style of preparation that the participants engaged with before coming to book club: quick-reads for content, with the intention of thinking more about the book during book club. For this group, the book club session was a time for collective processing. Besides doing a traditional reading of the text, i.e. reading for plot, setting, context, character development, etc., quick-reads, participants expected their ideas about the book to develop more fully during book club sessions, not prior to the meeting. Ashley describes her preparation this way: “I would read whatever [the] book was like for the next week … [and] I’d read it like a second time before we got here just so that I was ready to go. I’d also, like, note certain pages that I thought were, like, like, we should talk about this or something like that. [But] by the end… I didn’t have as many notes in terms of page numbers just because, like, sometimes our conversations would go, and then, someone else would bring up something. ‘Wait! I’d rather talk about what they’re talking about.’” Francis, Jane, and Stephen describe the way that they prepared similarly. Francis said, “I just read through it and… You know what I mean? I noticed, I mean like, I took mental notes of what I saw.” Jane said, “I would always read it first to try to get a base of what it was about before I would try to like do all of the like issues or the cultural questions.” Stephen described how he read each text twice, but read primarily for content as well: “I would normally try to read it the night before and then read it again like, [in] the free time I had. I normally had an hour before we met.” The preparation from all the participants were quick-reads of the text and some brief note taking. However, despite saying that they took notes on the books, no notes were ever visibly evident to me during book club meetings. Participants put their computers away during sessions, and the only materials on the table included: my recording devices, food, dinner plates,

145 drink bottles, and the book of the week for each participant. Perhaps private notes helped form their thoughts about the book, but no visual evidence of notes was ever visible to me. The way that the participants understood preparation was in a way that supported the bulk of the meaning making for the books as collective and coinciding with the hour and a half set aside for the book club meetings, not in preparation for book club before meetings. This kind of preparation generated different kinds of conversations during each book session. The participants understood this style of quick preparation as keeping them open to the perspectives of others, but I began to wonder throughout the meetings whether or not the quick-reads of the texts fostered conversation that felt “quick” as well, and whether or not more preparation was needed in order to engage more knowingly and critically with the texts. To illustrate this point, I contrast how the discussion of Sparkle Boy versus the discussion of Pashmina was facilitated by quick-reads before book club meetings in the discussion below. In a period of less than 10 minutes during the book club meeting about Sparkle Boy, participants brought up a wide range of topics, questions and remarks. Jane made an observation about the gender neutrality of the names Casey and Jessie. Ashley asked why the issue of gender nonconformity was instigated by a sibling. Francis raised the issue of age and socialization into gender norms. Next, Nicole noticed the zebra puzzle that shows up on most pages and wondered whether the use of the zebra as a “very different” kind of animal was purposefully chosen. Ashley continued this line of thinking about using animals as symbols of difference by connecting it to her reading of Parrotfish. I mentioned the educational toys as being classed. Jane shared that she works at a library. Stephen identified the family as Hispanic, which Francis clarified as probably Latinx. And Jane circled back to looking at the pictures of the family in the library and pointed out that The Little Prince is in the background of one of the library scenes, noting that the story of The Little Prince may have been selected purposefully because it is also a book about a boy who “is different.” The speed and proficiency with which the participants observed the themes, motifs, and raised questions about the way the book was authored and illustrated was on-topic and very much centered in the book’s content for Sparkle Boy. Furthermore, the topics raised by the participants were not so different than my own bullet point work preparation before the meeting, as can be seen above. For the book club session on Sparkle Boy, the participants made sense of the book and made quick observations that seemed unfacilitated by notes or lengthy preparation.

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Yet, the conversation also felt quick and choppy, similarly bullet-pointed, for much of the time as the participants moved so quickly between observations of the book. The participants did not settle into a reciprocal discussion about any of the topics raised in the list above. They noticed, named, and moved past these observations. However, once they exhausted this kind of literary run down of the book, they did settle into a group conversation which began with Francis’s observation that “the conversation that they have with the [boys at the library] is very realistic, very realistic.” Francis was unsurprised that the boys at the library would chastise a young boy for being too feminine and encourage them to act like a boy because “that’s just the way it is” (Newman, 2017). Nicole agreed and added, “It’s just so matter of fact.” Francis then connected the “that’s just the way it is” (Newman, 2017) phrase to the book To Kill a Mockingbird reflecting that “whenever Scout is asking people about segregation and why [they] don’t like Black people? Like, it’s a line that I, that like a lot of people…. Are content with how society is… would just say like, like, ‘Why, why are the police killing people?’ Well, ‘that’s just the way it is.’… It just shows you how, like, content, and like, they don’t know… You know what I mean? ‘That’s just the way it is.’” Ashley elaborated, “… high schoolers could really look at that, and be like, okay. So, what, what in our society do we say ‘oh that’s just the way it is’? Like, this could turn into a whole …” “essential question!” Nicole interjected. They all laughed at this connection between the book club discussion and the things they were learning about lesson planning in other classes. Jane humorously said, “It’s mine! No one else can use it!” as they laughed. The participants did not use the critical literacy prompts to make connections between the text and larger social issues, such as police brutality, yet they arrived at that point in the conversation on their own. They did not seem to need to prepare exhaustively for the conversation to unfold in this way. Overall, the conversation about Sparkle Boy centered on the text and the conversation had many different directions with just a few prolonged discussions about specific aspects of the text. However, I wonder how preparation that included general reading for the plot and characterization, with no predetermined selection of a particular topic or direction impacted the potential depth of conversation about, for example, the issues that are “just the way they are”?

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Whereas the time that I spent preparing to talk about Sparkle Boy seemed a bit excessive considering the familiarity of the content and the easy way that the participants moved through the observations about the characters, themes, motifs, and plot of the text, quick-reads as preparation to discuss Pashmina seemed to have quite a different influence on the content and flow of conversation about the graphic novel. Ironically, at the beginning of the book club session for Pashmina I complimented them as “really attentive readers” and concluded that they “don’t need any support from me in terms of how to do that.” However, Pashmina actually did seem to require more background knowledge in order to understand the text itself more fully, much less interpret the text, apply it personally, and engage it critically. Jane initially described Pashmina in the following way: “the plot made sense, it was easy to follow but not simple.” However, Nicole’s initial review of the book was that “it’s somewhat easy to [understand], but at the same time there were a lot of time (sic) where I was reading where I thought it skipped a bunch of pages.” She read the book in “less than 30 minutes,” and admitted “[maybe] I needed more background knowledge to really feel the full story, but I felt like there were a lot of gaps.” Nicole described the gaps this way: “There were a lot of [times] where I was reading were I thought it skipped a bunch of pages because it just… like I had to just keep going back because it went by so fast. Like I read this in less than 30 minutes, and I was like; there’s no way I should have been able to read this in the way I was supposed to in less than 30 minutes. But it was, just, it just seemed like it skipped everywhere, I don’t know. … I thought I flagged a few pages where it would just be like, nothing would really happen on the page and then, the next day, it would be a different time period. … I had no idea that she went to India over the summer, like, I thought it was just, like out of nowhere, right? Apparently, she was there for like, months? And then when she gets back, the page is like, how was break? And I was like, break? The little mini-vacation in the middle of the school year? … Just, like, the English teacher side of me, like, that really bothered me, so that’s why I gave it a low rating.” The comprehension-based questions that the participants asked during the conversation about Pashmina, such as the one Nicole asks above, surprised me. They were not just unsure about the nuances of the plot, there were a few significant questions about the basic

148 comprehension of the story. For example, Jane and Stephen wondered who wrote the comic book at the end and what it was about. Jane asked “I figured, like, she said she wrote a comic book. Like, the last couple pages are what’s in her comic book, I guess? That’s what I got out of it.” Stephen replied “Oh, that’s interesting, cause I thought everything before that was in her comic book.” (sic) To clarify and answer these questions, Priyanka, the protagonist, wrote a comic book called Pashmina (also the title of the graphic novel text by Nidhi Chanani) and presented it to her English teacher at school in the final pages of the graphic novel. In the graphic panels on pages 129 and 149, the images of Priyanka’s comic book appear as she writes and draws it throughout her trip to India. She is setting down the story of the pashmina throughout the trip as her understanding of it unfolds throughout Chanani’s narrative. Clarifying this important plot point of the book requires slower, or at least more attentive reading of the text and images. In a graphic novel, like in a picturebook, the text is not privileged over the communication potential of the images in the text. A reader cannot approach just the words of the text, which could be read in about 30 minutes; a reader must attend to the meaning conveyed in the imagery, or graphics, as well. Only Nicole admitted to a quick reading time of 30 minutes, but it seems that some of the plot was misunderstood by all of the participants reading, which leads me to believe that the participants did not take the time to look closely at the images throughout the text. In the comic book example, Jane and Stephen did not agree on the content or scope of the graphic novel that Priyanka wrote and the conversation moved forward without resolve. Another detail that confused the participants was how the pashmina changed hands between characters. However, the connection between Rotini, Priyanka’s mother, and Priyanka is also delineated in the text. In my own preparatory notes, I, too, was unclear upon first reading how the pashmina connected the women in the narrative, so I wrote a flow chart of how the pashmina changed hands:  The origin and lineage of the Pashmina: Rohini (Pashmina maker & Nanny to Pavani) → Pavani (got Pashmina from Rohini) & Pavani is the Mom’s (Nimisha) Mother (Priyanka’s grandmother) → Nimisha (the Mom) ‘gives’ it to Priyanka / knows Priyanka has it → the Pashmina is left in India with Meena (an unnamed woman mopping the

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floors in the hospital picks up the Pashmina as the book ends with her gasping and the colors indicate that the unnamed woman is next in line to “see her choices.”

Here, the preparation that I made for conversation seemed much more necessary for the book club conversation in terms of plot and comprehension. However, of more interest and some concern was that the participants did not familiarize themselves with unfamiliar cultural, religious, and linguistic content in Pashmina. They were not just unsure about plot, but socio-cultural content. This unfamiliarity with socio-cultural content, stood in contrast to the reading of Sparkle Boy for which the socio-cultural context was recognized as familiar to the participants. Jane admitted early on that she, “goofed up and also didn’t know, realize, there was a glossary until I was done.” Stephen admitted, “I didn’t either.” Jane continued: “I was trying to figure out what all these words mean, and I was like, I really don’t feel like lookin’ up all these words right now. Um, and then I saw them in the glossary and I was like, oh! And then, when she kept referring to people as Auntie and Uncle and then in the glossary it’s like they refer to them as, like, a form of respect, I was like, okay, so that wasn’t really; that cab driver wasn’t her uncle, like [short laugh]! (sic)” The cab driver in India was not her uncle. If Jane, while reading, understood this to be true, I can understand how the plot might have become quite baffling, quite quickly. In this specific instance, I have some exposure and experience with Indian culture enough that I first assume that the use of Auntie and Uncle are for friends or elders, not family members of my Indian friends. And Auntie is how my daughter refers to my Indian friends as well. Yet, despite my experience, I cannot help but wonder whether the other participants in the study also have Aunts and Uncles that are not parental siblings or spouses. I grew up with a few Aunts and Uncles who were not a part of my biological family, and it would seem a bit suspicious that the protagonist was only surrounded by family members. The conversation continued along these threads of trying to understand the basic plot of the graphic novel for a significant portion of the conversation during this book club session. Stephen and Nicole speculated about why they did not understand the text. Stephen wondered,

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“…. Maybe it’s because I don’t know that much about Hindu, the religion? Um, Hinduism, but like, I don’t’ know what the symb-, significance is of the elephant and the human being and the bird?” Nicole admitted, “… for a story that’s so culturally diverse, and not a lot of us know anything about this, I feel like those gaps should be filled a little bit more, um, just because I really didn’t understand it.” It became clearer throughout the conversation that unfamiliarity with the socio-cultural content was a hindrance to comprehension. I began to note and wonder in my researcher journal, as book club conversation for Pashmina unfolded how the author, Nidhi Chanani, was considered responsible for the understanding of the reader, versus the reader’s onus to inquire about unfamiliar cultural (religious and linguistic) content. A touchstone moment for this consideration of the onus of responsibility, was more seriously considered after Nicole lamented that the glossary was in the back of the book not the front. She said, “It should definitely have been put at the beginning because I didn’t, like, see it.” As I listened, I wondered why she placed responsibility for this on Chanani. In what books is the glossary located in the front of the book? Traditionally, glossaries end books, not begin them. I understood this as common knowledge and, after cross referencing this expectation with my teacher educator peers, it seems to be agreed upon that college age students generally understand that if a book contains a glossary it is located at the end of the text, not the beginning. Hoping that the glossary would be more readily available felt a bit evasive of responsibility for looking up unfamiliar content. Furthermore, Nicole more specifically speculated about Chanani’s responsibility for making the book more easily understood. “Even though I’m very confused by the plot holes, I don’t think she would do that, like, put all those words in, to like, to confuse. Because I don’t know what her motive would be behind that, but at the same time, like, the glossary being at the back, and no note of it being in the back in the front… How would you know to look up something you didn’t understand?” How would you know to look something up you didn’t understand? This question was a part of a stream of conversation and the other participants and I did not capitalize on this

151 opportunity to think more deeply about this at the time. But I wonder, when do we, as readers, feel compelled to look up what we do not understand? The participants in this study understood that the book club was a space to come together to learn more from each other and to develop their ideas about the texts selected for book club meetings. The understanding that the book club was the time to meet and discuss the texts is not a new research finding. Time and space to discuss texts are the purpose of book clubs. However, the way in which this understanding about the time and space impacted their preparation for book club seemed to indicate that the participants trusted that the time during book club was adequate for understanding the texts. This is interpreted from the way that they spent the majority of their time talking and thinking about these texts during book club, not in preparation time before. This preparation strategy and understanding the book club as an isolated, specific timeframe had different outcomes for different types of texts both in terms of text complexity, but also in terms of the familiarity, or not, of the text content. I learned that as a facilitator of dialogue for critical literacy book clubs, more socio-cultural context for the texts and more facilitating dialogue that engages the socio-cultural context and the power dynamics this content highlights is needed for the book club to be the time in which to engage in critical readings of the text.

Getting Personal In the conversation about Sparkle Boy in the section above, Ashley summarized the participants’ focus on how Sparkle Boy might be read with high schoolers using, “What in our society, now, do we say ‘oh that’s just the way it is’?” as an organizing, or essential, question. Yet, the participants did not answer their own question; they developed it for hypothetical students. I wondered at the time if they considered this “essential question” for themselves, so I followed up with the question, “If you entered these illustrations, like, where would you be?” a prompt that combines a question from the Visual Thinking Strategies (Yenawine, 2013) and critical literacy positioning of text and self (Janks, 2010). The engagement with the texts was often so text based and theoretically distant from themselves, that they did not do a lot of personal engagement with the texts during book club, that is, considering how the book positions them, until I asked questions like, “Where would you

152 be if you were in the picture? Like, if you entered the illustrations, like, where would you be?” or one of the participants made a personal connection to the text. In response to the question I asked during the book club meeting about Sparkle Boy, Jane responded, “ooh!” Francis clarified, “at this age?” and Jane added, “Dun, dun, dun!” Jane frequently added these small contributions to the group conversation. I wondered, at the time, and still now, whether Jane knew all along that we would get around to our own role in the book, or if all the participants knew that was where I wanted to go. The book club prompts asked quite a few questions about who they were and how the book positioned them, yet, this was not the first kind of engagement for the participants during book club conversations. With no response to my first version of the question, I asked, “Do you show up in the dad? The mom? Casey? The sister? The dog?” Jane capitalized on my humor and quickly said, “That’s me! I’m the dog. The dog with the leaf in his mouth, that’s me.” Both Jane and Francis laughed at that. Jane quickly changed her position, though, and said, “This girl right here. The ‘I love books,’” referring to a library patron who is carrying an ‘I love books’ tote bag with her at the library. “And with the polka dots,” (the character is wearing polka dot rain boots) she followed on, “because polka dots are my jam.” Her response was funny, but I was interested that she chose a background character, with no speaking or agentive presence. So, I asked a pointed question, “passive observer?” At that point, Stephen was ready to share his own role in the illustrations and he truncated Jane’s time to respond. He said that he works at a summer camp with a lot of campers each week over the summer and shared I’m very relaxed on what I let them do. So, I think if a boy showed up one day in a skirt. [I’d] be like, sweet! ‘sup! I don’t’ know. Jane heard my question, however, and did not let it dissipate into conversation. She replied I’m disappointed in myself to say, but I probably, as like, as like a kid and a teenager, like, I was a passive observer a lot. I knew how I felt inside but, like, not enough to like bring attention to myself and, like, be possibly made fun of, or beat up to like [interject] into the situation. I was always a really passive kid. Not so much now, I’m a jerk now, but [small laugh] back in the day I was a passive observer.

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I thought this was a really interesting, personal response from Jane. She approached the question with humor initially, but changed her contribution to a vulnerable personal reflection and positioning in the book. Her brief, also humorous reference to herself as a “jerk” made me curious about what she meant in the contrast between a passive person and a jerk. This might have been an interesting follow up question. But Nicole and Ashley, moved on to assert that their experiences with friends and family who identify in the spectrum of LGBTQ identities, not specifically named, were “not, like, anything different than what [Nicole] experienced in the past” and Ashley “wouldn’t be shocked by [Casey’s gender nonconformity].” Ashley was, however, willing to think about her own role as a parent with a hypothetical gender nonconforming child “… something this does make me wonder is like, how would I react if this was, like, my kid? Cause I feel like, while we are used to, like, our friends, or like, distant family members or whatever, like, coming out to us, you still love them just the same or whatever. But I feel like it is different when it’s your kid because there’s some things we can’t even help. Like, baby showers are like, you have pink if it’s a girl and blue if it’s a guy. And, like, that’s just how it is. There’s no, like, you know what I’m saying? …” Here Ashley picks up the phrase “that’s just how it is” to describe the way that she might hypothetically conform to gender norms if she becomes a parent. However, I wonder if this line of reflection was getting a little too personal when Nicole interrupted Ashley to say, “Did you see the Twitter thing? Where it’s like White people, White straight people need to be stopped, when it comes to, like, naming babies?” … “I just thought it was so funny.” But Ashley followed up Nicole’s interruption with a continued line of thought “I’m like, after reading this, I want to be exactly like these parents that are just like, cool whatever.” Here, Ashley had a personal moment of engagement not just with who she is now but who she imagines herself to be as a future parent. This is an interesting indicator of the way that the text offers a position not just of socialization being ‘the way things are,’ but something that can be changed by different rhetorical approaches to gender nonconformity. Stephen similarly, wanted to identify with the parents in the book. He said, quite simply: “I wanna be that dad… I feel like I kinda look like that dad.”

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The literature reviewed in Chapter Two, found that during coursework preservice teachers did make personal connections to reading texts when doing critical literacy engagements in classrooms (Van Sluys et al., 2005; Soares, 2017; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; Robertson & Hughes, 2012; Schieble, 2011), but neglected to connect their responses to systemic forms of privilege and oppression (Van Sluys et al., 2005; Schieble, 2011; Robertson & Hughes, 2012; Saunders, 2012). The literature, as reviewed in Chapter Two, states that preservice teachers who resist critical literacy prefer to stick with personal engagement, to avoid the political, but in my framework of understanding that the personal is political. I wonder: can there be a critical engagement without a personal one? One of the foundational assumptions in critical literacy is that all texts are “positioned and positioning” (Janks, 2010, p. 61). And a consideration of one’s position is necessarily personal. Furthermore, it was when students got personally vulnerable that they reflected on what their social roles have been in their own lives and what they imagine in their future lives. Entry points to critical moments, such as the ones described above, where Jane and Ashley considered their positioning in the text as well as their current and potential future social roles were prompted by personal reflection. Just naming the interesting aspects of the text that might prompt conversation, such as how police brutality is justified with complicity in “that’s the way things are” logic seem to be of little impact when none of the participants made any connections to the concept. Francis’s contribution to the discussion about a potential direction for curricular engagement with students was both relevant and appropriate. But with no continued conversation or personal connection to complicity in police brutality, the point remained a hypothetical engagement, not an actualized one. Similarly, when discussing Pashmina, the group was working through confusing aspects of the text wondering whether the pashmina fit into an Indian or Hindu myth and how the pashmina connected to the Hindu goddess Shakti, etc. During this part of the conversation, Francis explicitly raised an issue of economic injustice and the connection between economic injustice and patriarchy in the text. He stated: “I think it’s interesting that they, uh, [they] kind of critique capitalism in here. And the whole, umm, kinda like, the silk workers kinda revolting, and you know, just like, even Rotini says like, umm; find the golden silk; make one last pashmina; the pashmina will allow women to see their choices. You shall no longer be bound by fear. So, this tie

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between women’s rights and, um, capitalism, like, freedom from exploitation as a worker and them revolting, burning down the factory, is like, a big statement to put into a, kinda, a young adult novel.” (sic) Francis quite deftly and accurately connects the text to economic and patriarchal injustice. But there is no personal connection to make sense of it. Ashley continued the conversation with trying to sort out the details of what injustice Priyanka was impacted by specifically. She describes the injustice, as described by Francis as “so epic,” that she wanted a “connection” between Rotini, Priyanka’s mother, and Priyanka to make sense of the injustice. In my first considerations of the conversation, when reading the transcript, I thought – here’s a gem of connection that is totally passed over! But what Ashley asks for is a personal connection as well as an “epic” one. So, I began thinking differently about the connection between systemic injustice and personal entry points to those discussions. During the book club meeting for Separate is Never Equal, I also offered a connection to systemic injustice in schools in reference to the way that the two school buildings, the Mexican School and the White school were described in contrast: the Mexican school is “like a prison” or a “camp thing” with an “outhouse” according to Jane. The image of the Mexican school hit her “hard” in contrast to the White school. I offered: “And yet to me, this doesn’t really feel historical. It also feels really contemporary. Like, in the days when the temperatures were dipping below freezing in Baltimore and there were children in schools who had to wear winter coats and boots to stay warm because the schools were inadequately heated… There’s something about this being historical. … I get afraid that it will get left in the past, like this is the way we used to treat people who were different, or like, this is the way we used to treat [students differently] in specific school districts. And yet, it’s not just a historical fact, I think it’s also a contemporary event.” After sharing this thought, there was a pause in the conversation. Then, Stephen then continued the discussion making observations about how even the WWII veteran was subject to segregation and how unfair that was. As the group passed over this connection, I wondered, why? From my own experience, I thought of the classroom at the end of the hallway in the first school where I worked. For about six weeks, during the second year that I worked in that school, the heat was no longer circulating

156 to that classroom from January - March. Furthermore, as a part of the school safety protocols for the district, students were not allowed to wear their coats inside. Yet, here were kindergarteners so cold. As low-income students in North Carolina, many of them had minimal cold-weather gear because usually families could slide through winter with just a few truly too-cold days. As a parent with plenty of income for weather appropriate clothing, even I cringe at the price of winter coats and I better understand this wait-it-out approach. Yet, what I knew at the time, and still know is that students in better funded schools would have been allowed to wear their coats, and that the heater would not have been broken for six weeks. If I had made this personal connection explicit during the book club, how would the conversation have gone? Because this is a reflection on the book club, I cannot know. But I can wonder how either (1) focusing on the text and making literary observations or (2) making “epic” connections, those are connections to systemic injustice, contrasted with making personal connections to the text fosters more consideration of the personal and social positioning of the text. During the week that we read Separate is Never Equal, the subject/topic of the week was generally titled “social justice.” So, to get the conversation going, I asked the participants for their own definitions of social justice before beginning the conversation about Separate is Never Equal. The responses were varied and particularly interesting in terms of how personal students wanted to get about social justice issues. When asked about how they identify social justice education, Ashley claimed that it includes a “wide range of different books or topics.” She added, “in terms of social justice education, you could really look at… basically everything we’re looking at in our book club. Like, ever week is a different aspect that you could take of it.” More often than naming content, Jane and Nicole used feelings, namely feelings of discomfort, to convey that social justice included uncomfortable topics. Jane said, social justice is about “complicated issues, uncomfortable topics… or issues people go through that don’t really get talked about enough or can be like pushed under the rug when they shouldn’t be, or that maybe … difficult to talk about.”

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According to Nicole, “social justice, in a nutshell, because it’s very big, is just like issues that need to be talked about that aren’t necessarily talked about… I would say that there are issues that are outside of the societal norms.” Additionally, it is “everything we don’t want to talk about,” according to Nicole. The feeling of discomfort is well conveyed in these summaries of social justice, yet there is no specific reason given for why social justice topics are uncomfortable, or who might feel uncomfortable while talking about them. Stephen, however, though that being uncomfortable was important because social justice education is what is needed for “fighting the concept of, like, the single story.” and that “white, middle-class background [people] need to be like exposed to stories about people that are different than them– and maybe like have less privilege than they do.” This statement suggests that White, middle-class background individuals are uncomfortable during discussions of social justice. Francis, however, insists that “social justice curriculum is for anyone – for them to know who they are, what identities they hold, what oppression [they] face, and how [they] fit in with the larger country and global world.” These descriptions of social justice education vary widely. From his personal interview, I know that Francis’ ideas about social justice are grounded in the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire. And I suspect that Stephen’s connection to the idea of a single story is connected to the often used ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that has been used in many preservice teacher education classrooms at the university since 2014, when Adichie gave her TED Talk. Despite the differences of definitions, or feelings of comfort or discomfort with social justice, the participants agreed that it was important. Ashley and Francis self-identify themselves activists for social justice. Social justice education, Francis says, creates “critical thinkers” and “reflective thinkers,” both of which he considers important. Jane also understood it was important and highlighted how diversity is a part of “the real world for students.” She says that students need to open their minds because it is inevitable that “they are gonna encounter [people

158 different than themselves] in the real world [sic].” There are “other people besides them that look different than them or act different than them, or had different childhoods than them, or etc.” However, while claiming the importance of social justice teaching, the participants were most open to social justice education when they were presenting facts. Here, in a discussion of facts, the participants reveal how little they plan to use personal engagement to do social justice work. They prefer to rely on implicitly neutral facts. Stephen observed that he admired a teacher who could, “keep big p or little p politics out of it and try to just state the facts.” What these “facts” are remained ambiguous during book club conversations. When asked about what “facts” could be considered “facts,” Stephen and Ashley answered with “I don’t’ know.” Yet, Stephen reiterated that effective teaching happens when “you … try to tell [classroom students] facts.” Nicole says that “you can give [students] the information and just [say] what this is saying.” Ashley states that when approaching difficult issues, you can “just offer them information” because “students should be well informed.” Ashley also claims, “you can’t tell them which is right and wrong, but you can give them information to make their own decisions.” Teachers should “provide them a structure to understand.” Being political, not factual, for Jane would include being “open with political views, saying something [she] believe[s] in, or like support[s].” But Nicole says that there are ways of teaching such that you do not “[put] your own voice in it.” There’s no need to “say it flat out.” When pressed on the concept of using just “facts” to tell a story, I challenged the participants to consider their interest in talking about “facts.” I offered my own thoughts about the messiness of assuming that “facts” lead to “social justice.” In the context of Separate is Never Equal I proposed “I don’t think anyone would walk away from this book saying that ruling in favor of the Mendez family was wrong… yet… the ‘status quo’ … at the time … would be using the words of these white men [the defense] to talk about difference, to talk about differences [between White] and Mexican children.” Stephen picked up this line of thinking and shared a story about how a friend of his remembers an example like this from elementary school. The students at his friend’s elementary school were asked to consider the Dred Scott case “And the question in the case was like, was that slave considered property still? Or was he considered a free man now that he was in another state? And, uh, when it was ruled

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they considered him property, still, I believe. But like, in this activity that my friend did in school, it was like, they got all the facts from the case and like what was presented and they had to make a decision. And it was like, obviously, these kids are gonna (sic) say he should be a free man. But one of my friend’s best friends said, ‘Like no, he should be considered property based on the facts, like, at the time that is what the law said.” What was previously considered the best approach to social justice: the “facts” approach, started to be more critically engaged when Stephen drew a personal connection to what happens when “facts” are asked to stand alone. He eventually concluded that it was an interesting story, but he didn’t know what to make of it. Eventually his only remarks on the importance of facts seemed to be that facts were more subjective than objective. Stephen said, “It’s like whoever’s in charge, I guess, gets to define like what it means to be like, what justice means. And, like, what the right decision is, which, I don’t know. It’s like, it’s hard to have that shaded a different way I think.” Ashley added, “I feel like the term justice, has to be like, kinda more like zoned in on in terms of, like, if you, if you were like to teach the lesson or something. There would need to be a discussion about what you even mean about justice. You know?” This kind of deeper reflection, drawn out by personal examples in their personal lives tended to elicit these thoughtful, engaged responses to the text and their self-reflection. Ashley’s social justice activist identity is connected to the Black Lives Matter movement, so I specifically raised this question of justice for her to follow up with. I said, “The Black Lives Matter movement is a social justice movement… fighting for legal protection as well as an end to White supremacy. Right? Like, what Sylvia experiences at the outset of the nov-, the book, right? Technically she’s in [the White] school but personally, she’s experiencing open racial injustice” I might have continued with a line of questioning that queried how “facts” are presented in the teaching of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, it seemed from rereading the transcripts of the book club conversations that when the conversation got too close, or too personal, another participant would take the conversation back to the text and keep the conversation moving forward on new topics or other aspects of the texts. Jane interjected

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“This is kind of switching gears a little bit, but I really wanna talk about page 22, um, where the lawyer is talking to the, Mr. Astrada, that fought in the war and, like, he like, risked it all for like, like, his actual life, to fight for Americans and then his child isn’t even allowed to go to this school? I just thought that was crazy…” By returning to the text, the conversation moved forward without the completion of my question but the participants continued the discussion with more comprehension-based questions. Furthermore, rather than respond to Jane’s switched gears, Nicole switched again asking whether Orange County was a poor district in California and the conversation ended a few minutes later with the end of the book club meeting time. I came to this study with an understanding that students who made personal connections to texts might get mired in only personal responses. However, what I found throughout conversations was that personal connections were sometimes meaningful transitions from conversations about the content of the book to self-reflective conversations, and ones in which they considered their social roles and imagined new ones for themselves. Furthermore, making direct, explicit connections to systemic injustice did not foster conversation about those injustices unless there was a way to make the systemic injustice personal, and in some ways smaller and not quite so “epic,” using Ashley’s terms. The importance of personal connections to social justice issues seemed to also be important for the participants in the study, particularly to combat notions that social justice is best approached through a neutral approach of facts only.

Relying on Each Other Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole, and Stephen expected that they would think more about the books during book club meetings, and so with a loose hold on their incoming ideas about the books, they expressed the ways in which conversations together helped them think differently as individuals, about the books, during conversations. Ashley and Jane spoke the most about how the contributions of others’ thoughts about the text often changed their incoming ideas about the books. Ashley spoke succinctly about her 20-minute rule for the book club. “I always do this; I come in with an opinion and then like 20 minutes into this, I’m like, ‘Well, never mind on the thing I said earlier.’” Ashley made this comment during book club conversation about Thunder Boy Jr., the last book read during book club sessions, and so it is somewhat summative of the preceding 5 weeks. Her

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“always” implies that she had this experience in the previous weeks as well. With just Ashley, Jane, and Stephen in attendance for the final meeting, Ashley and Jane discussed this issue with each other the most in conversation. In response, Jane replied, “I think that’s the point though, like, your opinion is supposed to like develop and change. Like, if you came in here and just felt the same way after all of us were talking, like, that’d be weird.” “Yeah,” Stephen agreed. Jane mentioned in group meetings, and in her individual interview, the importance of hearing what others had to say about the books. “You guys have said certain things that, like, I never would have came up with on my own. [sic]” And “Reading them by myself, I had like completely different idea, of them versus when we came in here and discussed [sic].” “Like some things that Stephen said, or Ashley said, or Francis said, or Nicole said, like I could jump off. And like, ‘Oh wow! I didn’t even think about that.’” Stephen talked about the way that “We built knowledge from each other. And I guess that’s like the point of a book club… is to build off of what other people are saying and building understanding from what other people give you.” These comments are all open acknowledgments of the importance of the book club, as social space, where other participants and their interpretations of text are encountered that alter individual reading experiences. There is knowledge building power in a group, not otherwise available individually. The potential for this is always a hope that during group discussions; “literature circles can welcome, build on, and gradually broaden students’ responses to what they read” (Daniels, 2002, p. 38) Ashley, Jane, and Stephen talked the most about how the book club conversations with other participants changed their ideas about the books. Nicole and Francis were less direct about the ways that contributions from others in the book club changed their minds. But they were open about their changed perspectives on specific books throughout book club sessions.

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The Black Book of Colors was the book that had the most discussion from participants about the way that the meeting changed their minds about the book. During book club The Black Book of Colors was initially described as “progressive… just challenging us to like, go out of our senses” by Francis. After some discussion about the interesting tactile experience of the Braille amongst all participants, I shared with the participants that I have read at least one critique about the inaccessibility of the Braille. In a review of the book, Stevenson (2008) concluded that, “the aesthetic enterprise actually privileges the visual rather than conveying sightless experience, with all the sensual evocations of colors tightly tied to objects possessing the relevant hue, and the Braille isn’t sufficiently raised to be genuinely read via fingertip” (p. 461). In response, Jane followed up on this critique I shared from a peer reviewed journal, with the website GoodReads.com review read aloud from her phone into our conversation. The original source, as she read from it to the group, is by Moira Clunie here's the thing: the Braille isn't real Braille (it's not deep enough to read), and the tactile pictures aren't really designed to be read tactually. as a concept it's lovely, but the economic realities of mass book production means that it sort of fails in its execution. a blind child couldn't read this independently. a sighted child learning about Braille would learn that it's very hard to feel and that blind people must have super-senses. [sic] (2010, n.p.) These critiques altered Francis’ initial impressions about the “progressive” book. In his final interview, Francis reflected on the importance of the conversation during book club by describing the way that he changed his ideas about The Black Book of Colors. “And I was like, oh, The Black Book of Colors , it’s kind of progressive. And then it was just. I was just like. You broke it down. I was like, wooooah, like, it’s not even Braille!” With this exclamation, Francis effectively conveyed his surprise and appreciation for how the conversation during book club changed his perspective. Even though he considers himself to have “a decent critical lens,” he acknowledged that even critical individuals change their perspectives when presented with critique from others. Francis followed up his previous comment during his individual interview by describing another friend of his who he also considers to have a “very critical lens.” He described the way that she also approached The Black Book of Colors with the perspective that it was “so cool” and

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“so good.” Francis laughed as he admitted, “I haven’t even told her yet.” That is, he has not yet shared the critique with her. Nicole described her process of changing her perspectives on texts as internal. She described her participation in book club as preferential towards internal processing as well. “I like to reflect on what other people say more so than my own thoughts sometimes… Going off of what other people said internally…. That’s usually how I operate in my classes, too, so a bunch of my classes, I’m pretty sure my participation grade is a lot lower than others because I like to do stuff internally, rather than externally.” She also described The Black Book of Colors as one of the two books she “really enjoyed, or really, like, thought on a deeper level than some of the other ones… I think that was one of the most transforming.” From conversation had during the book club discussion on The Black Book of Colors, she described the way that she initially liked the book but realized after listening during the conversation, she realized that she needed to consider the books not just as good enough but consider ways in which they could be better. “… just because it’s being talked about [blindness] doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good way to talk about it. Like when you said the Braille, like, wasn’t even that read-able for a non-sighted person, like, that was kinda the moment where I was kinda like, just because we have all of this stuff, is like, do we stop here? Like with our social justice and our learning and our curriculum? Or should we keep pushing it to keep it better?” Nicole was initially pleased by the inclusion of blindness in conversation. She appreciated the presence of disability representation, but here she pondered whether or not any inclusion is adequate, or if “we” should keep “pushing” representation of inclusion to be “better.” Without sharing the critique of the book in conversation, Francis and Nicole admit that they would not have thought differently about The Black Book of Colors. Most notable from the reflections on the book club is that the space, which was understood as the time and participants that made up the book club, were an important part of processing the content of the books. The book club, as a structured place, time, and recurring set of participants, changed the engagement with the books in meaningful ways that were collective and mutually influential. A parting summary of this sentiment was made by Ashley when she

164 reflected on her own reading process as mediated by the book club sessions. During the discussion about The Black Book of Colors, she said that she initially thought: “It was just cool to touch… but, then again, we’re in this critical thinking book club. So, maybe, if I just picked this up in another moment, I wouldn’t have, like, thought about it that much. In summary, book clubs are social spaces to be together and being together may change individual opinions in ways that cannot be accomplished as an individual reader.

Constructing Critical Literacy in the Book Club At this point in the study, it is clear that the term critical literacy is broad and can be utilized in many different pedagogical and theoretical frames. As the conceptual framework for critical literacy, in Chapter One argues, critical, literacy, and critical literacy have many uses and meanings in different moments in history, politics, and academic fields. From Chapter One, and the literature review on doing critical literacy with preservice teachers in Chapter Two, there is an ominous foreshadowing that critical literacy may not be understood by participants in the same way that I theoretically designed. And it was not. The process of my attempts at constructing critical literacy in one way, and the way that participants understood critical literacy and constructed it in another is the emphasis of this section of data analysis. At the outset of the meetings, I proposed that the group use a critical literacy discussion guide (Appendix D) with question prompts gleaned from Hilary Janks et al.’s (2014) book Doing Critical Literacy to discuss: how language use positions the author, illustrator, and reader (Janks et al., 2014), talk about the context of the books (Janks et al., 2014), question how power worked in the books (Janks et al., 2014), and raise questions about identity and diversity (Janks et al., 2014) in the books and for themselves as readers. These prompts use Janks’ (2010) definition of critical literacy as literacy “at the interface of language, literacy and power.” (Janks, 2010, p. 22). In the introductory book club meeting, I described the differences between a book club as they may have previously experienced book clubs, and how I expected the critical literacy book club to be different: “a critical literacy book club… has a bit of a different approach than, a book club in another context … I want to talk about the characters, and the setting, and the plot. I want to talk about how it’s compelling or not compelling. And, in addition to that, I want to

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raise … Some different questions. This is a critical literacy book club, so that word ‘critical’ asks us to think about issues of power.” In response to the introductory remarks about what critical literacy is and giving some examples from the Janks et al. (2014) discussion guide, Jane replied “Yeah, I think once we start, like, it will flow. It’ll flow better.” This remark from Jane was a bridge from my introduction of critical literacy to reading and discussing The Hoodie Hero during the first session. Throughout the conversation, the discussion was closely tied to observing the content of the book. They discussed the aspects of the book that drew out what the Ohio Standards for English Language Arts describe as “key ideas and details” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9). This anchor standard requires students to “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9) and “determine central ideas of themes of a text and analyze their development” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9). Their comments on the book began with phrases that included “One thing I notice…” by Nicole and “I wonder what that means…” by Jane. Their observations of the text and searching for themes in the text went on until they began to discuss issues of grammar and improper grammar usage of the authors for the characters’ dialogue. In response, I asked explicitly, “What are the questions that, like, Hilary Janks would ask of text? How does the use of language in this picturebook position you as a reader? Like [how] does “fat-daddy hoodie,” and some of the other phrases that are used in this book, position you?” Nicole answered: “It pushes me out a little bit more, but at the same time, not far enough to where I feel segregated from the book. I think it does a really good job of, you know, using the language in a way that’s very, like, anyone can understand if you just sit down and you are looking at it.” Nicole’s use of the word “segregated” is an interesting word choice, especially because segregation brings to mind a history of racial segregation that was a legislated, and often violently enforced racial injustice, not merely a sense of distance.

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This issue temporarily aside, Nicole, in response to a critical prompt that asked her to consider the ways that this book positions her socially, responded with an affirmation that she can figure out what the phrase “fat-daddy hoodie” means from context. She could infer the meaning of the phrase and keep reading. Her emphasis as a reader, who was reading for “key ideas and details” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9) did not consider her lack of familiarity with the phrase a stumbling block to her overall comprehension of the text, nor indicative of her social position. Other participants noted the improper grammar as well but did not respond to the question asked and did not discuss their socially positions, either. However, during the following week’s discussion of Pashmina, Nicole, in particular, was distressed by her lack of understanding of the text due to a large volume of words, in Hindi, used by Chanani in the text. Nicole claimed that the text had “plot holes.” And was suspicious that Chanani, “put all these words into like, to confuse [the reader] because, I don’t know what her motive would be behind that. But at the same time, like, the glossary being at the back, and no note of it being in the back, in the front, so you would know to look up something you didn’t understand.” As a future English teacher, who felt the book was confusing, Nicole claimed, “I felt like there were a lot of gaps… and just like the, like, English teacher side of me, like, that really bothered me.” Nicole admitted, as a part of her criticism of the book that “maybe I did need more background knowledge.” However, her criticism of the book was ongoing as “confusing” and “having gaps.” This discomfort with not understanding the “key ideas and details” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9) was highlighting the ways that Nicole assumed she should be able to read Pashmina with no linguistic limitations to the content that she could not readily find in the text itself. In response, and in the hopes of returning to critical in my intended use of the term i.e. critical literacy to mean examining issues of power in text. I queried the group: “One of the things I think is important to raise is: Who is the assumed reader for this text? So, like when it comes to issues of language, like with The Hoodie Hero, and here [in

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Pashmina], you know you didn’t see the glossary until you got to the end, but is it necessary that every book is set up for a Western reader to start? Jane replied, “it definitely made me want to explore Hinduism and Indian culture more ‘cause I want, I wanna understand. And I wanna know more [sic].” But Jane then transitioned quickly, to affirm her ability to read critically, and framed her critical reading in a way that refocuses on her ability to focus on the text itself. “so I think it not having the glossary in the front and having us kind of figure out how, through context clues…I just worry, like, I know it’s okay for us because we, like we are used to, like, responding critically and, like, looking at a text. But it worries me, for like, if the assumed reader, if the assumed reader is like a teenager…. I don’t know if they would take that critical eye and, like, care enough [sic].” In this book club, the participants constructed critical literacy as close reading for “key ideas and details” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9). A commonly held misunderstanding that preservice teachers have about critical literacy is that critical literacy is the same as critical thinking. Lee (2011; 2016) attributes this “myth” (2011, p. 97) to confusion between learning taxonomies such as Bloom’s Taxonomy and critical literacy. When they do this, students misunderstand the difference between critical thinking and critical literacy (Matteson & Boyd, 2017). This connection between their own English classroom experiences, described later in this chapter as their “training” to analyze texts is also evident in their behavior with books. For the first three out of six sessions, I reminded the participants that I put together a discussion guide for the book club using critical literacy prompts that I gleaned from Janks et al.’s (2014) handbook called Doing Critical Literacy (Appendix D). I handed out a hard copy of the discussion guide at the beginning of the first session, the second session, the third session, and I sent a digital copy of it in email correspondence to the group prior to the third session. In the email I also reiterated a more formal definition of critical literacy. I thought I’d share with you a quote that helped me better understand what critical literacy is “... I think it is possible to think of a literacy teacher as someone who works with others to make meaning with or from texts. A critical literacy teacher is, in addition, interested

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in what all kinds of texts (written, visual and oral) do to readers, viewers, and listeners and whose interests are served by what these texts do.” (Janks, 2010, p. 19) This is from Hilary Janks’ (2010) book Literacy and Power. What I noticed about the conversations so far in our critical literacy book club is that they are very, very well grounded in literary analysis. We need that. However, I encourage you to read and reread Sparkle Boy with a few of the prompts from the CLBC prompts that I handed out at our first meeting. I have attached another digital copy to this email. You can “read” Sparkle Boy in about 7-10 minutes. But I hope you’ll spend some time thinking about what interests Sparkle Boy serves and how it positions you as a reader. (personal communication) After handing out the prompts for half of the sessions and not seeing them appear on the table once, or have any explicit reference made to them, I stopped handing them out and they were not used at all during book club. They seemed forgotten to me, but I later realized that they were deemed unnecessary. When asked in individual interviews about how and why they did or did not take up the discussion prompts that I provided, Ashley said, “I think it would have taken away, like, quite honestly. If we were always like, we have to answer these questions, you know? ‘Cause a lot of the conversation was just more of like free flowing … it kind of reminds me of just like in class if you get a worksheet, you’re just like gunnin’ to get all the answers done rather than like, ‘oh you just talk to your neighbor for 5 minutes.’ You might get something more meaningful by just letting ideas flow rather than being like, ‘Oh we have to get #1 now we have to get #2!’” Jane said that as a learner she benefitted from reading the prompts on her own, but she mostly read for the content of the book and expected the other members of the book club, “[to] make [her], like, think about these questions [sic].” Stephen also focused on the importance of the content of the book during his reading. He said, “there was a lot [of] content here to unpack when we met.” By focusing on the importance of determining “what the text says specifically” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9), the way that students prepared and participated in the book club repeatedly conflated the importance of closely reading the content of the book with critical literacy.

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Constructing Critical Literacy: Conclusion In the context of a voluntary group, without requirements for participation that might have enforced the use of the discussion guide in a course context, I decided to listen and better understand what they were saying and the ways that they constructed critical literacy in the book club space. In this book club, preservice teachers understood critical literacy as reading for comprehension of “key ideas and themes” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9). In the research on doing critical literacy with preservice teachers, as discussed in Chapter Two, one of the ways that teachers resist critical literacy is by positioning the standards as the curriculum of schools (Cho, 2015; Norris et al., 2012; Skerrett, 2009). In the previous research, this is done overtly by preservice teachers when they make arguments about the way that “practical issues” including “school district curricula, resources, and time… would make engaging in critical literacy difficult” (Norris et al., 2012, p. 62). In this data, the participants do not argue that they cannot do critical literacy for specific reasons related to standards. However, they actively engage in literacy work, as defined by standards, in their own approach to literacy: as reading. A traditional reader can “read with the text” (Janks, 2010, p. 22). However, critical literacy asks alternative questions than “reading with the text” (Janks, 2010, p. 22); critical literacy asks that readers, influenced by Freire’s criticality, “reflect critically on the process of reading and writing itself” (Janks, 2010, p. 13). In this way, the understanding of literacy, as reading that the participants construct, also carries with it assumptions embedded in this approach to literacy. Reading is “understood to be a fixed body of skills or an individual, internal capability – culturally neutral, universal in its features, and developmentally accessible” (Luke & Woods, 2009, p. 9). These issues of cultural neutrality and the accessibility of texts as understood via literary analysis skills, or as reading for “key themes and ideas” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9) is seen in the way that the research participants in this study construct themselves, as readers, and the others, who they encounter in texts as can be seen in the next section.

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Narrating Positionality The definition of positionality, as discussed in Chapter Three, emphasizes that understanding one’s own positionality means “the recognition that where you stand in relation to others in society shapes what you can see and understand about the world” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. 8). Also, in Chapter Three, I discuss how Beverly Tatum (2000) frames seven categories of “otherness” commonly experienced in U.S. society: race or ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, and physical or mental ability (p. 11). How individuals identify themselves, or are identified by others, in these categories is part of what socially positions them and each social position carries social power. Furthermore, how individuals are placed in these social positions influences their lived social realities. These positionality categories are also called “frames” by DiAngelo (2012) who defines them as “significant social groups in our society” (p. 21) and include: “race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, ability, and nationality” (p. 21). Tatum (2000) includes age, whereas DiAngelo (2012) includes nationality as unique categories. However, the rest of the categories overlap in group categories. For a group of all White, English speaking, monolingual, Christian (or raised in ways such that they are familiar with Christian practices), middle-class or upper-class, 20-24 year- olds, who are physically and mentally able, legal citizen, preservice English teachers, how do they discuss their social positions while discussing diverse, social issues picturebooks in which many of the characters and contexts are not White, monolingual, or Christian and who have characters of different ages, abilities, and nationalities which raise social injustice issues based on social identity positions? The findings from this study suggest that this group of participants understand and position themselves as critical readers, White readers, and also position themselves as readers who acknowledge their need for background knowledge, and selectively celebrate representations of difference when they feel comfortable with the representations of difference chosen by authors and illustrators of these texts. These findings do not fit neatly into the categories of positionality as described above by Tatum (2000) and DiAngelo (2012). That is, the data is not organized by social category and their own White racial identity was the only explicitly named social identity during book club conversations. When designing the study, the metaphor of books as mirrors, especially when asking critical literacy questions of power and the way that the books position readers and the

171 book content socially, I expected more of this type of personal disclosure during book club conversations, especially because the texts chosen present a wide range of social identities in characters. However, the way that the participants position themselves as critical, White readers who need more background knowledge and selectively celebrate difference, culminates in a position as readers who consider themselves capable and ideal readers. This position speaks to the ways in which, as White readers particularly, their social position is not confronted or challenged by reading diverse, social issues picturebooks. More about this readership position is taken up in the discussion in Chapter Five.

Positioning Self When directly asked to name their social identities in the categories that Tatum (2000) and DiAngelo (2012) suggest in individual interviews, the participants did so enough to support my initial statement about these preservice teachers aligning with the demographics of most preservice teachers, and enough to build small biographies that can be found in Chapter Three that include their “frames” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 20), as well as their “lenses,” which are “aspects of identity that are unique to us – what we think of as our personality, our family influences, our birth order, and our unique experiences” (p. 22). The way that they constructed their positions during book club discussions were less obviously embedded in socially constructed groups (with the exception being White racial identity). However, these findings contribute to building an argument that, even when not intentionally naming their positionalities, the way that the participants constructed their social positions in the above-mentioned ways, are indeed socially positioned.

Age and Readiness Understanding themselves as critical readers is largely established in the understanding and construction of critical literacy section of this data. This brief section speaks to how preservice teachers additionally name themselves as well “trained” in literacy and reading, thus reifying their position as critical readers. Furthermore, they describe themselves as critical readers because of their age, which is a unique contribution to the rationalization of themselves as critical readers.

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As mentioned in the previous findings, the participants in this group constructed critical literacy as close reading for comprehension of “key ideas and themes” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9). And they expressed confidence in these skills that Janks (2010) would call basic literacy and Andreotti (2011) calls the process of traditional reading. I started using the phrase “literary analysis” (Van Sluys et al., 2005) to describe their conversations about the content and text comprehension. When asked about this process that took priority as their primary responses to the texts, I was assured that they were quite skilled because of their experience in English classrooms. Ashley asserted, “We were really good at pointing out all the literary things” during the book club meetings. Jane describe this process as “an English classroom thing. And I think we’ve all been like, trained to, like, do it that way for so many years. I think that’s what we’ve been taught… maybe… first… getting into middle school.” Stephen extends this training as a way of looking at books: “We have been… trained to, like, books as I don’t know, something to be analyzed.” The participants in this study position themselves as critical readers, yet without taking up the critical literacy prompts, they reconstructed notions of traditional reading (Andreotti, 2011) in their self-perception of criticality. These research findings affirm what many other studies in critical literacy find. That is, many students do not overcome their socialization in traditional reading. Starting in middle school, they built a strong “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie 1972 as cited in Poetter, 2017, p. 25). According to Riley and Crawford-Garrett (2015), attempting to approach literacy from a sociocritical perspective, not a traditional reading approach, can be particularly difficult considering these participants “came of age during the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)” (p. 58). And reordering previously held concepts about literacy is difficult work (Albright, 2002, p. 300). Their “training” is well established. In addition to being good English class students which prepares them for critical reading, Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole and Stephen also frequently raised issues of age associated readiness for the topics raised during book club including: general knowledge of identity, bullying, and gender normativity. This age concern was raised for younger readers than themselves as well as readers older than them. By expressing concern for younger and older readers, they position themselves as the just-right age for reading these texts.

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Most frequently, disbelief in younger children’s ability to understand identity, bullying, and gender normativity, as social norms, was raised. Francis and Stephen asserted that young children are not concerned with the issues of identity that the book club participants discussed. When reading The Hoodie Hero, the group began to discuss the role of social identity in bullying and how not conforming to social norms makes individuals targets of bullying. Francis, however, claimed “it’s only when we get older that we start to differentiate identity.” This claim supported his argument that young children, if they read The Hoodie Hero, would not bully based on social identities as they do at the Reach Middle School (the setting of The Hoodie Hero). Nicole affirmed that the audience for The Hoodie Hero would need to be “older… [to] go deeper and deeper and deeper into the layers” of bullying, especially as it applies to bullying based on individuals violating social norms because “their brains are not at that level yet.” This comment alludes to a developmental unreadiness in young children. According to Cho (2011), preservice teachers sometimes situate critical literacy as demanding higher order thinking skills, as can be seen in this example. Relegating social issues to higher order thinking is often used as a way of dismissing critical literacy by preservice teachers as well. The “belief that little children are confused by social complexity and possess no significant comprehension of even their own personal and social experiences” (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001, p. 158) was asserted by the participants several times during book club. Van Ausdale and Feagin (2001) describe these beliefs as “adultcentric convictions” (p. 156) that draw on “commonsense understandings of children’s abilities,” (p. 158) not research based evidence that children as young as three-years-old are capable of understanding “social complexity” (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001, p. 158), for example, racial understandings of themselves and others (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001). This “adultcentric conviction” (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001, p. 156) that children cannot understand social complexity was also raised when reading Thunder Boy Jr. as the group conversation turned towards the issue of Native American identity generally, Stephen truncated the conversation about complex identities of Native peoples in the U.S, when conversation returned to Thunder Boy Jr. ’s understanding of identity, by arguing that the protagonist, “he doesn’t know his specific tribe and all that.”

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This comment diminished the importance of the role of Native American identity in Thunder Boy Jr. as a social issue specific to the book. Stephen went on to contribute more information about Native American identity as he learned about in a playwriting class. “Last semester, I took a class about Native American Playwriters ... and it was interesting…. I learned a lot about the identity that Native Americans feel and especially how their identities are like, very uh, like, still today, appropriated by the dominant culture…. My high school is still the Redskins.” But the location of such conversations and learning were within a course for adult learners, not children’s picturebooks. Stephen followed up with “I think it would have been strange if the kid was like, ‘Because in my tribe we do this and this and this,’ then it would have felt, I don’t know. It would have been a little bit too much for a picturebook.” In both The Hoodie Hero and Thunder Boy Jr., being able to self-identify one’s place in the social complexities of racial and ethnic identities, and the significance of those social identities, are relocated from picturebooks that are designed for young children and to the more seemingly appropriate audience of older readers. Identity is “too much” for children, but okay for older audiences. This same concern for the readership’s age was also expressed in matters of gender nonconformity in Sparkle Boy. The plot for Sparkle Boy follows a pattern of an older sister, Jessie, chastising her younger brother, Casey, for wearing sparkly, glittery things. The reader is left to imply that this is because the sparkly, glittery things are girly and not for boys like Casey. When discussing gender nonconformity, Casey was cast by the participants as clueless about why his older sister might be telling him not to wear sparkly, glittery things. This was justified by his age. “When they’re younger they’re not as ingrained as the high schooler would be… They haven’t been living long enough to see ‘the way it is,’” Jane said. Arguing that young readers, and Casey as a young character, are unable to “see ‘the way it is’” positions young children as innocent and unable to identify social norms. Francis recommended that in order to improve Sparkle Boy, the author might “make Casey older, like give him for speaking roles, and like more intellectual freedom.”

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By making the arguments that characters, and readers, need to be older to understand social complexity, and social identities, young children are removed from socialization. According to Laman (2006), some adults assume that young children “shouldn’t be burdened” with critical literacy conversations (p. 204). Yet, young children routinely experience prejudice (Laman, 2006) and children are not made safer by protecting them from a discussion of social issues (Stribling, 2014). Critical literacy pedagogy assumes that young people already possess the ability to question the world and engage it critically (Gainer, 2007). And the literature on doing critical literacy with early childhood students asserts that young children are capable (Quintero, 2004; Harwood, 2008; Flores-Koulish et al., 2011; Souto-Manning & Price- Dennis, 2012; Chafel, Flint, Hammel & Pomeroy, 2007; Deprez, 2010; Chafel & Nietzel, 2012; Laman, 2006; Meller et. al. 2009; Bourke, 2008; Souto-Manning, 2009; Stribling, 2014, Rogers & Mosley, 2006) of engaging in a wide range of social issues including racism (Rogers & Mosley, 2006; Laman, 2006; Souto-Manning, 2009), poverty (Chafel, et al., 2007) gender inequality and sexism (Laman, 2006; Souto-Manning, 2009), power (Harwood, 2008), authority (Bourke, 2009), and segregation (Souto-Manning, 2009). These developmental concerns, claiming age-based inability to engage with social issues, are an issue frequently raised during conversations with early childhood preservice teachers when discussing social issues books, in the context of critical literacy, for young children as cited above. However, I was surprised to see the way in which this was an ongoing issue, still used as a reason to not engage in hypothetical conversations, for preservice teachers preparing to teach English in middle school and high school settings. However, it was not just concern with the age of young readers, but also that of older readers of these books. Citing parents and grandparents as examples, Jane said, “older generations may feel a lot differently about [sic] things like this than I do” noting her dad as an example when it comes to gender nonconformity. Nicole shared the same concern about her own father as unready for handling gender nonconformity in her family. “My dad would have never painted my nails. Like obvi-, like, he would never have painted my brother’s. That’s a whole other study. If I asked him to paint mine, he never would have ‘cause that’s not what he thinks a man should be doing. Like that’s a mom’s job?”

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Personal connections created experiential expectations of adults older than them, and this extended to the book characters. Francis wondered aloud whether Casey’s Abuelita in Sparkle Boy would be as accepting as the parents because “she’s older, so she’s more used to living in society… she’s more accustomed to gender norms… as you get older, a lot of times… they get more ingrained in the ideas about themselves and their gender.” Casey’s Auelita was accepting. However, if young children are not a suitable audience because they are positioned as not socialized enough and adults older than the participants are too socialized, a question that begins to surface for me as a researcher is why the participants need to do so much age justification to their readiness. Even teenagers are sometimes not a suitable audience. Jane claimed they may not be ready for social issues, by saying things like “I know it’s okay for us because we are used to like, responding critically, and like looking at a text, but it worries me for the assumed reader if the assumed reader is like a teenager… they might giggle.” In response to the book Pashmina, when the group found themselves confused and unsure about the plot, “A kid’s probably not going to do the research if they don’t understand it, they’ll just like… toss it to the side” Jane lamented. At no point in time do any of the participants say, “I am the best reader for this book,” but they do this through their use of other, younger and older, imagined readers. The participants position themselves as critical readers, who understand socialization enough to identify it, and set themselves apart from other audiences that are not ready to discuss the social issues raised in conversation. This position makes them special, and unique, and validates their position as a just- right reader and this position is maintained through a foil of other imagined readers.

White Readers This subheading ‘Our ‘All-white World’ of Books,’ alludes to a seminar article by Nancy Larrick’s whose research demonstrated that the world of children’s literature was mostly White

177 in 1965, yet “in the 50 years since Larrick first documented the all-White world of kids' books, we've made some progress, but children's literature still represents a mostly White world in a real one that's becoming increasingly diverse” (Horning, 2014, p. 18). In this study, each participant was able to acknowledge their racialized White social identities and the Whitewashing of the participants’ reading experiences throughout their childhoods and school careers. They name not just the ways that non-White writers are absent from their repertoire of books they have read, but also the ways that non-White characters are absent from their reading as well. More specifically, their comments about Whiteness name African American or Black authors and characters as absent from their reading experiences. This specificity of African American, or Black racial identity is also closely tied to Larrick’s (1965) article because it specifically searched for African Americans in picturebook illustrations. The references they use to describe race, also specifically name race as Black, or African American, and do not include other racial identities in the discussion despite a wider range of racial and ethnic differences in the book characters for the book club including: Priyanka who is Indian, Sylvia Mendez who is Mexican American, Thunder Boy Jr. who is Native American, and Casey who the participants identified as Latinx. Francis noted the absence of Black authors from his reading in high school “we didn’t read a single Black author.” Jane has seen just one Black author read by students’ in all of her field experiences so far. In her last field experience the high school students read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. She was “excited to see that they were, like, being exposed to not only a classic but also a book by a Black author.” Participants also acknowledged that their own reading tendencies were very White. Ashley read more books by diverse authors, and with diverse characters, in the seven weeks of book club and The Literacy Course than she ever had before. She described the change in her reading experience this way “I can tell you, from the last 7 weeks that I’ve read this, and this, and this, and this. But before that, I don’t, before that if someone asked me, like, for a book recommendation, or like something, I would say something like, ‘oh, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or like,

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I don’t know, The Fault in Our Stars,’ or something. Like I wouldn’t know any books that are, that I liked, that had not a White person.” Ashley also acknowledged an awareness that being White, in the context of mostly White schools and teachers, did not trouble her sense of representation. She wondered as she read the picturebooks for this group if her friends who were not White, “Oh, maybe if they had seen this when they were younger, like, reading wouldn’t be this like, ‘oh, like, here we go again it’s just another basic White person book.’” Also, after discussing the book club with her father, Ashley shared her reflection on the ways in which her reading experiences as a child were also very White. “No matter what I was reading, even if it was like The Rainbow Fish, which is, like, a fish. I was like, you’re always as a White person, I feel like, you’re always safe to assume that it’s like your culture, or like, you would get it.” Nicole added, “All these picturebooks kind of made me realize that, ‘cause they were all from different perspectives, umm, made me just kind of realize that like, a lot of books that we grew up with, you could even just assume that they’re White. You never had to worry about it. But you never had to feel like, ‘oh, I’m not being represented,’ or something like that.” Jane followed up Nicole’s comment with “White Clifford! He’s a dog but, he’s White.” Ashley and Stephen then considered how, as writers, they always write from their own perspective and they assumed that the authors of all books must do the same thing. Stephen’s mother’s childhood neighbor was Marc Brown, the author of the Arthur books for young children. He reflected “It’s not like they’re friends or anything, but they grew up next door to each other. But like a lot of things in Arthur are from his childhood living in like, a suburb. In like, a White neighborhood, so it’s like, you know, it’s like those stories are an extension of himself… And what he knows, and then they become a part of like, the I don’t know, broader culture of kids who read them.” Ashley concluded “I feel like everything does get a little bit Whitewashed.” And the issue is

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“The fact that we only choose books, that are, that White people know.” This issue of choosing books that already expose them to what they are used to was reiterated by Nicole, when she concluded that we should be able to be uncomfortable and part of that is not giving books that are “all White.” In support, Jane asked “if every book was the same, like, why the hell would I keep reading?” Stephen, as a child who grew up in a White suburb, and also discussed his very White reading experience in schools, argues that White people need different types of stories: “Those that are growing up in the White, middle-class background need to be exposed to, like, stories about people that are different than them and maybe, like have less privilege than they do, and stuff like they” The ways in which specifically race, as Whitewashing of their reading experiences was critiqued was really specific. Each person in the book club was able to acknowledge their White racial identity, name it as a part of their social identities, and recognized some ways in which their reading experiences are predominantly White. Furthermore, in these conversations there was the clearest connection to how the books were “positioned and positioning” (Janks, 2010, p. 61) and their own experiences as readers. There was less acknowledgement of the other ways that their reading experiences are also socially positioned including: gender, religion, sexual orientation, class, age, ability, and citizenship (Tatum, 2002; DiAngelo, 2012). This is despite the broad range of social issues that these diverse, social issues picturebooks may have potentially raised. However, there is some evidence in this conversation that preservice teachers are capable of engaging texts critically, in the sense intended, even if the connection between the critical literacy book club prompts did not facilitate the conversation.

Learners At some point during each of the six sessions someone at the table took up the “I don’t know” response during conversation. The phrase “I don’t know” was employed to validate their confusion about the literary aspects of the text, particularly when the content was unfamiliar and not available using context clues or inferences alone based on their own socio-cultural understanding of the world, or what Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) would call their positionality.

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When unfamiliar with social or cultural content of any of the picturebooks presented, the participants said, “I don’t know” about the content of the text. When discussing Pashmina Stephen said, “I don’t know that much about Hindu, the religion, umm, Hinduism.” Jane claimed, “I don’t know a lot of Indian people.” Nicole tried to lean on traditional reading skills to read for understanding such as using context clues. “It’s kind of difficult for me to understand why all of these random words are in here, like, based off of context clues, I’m just assuming it’s pet names.” Nicole acknowledged, “Maybe I did need more background knowledge to really feel the full story.” Yet, while Nicole was frustrated by not understanding the “random words,” which were not random, but written in Hindi, a language unfamiliar to Nicole, Stephen assured himself “I definitely noticed, like, there were times when I didn’t understand all of the words being said, but was still like, I thought perfectly easy to, like, get what’s going on in each panel [sic].” In this way, traditional reading approaches provide tools for understanding the general plot, and the social and cultural knowledge of the text, provided in Hindi, while frustrating to Nicole, were minimized as add-ons that were not necessary for Stephen’s basic comprehension. Ashley described all books as having a “main theme” that is easily identified using literary analysis, yet there is usually another “main point” in the book as well. “If you don’t do your research, or you don’t understand something, you can still get it, part of it, you know? … And to get the actual main point of it is to, kind of like research it a little bit more and understand what’s going on.” Unfamiliarity or difference between their socially and culturally based knowledge continued to bother them throughout book club sessions. When discussing The Black Book of Colors, Thomas, the protagonist associated the silky hair of his mother with the color black. In response, Ashley expressed her confusion “That one kind of confused me … I don’t know why, but whenever I think of Black, I just think, like, not silky hair. I think of like, I don’t know, just Blackness. So I’m

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wondering… why they contributed Black with like such a happy thing like your mom’s hair, you know? Ashley is blonde. The firm assumption that the book characters share the same socio-cultural knowledge and expectations, even about hair color, is made evident in this comment. When discussing Thunder Boy Jr, Ashley, Jane, and Stephen agreed around the table that “we don’t know the culture.” During the literary analysis portion of the conversation, Jane, Stephen and Ashley, the three participants in attendance that day, took turns making observations and asking questions of the text. As they did so, Ashley asked “what is pow-wow dancing?” Jane responded with a quick Googling on her phone for what pow-wow dancing is. Her brief response was that “It’s a Native American people’s way of meeting, joining in dancing, singing, visiting, renewing friendships and making new ones.” (PowWows.com, n.d.) This clarified what pow-wow dancing was, then Jane followed up with a context-clue based assumption that “the outfit he’s wearing [for pow-wow dancing] – it’s something relevant to their culture; maybe, whatever, didn’t really say.” With no confirmation of this assumption apparent from the text they moved on. Ashley made another observation: “I honestly don’t know what culture this is based in.” Again, with no answer from Jane or Stephen, she asked: “Why do they go through all the different, like, possible names? ‘cause they’re all kind of like weird things, honestly, they’re not like your basic.” Jane jumped in, “he’s not like why didn’t they name me Bob? Or Joe?” The names in the text that Thunder Boy Jr. feels are more fitting include: “I’m not afraid of ten thousand teeth,” because he “once touched a wild orca on the nose” (Alexie, 2016, p. 15 ), “Touch the Clouds,” because he “once climbed a mountain” (Alexie, 2016, p. 16), and “Mud in his ears” because “I love playing in the dirt” (Alexie, 2016, p. 17). According to Ashley, these are not “basic,” in other words, they are not familiar to her as names. The insistence on the book

182 being knowable to them via their own experiences is evident when Jane says that the timing of the father renaming his son seems arbitrary – “Maybe if he would have had, like, a birthday or something? That would have made a little more sense.” While the participants cast themselves as confident and capable readers from a literary analysis point of view, the reality that they did not have the background knowledge to approach these texts, and their well-trained strategies of literary analysis did not work for them, left them with acknowledging their ignorance of the unfamiliar text content. Each of these approaches acknowledges a lack of understanding the text fully. However, both frustration with and minimizing details of the text reinforced, as well as generally expressing not understanding reinforced the dominance of their own socio-cultural knowledge. This approach to texts, however, was not an exclusive one. Francis, who felt strongly about the importance of discomfort when reading and approaching social justice said “It’s good for children … to have their… their comfortability as a reader, kinda challenged. And just like, for them to be like, you know, woah! Maybe I should look up this word. Like I don’t know what this means. … I think young people need that.” Stephen picked up on Francis’s idea with reference to a book preface that has become popular in the university teacher education courses about the importance of being willing to be disturbed by new learning. He reminded them “There’s an article for [Instructor], or [Course #], or something, where it’s like, umm, like reading, or like what you’re learning should make you feel uncomfortable … Like, if we always give books to, that we’re used to it already… “ The rest of the participants understood what he was referencing and finished his sentence in quick succession. Nicole said, “all White” as a reference to their Whitewashed reading experiences, “all cookie cutter” Ashley added to refer to sameness of the texts they usually read, and Jane finally added, “that wouldn’t really ignite a passionate reading for me.” Whereas the participants wanted to easily understand the books read during book club and were sometimes frustrated when they did not, small prompts from each other about what the experience of reading the same material over and over again was like also elicited frustration and an appreciation of differences experiences in texts. Furthermore, after getting caught up in frustration about unfamiliar content, they did sometimes acknowledge that they might have a

183 different perspective if they shared some kind of social identity or social positioning with the characters or content that they found frustrating. For example, when reading Pashmina, Ashley reflected “Imagine, just growing up without ever seeing like, myself in a story, or, in like a doll or a book or anything like that… Like, if I was Indian and reading this, like, I would probably be very excited about it…. [and] there’s probably little nuances that we don’t notice because we don’t know the culture.” Along this line of thinking about what nuance the participants might miss because they are not familiar with socio-cultural content, Ashley made similar reflections while discussing Thunder Boy Jr. “It seems at least from that [Debbie Reece] review, seemed like there was more critique in terms of like, if you, if you complete understand the culture. And, like, [if] you don’t understand it, its’ kind of like, ‘Oh, this is nice.’ And then, if you do know the culture, it – you’re able to pinpoint things that aren’t necessarily correct. But, like, if I didn’t just look that up right now, I wouldn’t ever [have] been like, the drums! You know?” Also, in the first book club session reading The Hoodie Hero, Nicole talked about how the use of grammar in the book would have been considered improper in the high school that she attended but she appreciated "Especially knowing that it’s written by teenagers, like, you’re not really changing their language to fit inside of a book.” Jane added, “the kids can relate to that more, versus, like, really, really formal writing.”

Positioning Others The section that precedes this transition, ‘Learners’ serves as a kind of bridge between the way that Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole, and Stephen constructed themselves and others in the book club. They often reflected on their White identity when encountering racial differences in the picturebook texts. However, their stance that they “do not know” about experiences outside of their own is another way of positioning themselves as readers, who should understand, and others, who should be understandable to them. In this section, there is one finding, in two parts, that gives shape to this metaphorical seeing of others in texts. This is the way in which participants selectively celebrated diversity.

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When they see diverse ‘others,’ they are pleased and praise the inclusion, especially racially, as their awareness of their Whiteness is evident in these conversations. When they see things in the picturebook texts that make them feel confused or uncomfortable, they do not celebrate the inclusion of difference.

Multiculturalism in Representation At times, Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole and Stephen celebrated racial, linguistic, and cultural differences when they encountered them represented in the diverse, social issues picturebooks. When the group started reading The Hoodie Hero, Nicole was pleased to see, what she assumed were racially diverse authors: “Well, first the names, I don’t want to be too assuming, but L-I-U looks pretty Asian to me. And then Daequan, and then Rice. It, it seems like a really good mix of people who went into making this book instead of just, you know, like typical White suburban names. That doesn’t mean that they are from White suburbia, but, you know, you’ve got that impression.” In the story line of the book, Marco and his friends were playing basketball and, on the court, the illustrations include a wheelchair user playing basketball. Ashley noted this as unusual but expressed her appreciation for this representation. “Also, the person in the wheelchair playing the game with them, too… At least from what I’ve seen not normally represented in a normal basketball game. Like, just a regular basketball game, so, that’s cool [sic].” And in a series of noticing comments, Jane chimed in that “It doesn’t look like there are any girls on the team.” Once they started to see some representation of different races other than “White suburbia,” although this is a conflation of race and location, and ability, they also started to look for other ways that the book might offer representations of others not “normally” included. The use of the words “typical” and “normal” indicate that the preservice teachers are aware that mainstream books lack many different types of diversity. Here, they highlight: race, ability, and gender and express approval for inclusion. When discussing the variety of shades of brown that the illustrator used in the illustrations for the other students at Reach Middle School in The Hoodie Hero, Nicole noticed

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“Um, one thing I noticed in the illustrations. The kids that are Black and the kids that are White are still different skin tones. Like, on this one [pointing to an illustration], like, if you look where they’re all playing basketball every person has a very different skin color, which I like because I think a lot of kids, like when you… Like, obviously, I’m not part of a Black community, but I hear all the time [about] light versus dark skin. There’s just so many different tones of like, Black, and brown kids who just aren’t always represented.” Nicole did not include where she hears about this issue of representation “all the time.” But Jane, eager to appreciate the diversity of skin tone affirmed Nicole when she said that seeing all the skin tones “is really cool.” However celebratory, the comments about representation, for example racial representations, are vague and rely on broad generalizations based in what Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) describe as “popular knowledge.” Popular knowledge is “standardized through ongoing representations in popular culture” (p. 9), particularly “mass-mediated popular culture” (p. 9). There was never any accountability to the source or validity of these assumptions but they were employed nonetheless in the conversations. Whereas The Hoodie Hero raised issues of race, Pashmina raised issues around appreciating “culture.” After so much of the conversation about Pashmina was described as confusing (see ‘I Don’t Know’ section above), Ashley changed the tone of the conversation by observing that if she thought about Pashmina from “the other perspective, of someone who is Indian and practices, like, Hinduism,” she acknowledges that the experience of reading Pashmina might be different, even “cool.” “It would be really cool because there’s probably even more little nuances that we don’t even, like, notice because we don’t know the culture… I can imagine it’s exciting that they’re like, eating food that they probably eat. And, like, talk about gods that they probably worship, too.” The response to Thunder Boy Jr., although also criticized for not being culturally understood at times, also elicited comments about appreciation of other “cultures.” After reading about pow- wow dancing from her Google search, Ashley said, “that’s cool.” Jane followed Ashley up with the observation

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“other cultures are so neat.” In book club conversations where they openly acknowledged that they were unfamiliar with the “culture,” they also acknowledged that they may not understand the whole story but appreciated the diversity, although there is an aspect of othering in describing another culture as “neat.” “Neat” feels a lot like the word cute and describing an entire culture in such a simplistic way is minimizing. When reading Sparkle Boy, the tone of the conversation for discussing gender nonconformity representation was once again positive, like race. The book was evaluated as “predictable.” They predicted that the older sister would come to accept the gender nonconforming behavior of her brother, “but still, a really nice topic that needs to be discussed,” Jane concluded. Overall, Sparkle Boy was approved of by the participants. Ashley described the book as “nice.” “It’s really nice. Like the whole way through, everything about it was just nice.” There was also some speculation from the participants that the family might be interracial, or Latinx with the grandmother called Abuelita and an assumed racially White father. This was well received and appreciated by Nicole: “I thought that they did, not a White family, having both a minority family and a boy who’s in the minority, like overall… like, it was someone different, which I really liked.” Ashley said, “Another reason why I think it’s like a Latino family: they’re not just, you don’t get to just pick one identity. And then they run with that the whole thing. It’s like a lot of different mixes and, like, the dad appears to be White so you have an interracial family as we mentioned. So, I feel like, the clothes kind of represent that too. ‘Cause it’s just kind of like a mix of all the things.” Francis added, “Some people could argue, it’s good to see a brown family in this context.” The group never discussed the nuances between using the terms “minority,” “Latino,” or “brown” they used to refer to the family or Abuelita. Notably, the only difference between

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Abuelita and the family members is her Spanish family title. But the common thread here is an appreciation of difference, even if imprecisely shared.

Discussing Difference Whereas the tone for racial, gender non-conformity, and culture generally were positive and appreciative, when reading Separate is Never Equal, the illustrations drew their attention as “interesting” at first. The illustrations in this book are by Duncan Tonatiuh, a Mexican-American author whose illustrator style draws on “Pre-Columbian art, particularly that of the Mixtec codex” (Tonatiuh, n.d.). After observing them as “interesting,” however, the group quickly turned to criticism of the specifically stylized illustrations. Ashley began “I loved how like, with their hair and with the books and the briefcase, it’s an actual image like cropped on there. I don’t know. I think that looks really cool.” Stephen continued “I also thought that it was interesting how their faces are always in profile… but sometimes it stressed me out ‘cause like on [page] 17, their heads are turned all the way around.” Ashley replied, “Oh my gosh, that’s spooky.” Stephen reiterated, “I’m not, like, okay with that.” Taking it one step further, Jane said, “Ewe.” Next, Stephen likened it to “the exorcist.” And Jane exited the conversation with “No, nope, I don’t like this anymore.” Nicole jumped in, “Also, every single person has White nails… which is very odd, like, I don’t know why they wouldn’t just do…” Ashley finished the sentence, “like, regular.” Nicole rejoined, “regular.” Jane makes one last sentence completion for “regular” with a recommendation for regular “skin color” as well. With this final comment, the conversation about the illustrations is over, there was a brief pause in conversation, and Ashley changed the subject to the time lapse in the storyline. And the illustration style was not acknowledged again. Nor was their response to the illustrations raised in conversation. In The Black Book of Colors, a discussion of the portrayal of people with disabilities, generally, is handled from a personal perspective that invites nuance of representation and celebration of authentic portrayal of disability. However, some portrayals of disability, if too

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“difficult,” made the participants uncomfortable. Nicole, speaking from personal experience shared, “I know a lot of people who have disabilities. [They] get really angry about the way that people without disabilities portray them. It’s like while we might think it’s really cool for us to see that, but” Jane ends her sentence with “they might hate it.” Television and film representations of disability portrayed by able-bodied people was a particular issue raised and critiqued by Stephen during book club conversation about The Black Book of Colors. He appreciated that one of the characters in “The West Wing” was deaf and played by a deaf actress. “They hired an actress who was deaf. So then, they like incorporated that into the character and she like, signed a lot. And [had] and interpreter which is, like, really cool.” Jane appreciated it too, with her response to Stephen: “Hell yeah, that’s awesome.” However, when I raised the critique of the movie Wonder, based on a popular young adult novel by R. J. Palacio that all the participants were familiar with, that the protagonist, Auggie, was not portrayed by someone with a facial deformity, the response from the group was different. Jane asked, “In the book they made him literally sound like a monster. But would people watch it if you looked like that?” Nicole shared “It’s hard to read the description about him.” As the conversation went on, Nicole acknowledged that having an actor who had a facial deformity play a character with a facial deformity is “how the world should work… but that’s not what happens.” Representations of difference are alternately a cause for celebration and concern amongst the participants. The representation of different races seems acceptable across the conversations. Acceptance and celebration of gender nonconformity seems to be shared as well. Yet, it was when the picturebook content became unfamiliar to them “culturally,” or when it felt

189 uncomfortable, that they critiqued the representation of difference and did not celebrate it. Why this may be the case is taken up in the discussion section in Chapter 5. In the discussion of this study in Chapter 5, the expectation that books should be knowable to them as readers is discussed at length as it relates to their social identities and the social identities of ‘others.’ How the participants in this study selectively celebrate diversity is an interesting finding for prompting discussion about the ways in which these preservice, English educators are both aware of their social positions and expect the privilege of understanding books using the tools of traditional literacy.

Promising Narratives of Critical Engagement In the findings from the critical literacy with preservice teacher literature review, one of the summarizing notes in some of the literature that I was drawn to most was the assertion from other researchers, that preservice teachers are “complex beings negotiating various spheres of their past, present, and future lives” (Jones & Enriquez, 2009, pp. 148-149). Reiterated from Chapter Two, I want to align myself with researchers who consider preservice teachers in fluid, changeable ways. This approach opens up opportunities for critical literacy learning to be a part of becoming a teacher who teaches critical literacy. In this section, I am not sharing overarching themes from the whole corpus of data, but small moments within the book club and follow up interviews that show evidence of preservice teachers adopting critical stances which “consists of the attitudes and dispositions we take on that enable us to become critically literate beings” (Lewison et al., 2015, p. 13). These moments are not thematically developed, but they do support rounding out the case study with nuance and unique contributions, not just thematic findings. I find this helps me interpret the case better as a complicated whole, rather than just selecting the shared themes. One of these moments that gave me joy was during the last few minutes of the final book club meeting. Ashley, Stephen, Jane and I were talking about what draws us, as readers, to read the things outside of our comfort zone. This was preceded by a conversation about the ways in which we, as writers, write most coherently and convincingly when we write from our own perspectives and experiences. I raised the benefits I see in writing from my own experiences, but I have intentionally chosen to read outsize of my own experiences. I queried, “why do you do it?” why were they

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“interested in things outside of [their] comfort zone?” Jane admitted that she loves to escape with books but she “[wants to] come out of [her] comfort zone.” Stephen said, “I’m always down to, like, consume things that are really good and, like, well done and powerful.” One of his favorite plays was The Color Purple which he described as “remarkably incredible. I’ve never experienced anything like it, but, I am not a black, woman, lesbian who’s poor, living in the South, like, you know? … but I still just thought, like… everything about it was so great.” Ashley, also spoke about her interest in different perspectives, but she credits “choosing to be a teacher” with her most significant interesting in other perspectives. To be a good teacher, is to, like, open yourself up to all of these different perspectives. … Freshmen year, I had no clue what was coming for me, but all the classes like we’ve taken have made me realize that I can’t just run my class based off of myself. Because, it’s not just a bunch of mes in the room. Ashley went on to describe the decentering of herself in social justice issues at the Chicago Women’s March. When she was at the Women’s March, another March attendee asked her a poignant question, “So, when you stand up for, like, women’s rights, do you mean, like, White women? Or do you stand up for all women?” Ashley reflected I honestly had never consciously decided that it was just White women, or not. I mean I hope obviously that wouldn’t be my main goal, but it did make me wonder, like, am I only caring for stuff that impacts just me? … I feel like ever since that day, like, that marked me in a different way. I was like, okay, I need to start thinking about like, other things. Like, social justice might not be like just how I feel about things. Ashley’s reflective thoughts about on her own social position as a powerful place from which she could either center her own understandings of social justice, or considering the perspectives of others in a meaningful way, was a powerful moment of “being reflexive” and “entertaining alternate ways of being” a teacher in an educational setting (Lewison et al., 2015, p. 13). Stephen, also took the initiative to entertain alternate ways of preparing for reading, despite not doing so during the critical literacy book club. During the final interview after responding to the prompt about how he prepared for book club, he likened it to the way that he prepares for a play. As a theatre double major along with his major in education, Stephen drew many connections between the book club texts and plays and playwriting courses.

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Just the week before our final interview meeting, after the book club sessions had already ended, he attended a theatre festival in Louisville, KY. During the festival, playwrights debut new works and one of the prompts that the festival organizers posed to festival goers was, “How do you prepare yourself to experience something new?” Stephen offered the question up as an interesting prompt and one he had not before considered. He admitted that most of the time he “[didn’t] really do anything.” I normally just go in and just wait for it all to hit me, but some people were like, well, I look up what the play might be about and I do some Googling about it while I’m waiting in my chair before the show starts, or like, read dramaturgical notes in the playbill and stuff like that … So, I don’t know, but I know that’s the thing. Like what’s your duty as someone who’s like going to experience something that you’ve never experienced before? Is there anything that you should like, should be doing? I thought that the prompt question was intriguing and delightful. I have tucked it away into my teaching prompts for future classes, particularly because I found myself frustrated over the course of the book club with a lack of preparation from the participants that I asked, “That’s so interesting, like, I wonder if we did a book club again, like, how do you prepare yourself to experience something new [during a book club]? Stephen’s response was indicative of how he was beginning to rethink his “wait for it all to hit me” approach. Like, even for Thunder Boy Jr., it wasn’t until we were sitting there and we had been talking for a while that it was Sherman Alexie and even then, I was like, that name sounds familiar, but then I realized he wrote the part-time, or, Diary of a, you know what I mean “Yes,” I replied. I don’t know. It was like, if I’d known that and then done some research, maybe on him and his experiences, what would I have like learned after reading this book? I don’t know. … I never thought about that, like, how I do that. Maybe I should. It seems inferential from the findings that the participants may have learned more or read more critically if they had “taken responsibility to inquire” (Lewison et al., 2015, p. 13). Yet, it was not the book club meetings that prompted this reflective stance on his participation in the book club, it was a theatre festival, but Cho (2014) describes her research

192 participants’ identities as “in constant negotiation within individuals and with others in varying social and discursive contexts” (p. 690), not as fixed or always linear in process. I am grateful that I had a chance to hear from Stephen more about how he might choose to prepare and inquire into new texts in future reading. Also, during final interviews Jane shared how the book club has impacted her professional work in a local library, which she describes as “the greatest job ever.” She shared this, and the impact of the book club on her work at the library, in response to my final prompt for her to share anything else she wanted me to know. She said I’m really close with the children’s librarian. And we talk about the book she’s gonna use for her story time. And so, I’ve caught myself like looking up critic reviews of books and, like, trying to like, see if I’m gonna let that effect the way I feel about it, or if I even should, or if it’s worth letting my view be changed of it, and talking with her about that. [sic] I inquired how the librarian responds to Jane searching for reviews. She reported that She honestly said that she had never even looked up anything and she would just pick it based on, like, her personal feeling of the book. But she’s like, maybe I will start doing that… so I (Jane) was like, give it a try and see how you feel and see what, if you find anything, interesting. Cause like I said, we didn’t even know anything about that critic review [of The Black Book of Colors], or that the bumps weren’t even deep enough until we looked that up. So, I just, I gave her that piece of advice…. I was like, I’m not saying your books aren’t great, I’m just saying, like, you could just, like, get more perspective on it. [sic] I was encouraged that Jane extended the importance of “taking responsibility to inquire” (Lewison et al., 2013, p. 13) into her work in the library. These moments of application, outside of the book club, but actively applied in Jane’s current context with children were encouraging to me as a researcher and teacher educator. The emphasis of this study was not to find out how the study participants would apply principles of critical literacy to their future teaching work, but how they played out during the book club sessions themselves. I frequently looked at the site of the book club as the most likely context for critical literacy, or taking a critical stance as Lewison et al. (2015) describe to play out, but it was

193 in contexts outside of coursework and classrooms where the participants applied principles of critical literacy to their lives that seemed to hold the most evidence of adopting a critical stance.

Discussion In summary, the data from this study answer questions about how the participants in this study: Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole, and Stephen considered the book club a social space where they generated ideas about texts together and benefited from relying on each other’s’ contributions to the book club. Preparation and a willingness to get personal in book club conversations sometimes facilitated engagements of self-reflection and critical reflection on the positioning of themselves with the text as well. My analysis also provides evidence of the ways in which the participants in the book club constructed critical literacy as traditional reading (Andreotti, 2011), despite a research design that prompted critical literacy responses to texts based on critical literacy theory and the guiding pedagogy of Janks et al. (2014). Finally, the question of how preservice teachers narrate their positionality during a critical literacy book club was discussed in two parts: how they understand themselves and diverse others encountered in texts. The majority of the participants’ approaches to the texts, when literary and impersonal, suggest that when encountering unfamiliar cultural content, they sometimes cast the texts as confusing, i.e., difficult to comprehend using their traditional tools of literary analysis. These overall findings are, however, not exclusive. There are discussions throughout each of the sessions that give evidence of an awareness that their reading positions are privileged, particularly in terms of racial awareness, and there is evidence, particularly in the section White Readers that they understand they have White biased reading experiences personally and professionally. There is also evidence that the preservice teachers in this study understand that their approaches to unfamiliar texts can be mitigated by learning more information about unfamiliar content. More discussion of these findings in socio-cultural context, and the implications of these findings for future work with preservice teachers doing critical literacy book clubs can be found in Chapter Five.

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Chapter Five: Discussion and Implications for Future Practice Introduction In Chapter Four, the themes presented in the data to answer the research questions are divided into two categories of findings in response to each research question: how the preservice teachers understood critical literacy, and how they understood their social identities while reading during the book club. Despite my intentions to foster critical literacy with specific attention to issues of social stratification and power, the context of the book club itself did not manifest discussions of critical literacy. In this discussion, I revisit the data findings to contextualize the way that the participants’ socialization intersected with my intentions as a researcher and critical pedagogy design in critical literacy book club. I also revisit the ways in which the participants socially positioned themselves in socially powerful positions. Janks (2010) reminds us that “attitudes are socially and textually produced” (p. 9). The ways that the participants position themselves as critical readers, ignorant readers, readers who selectively celebrate diversity, and White readers, are positionalities that are embedded in political and social power relations already at play, not invented or solely generated by Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole or Stephen. As such, this type of discussion also does some of the work of reframing preservice teachers as “complex beings negotiating various spheres of their past, present, and future lives” (Jones & Enriquez, 2009, pp. 148-149) as called for in the literature from Chapter Two. Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole and Stephen are forming their views and “experimenting with what it means to enact the identity of a critical teacher within a political context” (Wolfe, 2010, p. 384). In the following subsections, “Constructing Literacy” considers the ways that literacy, as reading, has been politically justified and legislated in education. In “I Don’t Know: I Need more Background Knowledge,” Janks’ (2010) consideration of dominant discourses as more powerful than secondary discourses, despite their productivity for creating critical distance for readers, is discussed. And in “Seeing Others and Selectively Celebrating Diversity” an exploration of the ways that these celebrations and feelings of discomfort are effects of power to “construct dominant forms as the natural default position, with different forms constructed as other” (Janks, 2010, p. 103) is raised. In “White Readers in an ‘All-white World’ of Books,” A consideration of the way that Whiteness is still working powerfully throughout all of the ways that the participants position

195 themselves and respond to diverse, social issues texts is discussed. The pervasiveness of Whiteness, despite its acknowledged presence, is discussed for each of the data findings, particularly as Whiteness scholar DiAngelo (2012) frames Whiteness in “common patterns of well-intentioned white people” (p. 199). Finally, this discussion of literacy and power, or critical literacy theory as it relates to the findings in the data connect to the implications for the ways in which Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole and Stephen connect their reading practices with practices of social justice. After the discussion of the critical literacy book club, I discuss implications for future practice and directions for research endeavors informed by this research process. This chapter ends with a summary and conclusion of the study.

Discussion Constructing Literacy The participants were excellent at “comprehension, analysis and evaluation of the texts in context” (Janks, 2010, p. 22) or what Janks (2010) calls “reading with the text” (p. 22 emphasis in the original). As discussed in the data findings for Chapter Four, this also connects to the anchor, or cornerstone standards for English Language Arts in the state of Ohio that state that readers should be able to “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9) and “determine central ideas of themes of a text and analyze their development” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9). This way of reading, discussed with participants as a literary approach (Lewison et al., 2002), took up significant time during each book club session. They spent one third to half of the time discussing the characterization, plot, setting, and sharing insights about what they found interesting about these comprehension-based aspects of the text. And they considered this important work and productive work with the texts. When asked about why the participants did not use the critical literacy prompts, as provided, Ashley said, “You might get something more meaningful by just letting ideas flow.” Implied in this statement is that whatever might “flow” from the conversation among participants is what is needed for critical literacy conversations during book clubs. However, whatever might “flow” in conversation is whatever feels most natural to those who participate. What goes

196 unexamined by Ashley in this statement is that the literary approach to reading, the one that they have been “trained” in, as they discuss in Chapter Four, is just one kind of reading or one kind of literacy and it is a dominant, powerful discourse about literacy. The underpinnings of literacy, as defined by the English Language Arts standards, has its political history in the scientific research on reading and literacy, and the reading wars, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s as discussed at length in Chapter One. Janks (2010), using the lens of Foucault’s knowledge/truth paradigm, states that the “scientific” research on reading was the definition of literacy “that received government funding and informed government policy” (p. 50), such as government policies that regulate English Language Arts standards in the United States and Ohio, and reading as literacy was “constructed as the ‘true’ discourse about literacy [which] effectively excluded… socio-cultural theor[ies] of literacy” (p. 50). Critical literacy, as informed by socio-cultural theories of literacy, also discussed in Chapter One, is the “marked” form of literacy. “The notion of markedness in linguistics is a good example of how one can tell what is considered normal - it takes the linguistically unmarked form” (Janks, 2010, pp. 102-103). In this case, what might “flow” in conversation is reading as literacy, not the marked critical literacy. When the participants legitimated their position as capable, literate readers they did so in their socio-political and socio-cultural context. Thus, the assertion made by Riley and Crawford- Garrett (2015) that attempting to approach literacy from a socio-critical perspective, not a traditional reading approach, can be particularly difficult considering these participants “came of age during the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)” (p. 58). Not only is literacy as reading for comprehension well established as I concluded in the data analysis, it is also a socially powerful position to assume. By subsuming and dismissing the design of a critical literacy book club into what might “flow” from their preexisting notions of literacy, authorized by the state, I see that what Janks (2010) asserts: “it is not possible to separate literacy from questions of power” (p. 5). Power played out in this critical literacy book club.

I Need more Background Knowledge: More than Personal Knowledge One of the aspects of developing a “critical stance” (Lewison et al., 2015), a disposition for engaging with critical literacy, that was not taken up by the participants is that of “taking responsibility to inquire” (p. 19). Lewison et al. (2015) discuss this dimension of a “critical

197 stance” broadly and particularly in connection to the work of classroom teachers who “develop curriculum from memory - from what we were taught… or from what we think is fundamental” (p. 17). Teacher educators need to “move beyond initial understandings” (p. 19) based on background knowledge that they already bring to texts in order to take on the “critical stance.” In the brief discussion of this “I don’t know” approach to texts, I wrote in Chapter Four, that expressing ‘not understanding’ reinforced the dominance of their own socio-cultural knowledge. Why, upon first reading, did Ashley not look up what pow-wow dancing was? Why, when unfamiliar with naming practices of any Native American, or Indigenous, groups did they not look up something that they could learn about that social practice from? For the critical literacy book club, there was no requirement for outside reading to prepare for meetings. However, each week there was some aspect of the social issues picturebooks that were purposefully chosen as unfamiliar to the participants in the group. In the initial design of the study, I chose social issues picturebooks with a wide range of content and characters that would raise representation of several different social issues, racial, linguistic, religious, gendered, cultural, and ability differences. I attempted to select a text each week that would “[privilege] [a] fund of knowledge (Moll, 1992) or the cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991) of a particular group” (Janks, 2010, p. 97) of readers that the preservice teachers would have the least chance of identifying with using just personal knowledge and experience. Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012) describe these types of knowledge, and ways of knowing, as “personal and cultural knowledge” (p. 8) and refers to the type of knowledge that individuals acquire, “from their personal experiences in their homes, with their family and community cultures” (p. 8). When students make personal connections to text, they reach forward with what they know personally in order to make first contact with the text. However, sometimes personal connections fail to make the book known. When Stephen tried to make connections between the Goddess Shiva and “our holy trinity, like Father, Son & Holy Spirit,” it was an imprecise and clumsy comparison. His connection between the Christian Holy Trinity and the Hindu Goddess Shiva is not comparable. The Christian Holy Trinity is a uniting metaphor for three separate but unified expressions of God. The Hindu narrative of the Goddess Shiva is one of unique feminine, create power. Understanding this narrative, not just as a Goddess but a Goddess with unique characteristics, enhances the complexity of the protagonist Priyanka’s coming of age story, in a patriarchal context.

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At the end of the book Pashmina, Priyanka assumes the role of an artistic creator who expresses her own feminine, creative power when she exclaims, “I wrote my own comic book!” (Chanani, 2016, p. 161), while her male friend looks on dubiously. On the final page, the reader sees a comic book ‘Pashmina’ by Priyanka Das. Priyanka, always interested in artistic creation but visibly submissive and unsure when asked to share her comics early on in the graphic novel, finally claims her feminine, creative voice. As the researcher who was also only vaguely familiar with Hindu religion and unfamiliar with the Goddess Shiva, I had to research this story. After I did, I appreciated the end of the book as elegant and thoughtful. The participants, without additional research or information about Shiva were, “confused” about the end of the novel. I anticipated that encounters with texts that privilege other types of knowledge can be “experienced as alienating by other students” (Janks, 2010, p. 97). In this group, the word that signaled this discomfort was often that they felt “segregated” from the book. However, “this sense of alienation [is] a resource for critical deconstruction” (p. 97), when engaged in critical literacy readings of texts. When a text is not available to a reader and they experience critical distance, that’s when readers can “refuse the ideal reading position” (p. 97) and “engage with the text in order to make sure they understand it on its own terms and can see it for what it is” (Janks, 2010, p. 97). I hoped that the research design of selecting texts that I suspected the participants would have a critical distance from would create an opportunity for the participants to “[understand] that all knowledge is constructed from particular perspectives” (Lewison et al., 2015, p. 19) another aspect of “taking responsibility to inquire” (Lewison et al, 2015, p. 19). However, it was clear throughout many of the book club sessions that the participants, when unfamiliar with something in the text, saved their questions for book club conversation rather than seeking research to help explain what they did not understand. Because the participants shared so many similar social identity positions, they lacked “more than one discourse, more than one combination of ‘saying (writing), doing-being-valuing-believing (Gee 1990, p. 142), more than one way of thinking the world” (as cited in Janks, 2010, p. 22). Perhaps it is because of their shared social backgrounds, sharing many of the same school experiences that as a group they reified their collective assertion that the content of the graphic novel, or picturebooks, did not align with knowledge that the participants already had. When unfamiliar, the books and authors were cast as unknowable.

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Furthermore, their shared reflections on the texts together do not cast the participants in any responsible role as readers - after all, none of them understood. Instead, the books were understood as confusing, i.e., difficult to comprehend using their traditional tools of literary analysis and “personal and cultural knowledge” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012). And the group enacted a powerful agreement that if they did not know about something unfamiliar in a text that “instead of… diversity being seen as a wonder and pleasure,” it was used as “a powerful marker of social difference that can be used to exclude people who we hear and judge as other” (Janks, 2010, p. 147). While the participants cast themselves as confident and capable readers from a literary analysis point of view, the reality that they did not have the background knowledge to approach these texts, and their well-trained comprehension strategies did not work for them, revealed an internalized dominance in their position as readers. Internalized dominance refers to “internalizing and acting out (often unintentionally) the constant messages circulating in the culture that you and your group are superior to the minoritized group and thus entitled to your higher position” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012, p. 49). However, it is also worth considering that preservice teachers, in the context of preservice teacher education programs are not generally encouraged to undertake the effort of educating themselves beyond coursework requirements. Critical literacy is always situated in context (Lewison et al., 2015) and in the context of preservice teacher education, a sense of internalized dominance (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012) is sneakily compatible with the ways that teachers are being deskilled and “trained” to become teachers. The standardized curriculum for teaching is “specific[ally] mandated” and portrayed as “one-size-fits-all materials” (Lewison et al., 2015, p. 20). Assuming a critical stance (Lewison et al., 2015) and “taking responsibility to inquire” (p. 9) implies that teachers are “intellectuals and professionals,” yet teachers have socially been “positioned as transmitters of set curricula” (p. 21). Perhaps if preservice teachers begin to take issue with being “trained,” they may reconsider the ways in which both teachers, and the curriculum have been positioned. Until then, a sense of “internalized dominance” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012) compatibly upholds the notion that they are “just teachers… teaching out of tradition” (Christensen, 2015, p. xx). Christensen (2015) writes that as a new teacher she was willing to follow “unexamined assumptions about curriculum because [she] did not feel important enough, smart enough, or

200 empowered enough to make those connections on [her] own” (p. xx). The arguments made throughout the book club about not knowing enough about the books supports not just a sense of internalized dominance but the deskilling of teachers as well. Social positioning is never singularly accomplished, it is always enmeshed in a variety of social dynamics.

Seeing Others: Selectively Celebrating Diversity When the participants selectively celebrated difference praising representations of diverse racial, ability, and gender conforming characters, but unfamiliar cultural imagery and “difficult” portrayals of disability were criticized, it is easier to see, in the contradictions, that diversity is always operating in relations of power. The participants were, without fail, “glad” to see representations of racial difference. Yet, they felt comfortable openly criticizing the “weird” style of Duncan Tonatiuh in Separate is Never Equal. “One of the ways in which power works in to construct dominant forms as the natural default position, with different forms constructed as other” (Janks, 2010, p. 103). When the participants differentiated their responses to different representations of diversity, the participants constructed a hierarchy of relations of power within the representations of difference. The participants showed no evidence of reflecting on the way that they responded to diverse book content in the context of relative social power, however. According to Janks (2010), “diversity without attention to relations of power… leads to a celebration of difference without any recognition that difference is structured in dominance” (p. 102). Ashley was grateful that when I said that the book club would be reading diverse, social issues picturebooks that I did not just mean race: “I think it’s important that like, all these books were very different and we were able to analyze them in different ways because if it was all, saying it was diverse, but then all just like, from a Black author or something… We would call it ‘diverse,’ but you know? … ‘Diverse’ does not just mean like one time you do, like, one different colored author. It has to be a mix of everything.” But the “mix,” created space for a wide range of responses that varied in their treatment. I suspect that students, in the teacher education program or through other avenues such as social media, are more attune to racial power than other types of social identity power.

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Awareness, in this case study, is at least demonstrated by the 19 individual references to the race or racial experience when discussing texts throughout all 6 book club sessions. Other social identity conversations included 11 on gender across different books and sessions. However, social identities and other social differences such as class, ability, linguistic difference, religious differences, and citizenship were isolated to the books that specifically raised these identities and associated social issues that groups and individuals may experience based on these social identities. When surveying multicultural preservice teacher educators about the issues that they address most prominently in their curriculum, Gorski et al. (2013) found that race receives the majority of attention while other issues such as sexual orientation and immigration receive little, if any, attention (p. 233). By surveying multicultural educators’ course syllabi, and estimating time commitments to different social identities and related forms of oppression, Gorski et al. (2013) found that amongst the social identities listed below, race is the equity concern most frequently raised by multicultural teacher educators:  race (including racism, racial identity, white privilege, critical race theory, etc.),  gender (including sexism, gender identity, transgender identity, feminist theory, etc.),  sexual orientation (including heterosexism, homophobia, LBGTQ identities, queer theory, etc.),  class/socioeconomic status (including classism, poverty, economic injustice, class identity, etc.),  language (including linguicism, ELL identity, etc.),  (dis)ability (including ableism, ability identity, critical [dis]ability theory etc.),  religion, faith and spirituality (including religious oppression, Islamophobia, religious or nonreligious identity, etc.), and  immigration status (including anti-immigration oppression, immigrant identity etc.). (p. 233) In approximately 45 course hours, race accounts for about 10 hours, gender accounts for approximately 3 hours, sexual orientation accounts for 1.7 hours and the rest of the list of specific identities and oppressions dwindle to immigration status, which accounts for approximately 18 minutes out of 45 course hours (Gorski et al., 2013, p. 233).

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The social issues that receive the most “openness and care” (Janks, 2010, p. 125) are differentiated. Not all social identities are equally celebrated and deferential attitudes about different types of diversity is part of larger relations of power at work. What was most easily able to “flow” in conversation about Duncan Tonatiuh’s artwork based on the Mixtec Codex was not an appreciation of the craft, but an othering and a literal, via the “exorcist” reference, “demonisation of the other” (Janks, 2010, p. 102). This was not the same for the treatment of race or gender in conversation. My intention in this analysis is not to say that discussions about race and gender do not need attention in preservice teacher programs, but that they received a disproportionate amount of attention and care from the critical literacy book club participants in comparison to other social identities and issues of oppression.

Whiteness All Around The exposure that Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole and Stephen have had to race and thinking about Whiteness and Whiteness in literature is evident in their conversations about the texts during book club. In multiple sessions, the participants were comfortable discussing issues of race and naming their own Whiteness and own White reading experiences, particularly. Their understanding that they were surrounded by a White world of books is certainly affirmed by statistics in publishing. “Depending on which survey we consult, American publishing is between 79 and 89 percent White. The publishing industry’s Whiteness either prevents it from seeing or, when it does see, from correcting its institutional bias. The well-intentioned, good- hearted people in publishing are no match for the entrenched policies and practices that govern the workplace.” (Nel, 2017, p. 141) Furthermore, 95% of books published for children annually are still written by White people (Nel, 2017, p. 141). When discussing Whitewashing in literature, Nel (2017) discusses the ways in which particularly young adult literature has Whitewashed covers, where the characters are made to look White, even if the protagonist is not. What Whitewashing does is “naturalizes Whiteness as ‘normal,’ and promotes the idea that to be White is to be raceless” (Nel, 2017, pp. 146-147). The way that the participants used the term Whitewashing does not highlight the way that race is

203 erased in the texts selected, but it conveys a sense that Whiteness is dominant and made to feel normal in books. Bruce (2015), a White librarian and participant in the We Need Diverse Books ™ campaign adapted Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack metaphor to make a list of ways in which her reading experience privileges her Whiteness and includes these in her list:  “I have a wide variety of books from all genres to choose from in which characters look and speak like me.  When browsing in most libraries or bookstores, I can be pretty sure I will see white people who look like me featured on the book covers without having to search for them.” (p. 4) These are the sentiments echoed by the participants in their reflections on their White reading experiences. The way that they discussed race in the texts was an acknowledgment of their own racial “normalness” in the books that they read and they acknowledged the ways in which their reading perhaps should not be so White. However, beyond making these important acknowledgments of Whiteness, several of the general trends and behavior during book club sessions did not disrupt patterns of Whiteness in their reading. This can be seen across categories of the data findings. DiAngelo (2012) discusses these behaviors as “common patterns of well-intentioned White people” (p. 199). These patterns of behavior are seen particularly in the assertion that the participants did not understand texts that were not immediately familiar to them. DiAngelo (2012) writes about 14 patterns including: “guilt,” (p. 199), “seeking absolution” (p. 200), “feeling indignant/ unfairly accused” (p. 201), “objectifying” (p. 201), “rushing to prove ourselves” (p. 203), “ignoring” (p. 2014), “assuming people of color have the same experiences we do” (p. 205), “pretending our preference for segregation is accidental” (p. 207), “only acknowledging racism in other Whites not ourselves” (p. 207), “explaining away / justifying / minimizing / comforting” (p. 209), “insisting that if ‘they’ won’t teach us, ‘we’ can’t know” (p. 211), “focusing on delivery” (p. 213), “dismissing what we don’t understand” (p. 215), and “carefulness” (p. 217). While the participants acknowledged their Whiteness, they also exerted their Whiteness in readings of the texts throughout each of the six sessions. When discussing language use, particularly non-standardized grammatical differences in The Hoodie Hero, Nicole rushed to prove herself with the assertion that

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“I think all the schools I’ve been to, besides like my own as a student have been, like, urban places where this language is used. So, it’s not shocking for me to hear stuff that I don’t understand… I think most of us in here would agree it’s easier for us to probably comprehend and understand why they’re talking in that, sort of, vernacular, as opposed to someone who’s never been in a school like that.” With this statement, she asserted herself as an insider to urban schools and proved her comfort by not having students’ language “shock” her. Nicole and Jane both expressed surprise at the segregation of schools, as if they had not noticed ongoing segregation before reading Separate is Never Equal. When reading the ongoing statistics about school segregation that Tonatiuh includes in the back matter of the text, Nicole reflected “... that shocked me when I first read it. I’ve just never once thought that our schools are still like segregated.” Jane claimed, “It really hit me in the field” that schools were still racially segregated. This feigned ignorance implies that it might have been an accidental oversight of White people that they live in segregated neighborhoods. In a focus on delivery, the participants wanted to be sure that their sources for information about the social issues raised were written by and validated by authors and illustrators who could provide authentic and clear articulations of the issues addressed, or the culture they were writing about. When Pashmina was deemed confusing and full of “plot holes,” Nicole wondered “I don’t know how good a job this book does… like, trying to get someone to look at a different culture in, like, a better light?” DiAngelo (2012) describes this phenomenon of not understanding another person who is talking from another cultural context, in this case an Indian cultural context in Pashmina, as listening from the position that “I see myself as smart - that she is the one who is not being clear” (p. 214). Nicole did not understand the whole plot, or all the words in Hindi so Nidhi Chanani, the author and a woman of color, was being unclear. Nicole acknowledged that she might need more background knowledge, but did not attribute her confusion to her own “lack of experience and practice communicating outside [her] dominant cultural context” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 214). Instead, she wondered how effective Chanani, or the book itself, was at teaching her about Indian language and culture.

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So far, the evidence of common patterns of well-intentioned White people have fallen heavily on evidence using Nicole’s voice. However, the other participants in the book club were not challenging these statements that Nicole made. They generally did not follow up on them, or affirmed them with their silence. No disagreements raised conflict with these statements. And in the social space of the book club, where the participants relied on each other to raise issues of concern, there is a collective “flow” that was not interrupted and so, while one participant does not speak for all, the collective “flow” does move in this direction of being well-intentioned but still actively reproducing racist discourses and attitudes. Finally, dismissing what they did not understand was made evident often in the “I don’t know” responses and selectively celebrating difference. “Like most of us who are white, they are culturally incompetent” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 217). The participants lacked “humility about the lack of knowledge” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 217) that they brought to most of the unfamiliar book content. Simply stating, “I don’t know,” when unfamiliar with the content was an excuse that located no responsibility onto the participants, as readers. As Jane admitted, when she was reading Pashmina she came across the words in Hindi and “I was like trying figure out what all these words mean. And I was like, I don’t really feel like lookin’ up all these words right now.” Feeling like looking up the words implies an optional engagement with the text. Whatever the text might not immediately provide was deemed optional and it was the moments like this where the Whiteness of the participants manifested itself. So, despite the acknowledgment of their White racial identity and White reading experiences, Whiteness as a socially powerful discourse was still part of the relations of power in the conversations of the group.

Critical Literacy and Social Justice During the first book club session, after I introduced myself and we shared expectations for group norms during conversation, I opened myself up to questions from the group before reading and discussing The Hoodie Hero. Francis immediately asked me: “When did you first get interested in social justice? Especially as an educator, like, is that something that drove you from the beginning as an undergrad? Or was it more a process over time?”

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This moment is important because it implicitly set the tone for the book club as a social justice book club. In this study, critical literacy was not just mistaken as literary reading. Critical literacy was transposed into social justice and social justice education more broadly. The term “social justice” was frequently raised in conversation, while at the same time critical literacy, along with the critical literacy prompts, were left behind. Social justice is integrally associated with critical literacy, and my hope was, as an educator and researcher, that conversations about social justice would be raised while critically reading. After all, the eventual goals of an awareness of one’s positionality and “critical stance” (Lewison et al, 2015), and engaging in critical literacy, are linked to “critical social practices” (Lewison et al., 2015, p. 6), one of which is “taking action to promote social justice” (Lewison et al., 2015, p. 6). Sensoy and DiAngelo (2012), critical social justice scholars, also emphasize the importance of educators’ positionality in their work on social justice and argue that much of a social justice educators’ work begins with an understanding of the educator’s own positionality; that is, understanding one’s own positionality as an educator means “the recognition that where you stand in relation to other in society shapes what you can see and understand about the world” (p. 8). The critical literacy prompts, if taken up, might have prompted this kind of response from participants. However, rather than grounded in their own positionality, social justice education was discussed more broadly. Particularly they discussed the feeling indicators that social justice education was happening and how they understood that social justice might be uncomfortable, but that it is important. All the while, they insisted on a political “line” that should not be crossed when doing social justice education work.

Social Justice Education When asked about how they identify social justice education, Ashley claimed that it includes a “wide range of different books or topics” that encompassed all of the books and topics raised during the book club. However, more often than naming content, Jane and Nicole used feelings, namely feelings of discomfort, to convey that social justice included uncomfortable topics. Francis and Stephen claimed that feeling uncomfortable was important, but were vague about how that should be done with students.

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Yet, despite feelings of comfort or discomfort with social justice, the participants agreed that it was important. Ashley and Francis self-identify themselves as activists for social justice. Jane focused on issues of diversity and the reality that diversity is a part of “the real world for students.” She says that students need to open their minds because it is inevitable that “they are gonna encounter [people different than themselves] in the real world [sic].” This type of assertion, however, reifies the above-mentioned surprise that Jane expressed about schools being racially segregated and denies diversity in students’ contemporary experiences. Stephen says that we need to resist “Teach[ing] to one type of person or about one type of person; we need to resist the concept of … the single story.” These arguments for the importance of social justice are very practically oriented. The participants see social justice as important for students to live in a world that they describe as diverse, yet the motivations for why social justice is important are vague enough that the argument for social justice could be replaced by any number of inevitable conditions of the world that students need to learn about. The importance of social justice education is not oriented towards resisting oppression or challenging injustice. There is also an audience for social justice that seems to be implicitly like the participants. In these arguments for social justice, the ownership of teaching and audience of social justice teaching seems to be the “White, middle-class background [people]” that “need to be, like, exposed.” In this way, the ownership and audience of social justice implicitly belongs to the participants and other preservice teachers like the participants. The way that they describe social justice teaching as a-political and for a comfortable audience continues these assumptions about who they might engage with social justice education.

Personal and Political: “The Line” Cho (2014) found that when doing critical literacy, that not all preservice teachers want to get involved with something so “political” (Cho, 2014). Yet both social justice education and critical literacy are always, and intentionally, political (Janks, 2010; Lewison et al, 2015). According to the participants during the course of all of the book club sessions, they are open to social justice education when they are presenting facts and they want to model themselves after teachers who, Stephen observed, “keep big p or little p politics out of it and try to just state the facts.”

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What these “facts” are remained ambiguous during book club conversations. When asked about what “facts” could be considered “facts,” Stephen and Ashley answered with “I don’t’ know.” And that if students want to “spin on it, they can…. I don’t know.” Yet, Stephen reiterated that effective teaching is when “you … try to tell [classroom students] facts.” In this case study, I learned that the participants understood social justice in contradictory ways. Furthermore, the participants understood that social justice agendas may place teachers in conflict with parents with different political views. If mature and comfortable, perhaps students will lead these preservice teachers down social justice paths, but until they have students take the lead, preservice teachers have difficult terrain ahead of them if they want to avoid discomfort and teach just facts. I wonder how the threat of being perceived as political, having their own views, and differently minded parents will deter students from social justice education. Parental deterrents from social justice education is a prominent finding in critical literacy research. “Potential parental opposition to the issues being addressed [and]… overstepping their boundaries” (Norris et al., 2012, p. 62) are frequently raised by preservice teachers who feel that critical literacy approaches are too political. The participants in this study were concerned that sharing their views was not right or fair because everyone has their own views. Yet, this everyone-has-an-opinion perspective may be more accurately be rooted in the ways that those who are ethically concerned with issues of oppression… are demeaned as proponents of an oppressive ‘political correctness’ that makes the real victims of oppression ‘regular people’… in this configuration those of us who join the struggle for critical emancipation are the true oppressors in the contemporary world. (Kincheloe, 2008, p. ix) If the preservice teachers look to dominant discourses for what the “facts” are, and how to teach in ways that are both socially justice oriented and critical, the type of teaching that they do will not be critical, but will reinforce already existing ideas and ideologies embedded in educational contexts. Educational sites are not neutral (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 2) and preservice teachers who wish to do social justice teaching, or critical literacy as a social justice pedagogy, are faced with

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“minefields of educational contradictions” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 1). Making choices amongst these contradictions cannot be easily accomplished by just finding the “facts.”

Positioning Themselves as Social Justice Educators – But are They? The purpose of this book club was not for preservice teachers to do any curricular planning or to spend significant time applying the conversations about picturebooks to an imagined classroom audience. However, imagined future classrooms were a destination for conversation over and over again. Participants in the book club held contradictory views that social justice education is difficult, but important. It is also political, while employing imagined future-teacher selves, and the ambiguous third party “you,” teachers who are not political. By rhetorically using the word “you,” the participants in the study positioned themselves as committing to none of these approaches that they suggest. The nebulous, third party, “you,” might want to try these things, but they are making no personal commitment to this type of teaching. The literature suggests that preservice teachers avoid the political by engaging in the personal. However, what is complicated in this strategy is that while they may consider their teaching a personal endeavor, teaching work, particularly critical literacy and social justice is political and social (Janks, 2010; Kincheloe, 2008). “There are always social, political, cultural, and economic dimension to any event or issue we might first describe as personal” (Lewison, et al., 2015, p. xxxi). The way that the preservice teachers discuss social justice education, as important but risky and position the teaching of “facts” as safer connects to the ways in which they positioned themselves throughout the critical literacy book club. They are capable, yet the way that they discussed texts maintains distance from engaging with the issues of social injustice raised in the texts in a similar way that their reasoning about what social justice is and how it is important, yet they evaded the political nature of social justice, like they did with critical literacy. Perhaps the connection between insisting that they “do not know” enough to teach the diverse, social issues texts also informs the way they do not seriously consider pursuing social justice, in critical ways, with students. “Teachers who are not aware of critical pedagogy and are less familiar with world and local events are more unlikely to protest the standardized curriculum designed to uphold the status quo” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. viii). Critical scholars argue that “little in

210 the world and certainly little in the world of education is neutral” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 5), yet the notion that teaching can still be conceptualized as just teaching the “facts,” is continually reified by preservice teachers. Is this indicative of honest ignorance about world and local events, or can this be understood as an intentional action to avoid information, and research, about world and local events maintained to justify their neutral approach? Teacher educators who hope to introduce critical pedagogies, such as critical literacy, have a “difficult task of inducing students to challenge the very practices and ways of seeing,” knowing, and teaching, “they have been taught in their professional programs” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 4). For example, the conflict within teacher education programs that on the one hand teach standardized curriculum and teach preservice teachers be “successful” teachers of reading (Reutzel & Cooter, 2004), are positioned against critical, social justice, teachers that are characterized as “brave” and “subversive,” critical educators that “resist such control of knowledge,” but do so “at their own risk” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. viii). When given the choice between “success” (Reutzel & Cooter, 2004) and “rigorous and too often unappreciated work” (Kincheloe, 2008, pp. x – xi), teacher educators and researchers must remember how these narratives are always at play and create a context for discussions about curriculum and engaging critical pedagogies.

Conclusion When literacy and reading are conceptually understood as personal endeavors, such as the research participants conceptualize it when they are individually responsible for determining the “key themes and ideas” (Ohio Department of Education, 2014, p. 9), the approach to reading assumes that the meaning of the text, lies in the text, not the social practice of reading the text. And when reading is conceptualized as an individual endeavor, so are the responses to it. In Chapter Four, the research questions led me to an examination of the ways in which Ashley, Francis, Jane, Nicole and Stephen primarily approached texts with comprehension in mind. However, what they chose to raise, or ignore, from the texts in conversation was the more interesting social practice where power is at play in the act of constructing themselves and others through dialogue about the books. My research questions highlight data findings that convey ways that the participants in this study are simply able to articulate their positionality. Yet, what I found as I reread the data,

211 relistened to the audio recordings, and studied the ways that the participants interacted with the books, the conclusions that I reached did not fall obviously together in obvious themes or a clear organization. What I encountered most in the ways that I tried to group together participants and find common responses was instead a set of contradictions. Participants read for comprehension, but skipped their own positioning by the texts, yet then wanted to connect the books to issues of social justice education. The participants brought different levels of awareness of social issues to each book and made personal connections to the books without extending beyond their own personal knowledge. In other words, the participants identified social issues such as the complexity of identity, but the participants neglected to inquire further into the “sociohistorical and cultural context” of the books (Short, 2017, p. 10).

Implications for Future Practice: Notes from a Teacher Educator This case study research was an evolving project. At its conclusion, I wonder about how future research and teaching are shaped by these specific research findings as well as my own musings about the project along the way. In this section, I reflect on how I might do critical literacy work, and book clubs, with preservice teachers in the future. Pedagogically, there is no right way to a accomplish critical literacy, the research in Chapter Two already established this. And critical literacy is not the only way to foster social justice educators. However, I personally enjoyed this research endeavor and I would like to do similar inquires in the future. In this section, I share implications for future practice.

The Book Club as a Research Site Most of the research on preservice teaching and critical literacy in the literature review for Chapter Two highlighted the way that preservice teacher resisted doing critical literacy work. The findings from this study, share the same features of resistance. However, what is unique about this study was that students were engaged and interested, not reluctant or overtly resistant to participate in what they called a critical literacy book club research site. As self-proclaimed “readers,” they found conversations about books in and of themselves joyful and they enjoyed the book club meetings. This positive reception of the books, and book club meetings was encouraging. Especially outside of a course with graded participation in the book club, the participants were pleased to participate. In future research endeavors, I think the

212 book club setting which was understood as collective and a potential space for changing ideas together is potentially a very productive one. The standalone nature of the book club, outside of course assignments, was also a unique space in which the participants did not concern themselves with the grade that was attached to their participation, which seemed to create a more relaxed setting that other classroom-based conversations I have had with preservice teachers in my experience as a teacher educator instructor.

Role of the Researcher as Facilitator In Chapter Three, I wrote about the intended role of myself as the researcher in the group. I discussed the tension of planning for an open but critical dialogue and discussed the ways in which, as a facilitator, there would be times appropriate for intervention during book club conversations in order to keep the conversations critically oriented. After facilitating the group, I reiterate the difficulty of striking a balance between open and critical dialogues. As discussed in the framing of critical literacy data discussion in Chapter Four, the participants in the study dismissed the critical literacy prompts for the study and I did not anticipate that the way that participants would repeatedly ignore my redirections towards the critical literacy discussion prompts. While, initially, I attempted to intervene and insist on getting to the questions, as designed, I made the decision after three out of six sessions that it was more interesting to me that I more thoroughly understand the ways in which the participants thought about book clubs, and themselves, without the critical literacy prompts, while still considering themselves critical. In a process of progressive focusing (Parlett & Hamilton, 1976 as cited in Stake, 1995), the issue of study transitioned from how preservice teachers in the study would use critical literacy to the way that they understood critical literacy without using the discussion prompts. In the process of letting go of my insistence that the participants use the critical literacy prompts, I slid closer to the “neutral facilitator” than critical redirector during conversation. The conversations, if redirected back to the critical literacy prompts may have been more uncomfortable, and in that tension the participants may have learned more. Discomfort (Ohito, 2016) and tension (Lewison et al, 2015, p. 75) during conversation is often more productive than a comfortable conversation. Yet, outside the context of coursework, with voluntary participants who came every week, eager to talk about the books and their responses to the books, I was

213 fascinated by the ways that the students spoke with each other and what they chose to talk about without my redirection. My focus redirected to what happened when I was not acting as a teacher educator, but rather a facilitator who listened more than I talked. As a teacher, that is a fair critique of my work: I talk a lot and do not listen as much. Because the motivation for this study was a personal interest in my future work with preservice teachers doing critical literacy, it was a personally productive experience to hear what happened when my voice did not redirect the conversation. My absence in the conversation was of interest in and of itself to me. However, it was quite clear that if teacher educators intend to do critical literacy with preservice teachers, “it is absolutely necessary that the participants, or pedagogies… have an explicitly critical purpose” (Myers & Eberfors, 2010, p. 153). As a facilitator, with more participation in the book club setting, I may be able to make critical literacy more explicit, rather than default to the “flow” of conversation.

Visual Thinking Strategies In the research design process, I made intentional decisions to include visual analysis as an important part of critical literacy book club conversations. The texts chosen were picturebooks and, as such, the visual illustrations are important parts of multimodal texts. In planning, I designed engagement with the illustrations based on the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) by Yenawine (2013). These strategies, while presented and offered to the participants were not taken up by the participants explicitly in conversation. Their observations about color, line, and choice of illustration styles were a part of the critical literacy book club conversations, but these observations of the illustrations do not play a prominent role in the data findings because of the research questions asked. Furthermore, VTS relies primarily on viewers’ responses to visual images, color, etc. and observations about the illustrations were made during each of the sessions, yet the focus on written text, as the primary source of authority from the text, or what the text was about, was also pervasive throughout the book club sessions. In future endeavors, facilitating conversation such that observations of the images inform the discussion of the text would help integrate the importance of the picturebook as a unique type of text medium that offers written and visual modes of communication.

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Books Alone In the literature review on doing critical literacy with preservice teachers, the critique that reading social issues books is not enough for critical literacy engagements is already established. While many of the authors who use social issues, books argue that they can “facilitate provocative and productive multi-tiered inquiries into social justice topics” (Enriquez, 2014) and “explore how difference can make a difference” (Van Sluys et al., 2005, p. 16), exposure to social issues texts alone do not prompt criticality. To be clear, the design of this study never intended to place the burden of prompting criticality onto the books alone. Yet, when the participants disregarded the critical literacy prompts, and engaged in their own version of criticality with texts, the assumed power of the texts was reintroduced into conversation and not adequately addressed by me, the researcher. When Nicole asked, “I don’t know how good of a job this book does, like, trying to get someone to look at a different culture in a better light?” during the discussion of Indian culture in Pashmina, I wrote down her question, and wondered how the other participants would address the issue she raised. Schmidt et al. (2007) describe the ways that students in their studies claimed that “a text holds power in itself” (p. 54) when doing critical literacy with preservice teachers. Placing the power of a book, not in the reading of the text, but in the book itself is an interesting way that Schimdt et al. (2007) discuss the ways that preservice teachers avoid doing personal critical literacy work. This is connected to and expanded by the preservice teachers in this study. The responsibility for being a good or effective text for understanding the experience of others is laid upon the authors and illustrators. There seemed to be no strategic, group decision to do this. However, the criteria for whether the book was a good book or, in Stephen’s words, “achieved the goal” of the text, was partially based on the authentic experience of the author and illustrator. In my data analysis, these types of responses to the texts helped form the themes of the way that the participants positioned themselves as un-knowing readers and that the books were responsible for the teaching of unknown knowledge. However, when I reflect on the way that participants did this, I did nothing to disrupt their assumptions about the power of books that the

215 books hold, themselves. Perhaps disrupting this notion, with a more active role as a facilitator might disrupt these assertions from participants.

Reading Social Issues Books is Not Enough: They Do Need Background Knowledge Furthermore, reading social issues picturebooks is not enough material to generate productive critical literacy engagement with texts. What the participants realized during most book club conversations was that they needed more background knowledge in order to meaningfully address the social issues raised by the texts. As a researcher, I wondered if participants would seek out research to better inform their reading. The answer in this case study was that, no, they did not. I wonder how linking the social issues raised in texts with research, media, or other information about the social issues raised might more thoughtfully engage participants with social issues. Furthermore, a more thorough introduction to critical theories that can be operationalized to interrogate texts, beyond Feminism, seem to be of need in preparing students for critical literacy engagement. Feminism was the only socio-cultural lens for analysis that students could reference for analyzing texts. Other interpretive lenses or theories, such as Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness, Postcolonialism, Queer Theory, Critical Disability and other critical theories may expand their repertoires of lenses that preservice teachers may take up to analyze texts.

More Focused Book Club Topics Furthermore, the use of the term “diverse” social issues, and the range of topics that could be address by any number of the five picturebooks and one graphic novel selected was a difficult term to wrangle for myself, and for students. “Diversity” is a difficult term to use because it is so imprecise and that imprecision can obscure the lived realities of the effects of privilege and oppression. Au (2014) worries in the introduction to Rethinking Multicultural Education: Teaching for Racial and Cultural Justice that multicultural education may be equated with “diversity” and become the “everyone else category” (p. 3). Au (2014) expresses concern that if the topics in teacher education are too broad and associated with too many different forms of diversity, education may “give short shrift to the powerful and systemic racism, the legacies of colonization, and the realities of cultural oppression” (p. 3).

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As a reminder the topics/genres/categories as assigned in The Literacy Course include: bullying, a graphic novel (genre selection), LGBTQ, social justice, disability, and an award winner (category selection). I also selected texts that were racially diverse, ethnically diverse and religiously diverse. The reason that I selected diverse, social issues picturebooks is because I hoped to create critical distance for the participants, as mentioned above, and to align with The Literacy Course, which was covering a broad range of social issues, and social justice issues, so the range of the topics addressed were quite broad. The participants were grateful that when I used the term “diversity,” I really was presenting more than just race. “Diversity” is often a code- word for “race” in their experiences. However, in future research, for clarity of focus for the group, cohesion of conversation from week to week and greater intertextuality between meetings, I recommend that book clubs be focused more tightly around a particular social issue or representation of “othered” (Tatum, 2000) social identity. For example, a critical literacy book club studying the portrayal of rural America might be of interest for preservice teachers who seem newly concerned with the distance between themselves, their worldview, and students who live in rural spaces. Other topics for critical literacy book club include studies of language, ability, religion and immigration, some of the least frequently addressed identities and associated oppressions (Gorski et al., 2013) addressed in preservice teacher coursework.

Considering Theories of Literacy And finally, in order to do critical literacy well with preservice teachers, there needs to be reading, and some teaching, that not only addresses what critical literacy is, but uncovers the historical, political, and social underpinnings of what literacy is and how it is defined. A greater awareness of the frames that one uses to discuss reading, literacy, and critical literacy may be the most important part of engaging students with critical literacy in the way that I define the term for this study, not the way that students define literacy for themselves using dominant discourses about reading, literacy, and the socially powerful binary of constructing literacy and, in opposition, illiteracy (Janks, 2010). “A conscious awareness of the theories that influence our teaching enables us to be more reflective of our practice” (Christensen, 2015, p. xx).

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As Harste (as cited in Lewison et al., 2015) argues, “don’t be afraid to take a stance” (p. 25). Teaching literacy, as an individual reading endeavor, with an occasional sprinkling of critical literacy in pedagogy is not doing critical literacy. Eclecticism … allows us to sidestep doubt rather than confront the theoretical beliefs that were at play when we acted. Taking a position is not wrong. The problem is taking a position that does not challenge anyone, including you. (p. 25) When reading the literature on doing critical literacy with preservice teachers, beliefs about what reading is and what literacy is were prominent and overarching findings, but what I failed to appreciate as a novice critical literacy scholar was the depth of these beliefs. The philosophies of both models make profoundly different assumptions about learners and literacy. Namely, learners in critical literacy work are “language users, not language recipients” (Van Sluys, 2005, p. 2 as cited in Lee, 2011, p. 100), literacy is “a social practice” not “skills to master,” (Lee, 2011, p. 100) and always a political endeavor (Janks, 2010).

Other Research Directions for Future Practice There are just a few more research directions that I discovered throughout the process of research, designing, and executing this study that I will mention before concluding this chapter.

Statistics on Diversity in Children’s Literature Beyond Race The first is that the research available about diversity in children’s texts and publishing is almost entirely based on race. Statistics about representations of gender, sexuality, ability and disability including physical and cognitive ability, geographic region represented, citizenship status and immigration, religion, etc. beyond race are not well accounted for in measures of diversity. I agree with Au’s (2014) assertion that multiculturalism broadly may obscure specific realities of oppression, specifically racial oppression. However, if “diversity” remains a code word for just race in children’s literature, other ways that individuals experience “otherness” (Tatum, 2002) will continue to be unaccounted for in children’s texts and publishing. Even the We Need Diverse Books ™ campaign, whose definition of diversity goes beyond race, offers statistics on just race in children’s literature. In Chapter One specifically, I searched for these statistics to discuss representation of the diverse social issues I chose for the texts, but could not

218 find research to support arguments about either the scarcity or availability of books with diverse representations of social identities beyond race. The other social identities addressed in this literature that have less research and less prominence in the conversations about publishing including not limited to: “LGBTQIA, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities, and ethnic, cultural and religious minorities” (We Need Diverse Books ™, 2018). According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (2015), who delineate the diversity of racial representation more specifically, in 2015, 7.6% of books had African / African American characters, 3.3% had characters with Asian Pacific / Asian Pacific American characters, 2.4% had Latinx characters, and 0.9% had American Indians / First Nations characters.” (Hyuck, 2016, n.p.) As can be seen in these statistics, “of all minority children’s literatures in the United States, African American children’s literature has the longest history and largest body of work” (Nel, 2017, p. 29). However, research on the representation of other social identities, besides race, may benefit scholarship in critical multiculturalism, critical social justice, and critical literacy.

Research Participants Beyond K-12 Preservice Teachers The literature on critical literacy in the literature review for chapter two is specially oriented towards preservice teachers across preparation programs. However, there was no mention of any critical literacy research with daycare and early childhood, specifically preschool preservice teachers. As a mother whose daughter attends a daycare, my conversations with the directors of the program have been an interesting process of trying to introduce more diverse books as well as edging my way into training about how to teach more diverse books. Young children are developing ideas about the way the world works and children as young as three-years-old are capable of understanding “social complexity” (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001, p. 158), for example, racial understandings of themselves and others (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001). Critical literacy with young children, as young as three- to five-year-olds is the heart of some scholars’ work such as Vivian Vasquez (2014) and Mary Cowhey (2006). However, there seems to be scant research on preparing preservice teachers whose work will be with these young learners. Furthermore, many early childhood care centers to not require degrees or licensure for educators. Research with these educators who do not participate in official

219 licensure is another opportunity for learning more about critical literacy reception and use in these educational settings. Finally, one of my personal motivations for research resurfaces here at the end of this study. The population that first drew my interest to the way that books are conceptualized as neutral, and good for reading regardless of content, etc., were other mothers. I wonder how doing critical literacy with other mothers, or parents more broadly and other community organizations, not associated with the official educational settings of children, contribute to understandings about how critical literacy is received and engaged in homes and other non-institutionalized educational settings.

Summary and Conclusion of the Study The focus of this study’s inquiry was to discover the way that a particular group of preservice teachers constructed critical literacy and narrated their social identities in the context of a critical literacy book club reading diverse, social issues picturebooks. The findings suggest that socialized notions of traditional reading, or “reading with the text” (Janks, 2010, p. 11) remain dominant discourses of literacy amongst the participants in the study. Furthermore, how the preservice teachers positioned themselves as readers reified their powerful social positions already available to them via their social identities. The nuances that I discovered from the specificity of selecting just one case study of preservice teachers who joined me in the critical literacy book club offer additional lenses for understanding the ways that preservice teachers understand literacy and their social positions. Discussing issues of the age of readership with preservice teachers, for example, may be an interesting way of anticipating some of the avoidance strategies for engaging critical literacy with preservice teachers. Also, reconsidering the dynamics of participation in critical literacy book club conversations is also an important point of reflection.

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Tonatiuh, D. (n.d.) About Duncan Tonatiuh [website]. Retrieved from http://www.duncantonatiuh.com/about.html Twomey, S. (2007). Reading ‘woman’: Book club pedagogies and the literary imagination. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50(5), 398-407. U.S. Department of Education (2016). The state of racial diversity in the educator workforce. [online document]. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial- diversity/state-racial-diversity-workforce.pdf U.S. Department of Education (n.d.). College- and Career-Ready Standards. Retrieved from https://www.ed.gov/k-12reforms/standards Van Ausdale, D. & Feagin, J. (2001). The first R: how children learn race and racism. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Van Duinen D. V., Hamilton, E. R. & Rumohr-Voskuil, G. (2017). Challenging constructions together: Implications of a mother-daughter book club for classroom practice. Voices from the Middle, 24(4), 67-73. Van Sluys, K., Laman, T. T., Legan, N. (2005). Critical literacy and preservice teachers: Changing definitions of what it might mean to read. Journal of Reading Education, (31)1, 13-22. Varus, M. (2010). Critical multiculturalism and higher education. In Critical multiculturalism: Theory and practice. S. May & C. E. Sleeter (Eds.). New York, NY: Routledge. Vasquez, V. M. (2004/2014). Negotiating critical literacies with young children (10th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Vaughn, M., Allen, S., Kologi, S. & McGowan, S. (2015). Revisiting literature circles as open spaces for critical discussions. Journal of Reading Education, 40(2), 27-32. Walker, L. H. & Waldron, L.S. (2009). Shopping carts & apple tarts. Teaching Children Mathematics, 16(3), 150-153. Watkins, G. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. Wetzel, M. W. & Rogers, R. (2015). Constructing racial literacy through critical language awareness: A case study of a beginning literacy teacher. Linguistics and Education (32), 27-40. DOI: 10.1016/j.linged.2015.03.014

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Yenawine, P. (2014). Visual thinking strategies: Using art to deepen learning across school disciplines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Yin, R. K. (2014). Case study research: Design and methods (5th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Zapata, A., Fugit, M. & Moss, D. (2017). Awakening socially just mindsets through visual thinking strategies and diverse picture books. Journal of Children’s Literature, (43)2, 62- 69. References for Children’s Literature Included in Study Alexie, S. (2016). Thunder boy jr.. New York, NY: Hachette Book Group. Chanani, N. (2017). Pashmina. New York, NY: First Second. Cooper, A., Golden, D. & McCard, R. (2014). The hoodie hero. Washington, DC: Shoutmouse Press. Cottin, M. (2006). The black book of colors. Toronto, Canada: Groundwood Books. Newman, L. (2017). Sparkle boy. New York, NY: Lee & Low Books Inc. Tonatiuh, D. (2014). Separate is never equal: Sylvia Mendez and her family’s fight for desegregation. New York, NY: Abrams Books for Young Readers.

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Appendix A: IRB Approval Letter

9-Jan-18

To: Vanessa Winn and Brittany Aronson ([email protected]; [email protected])

Educational Leadership

RE: Social Justice Educator Identity in a Critical Literacy Book Club

Project reference number is: 02688e (please refer to this ID number in all correspondence to compliance administration)

The project noted above and as described in your application for registering Human Subjects (HS) research has been screened to determine if it is regulated research or meets the criteria of one of the categories of research that can be exempt from approval of an Institutional Review Board (per 45 CFR 46). The determination for your research is indicated below.

The research described in the application is regulated human subjects research, however, the description meets the criteria of at least one exempt category included in 45 CFR 46 and associated guidance.

The Applicable Exempt Category(ies) is/are: 2

As part of the exemption process, your procedures were reviewed for and found to be in adherence to the principles for the ethical conduct of research as described in the Belmont Report and Declaration of Helsinki.

Research may proceed upon receipt of this certification and compliance with any conditions described in the accompanying email message. When research is deemed exempt from IRB review, it is the responsibility of the researcher listed above to ensure that all future persons not listed on the filed application who i) will aid in collecting data or, ii) will have access to data with subject identifying information, meet the training requirements (CITI Online Training).

If you are considering any changes in this research that may alter the level of risk or wish to include a vulnerable population (e.g. subjects <18 years of age) that was not previously specified in the application, you must consult the Research Compliance Office before implementing these changes.

Exemption certification is not transferrable; this certificate only applies to the researcher specified above. All research exempted from IRB review is subject to post-certification monitoring and audit by the compliance office.

------

Neal H. Sullivan, PhD

Director: Research Ethics and Integrity Program

Office for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship

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Appendix B: Lay Summary of the Research You are invited to participate in a research study that will help me learn more about how preservice teachers understand their social identities. This research is being done for my dissertation as a part of my program as a doctoral student at Miami University. I am asking you to participate in a book club with me. I know that many of you are preparing to teach in middle and high school classrooms, and you may not have anticipated me inviting you to read picturebooks in a book club, but I find that picturebooks are a really powerful form of literature and a rich medium to begin conversations . During our book club, we will be discussing 6 texts (one each week of the book club). These 6 books align with what you are already doing in The Literacy Course : (2/7) Bullying: The Hoodie Hero by Ashley Cooper, Daequan Golden (2/14) A Graphic Novel: Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani (2/21) LGBTQ: Sparkle Boy by Lesléa Newman (2/28) Social Justice: Separate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation by Duncan Tonatiuh (3/7) Disability: Black Book of Colors by Menena Cottin (3/14) An Award Winner: Thunder Boy Jr. by Sherman Alexie I have specifically selected these texts because they are social issues texts, and our conversations that we have in the book club will be about the picturebooks as well as social issues in schools and society. If you would like the opportunity to meet with me before this course for the next six weeks from 5:00 – 6:15, I will bring dinner each week, you will each get a set of the books listed above to keep, and you will have a chance to practice critical literacy. The benefit for you in doing this study is the opportunity to practice critical literacy. Critical literacy practices may be something that you choose to implement with your future classrooms as well. I believe this book club will be an opportunity for practicing how to raise, discuss, and consider social justice issues. During our book club, we will be using a few different strategies for analyzing the images in the picturebooks as well as the written text. Overall, we will be taking a look at these picturebooks with a critical literary lens. Critical literacy can be situated under the umbrella of other critical pedagogies. Generally, when doing critical pedagogy

240 curriculum, we are examining issues of power and justice. Critical literacy, quite simply, is an examination of power and language in text (written and visual). Critical literacy scholars would say that what we read and how we read are important. Social issues picturebooks and conversations about social justice can be sensitive topics. This study will take place in a group setting, so others will be in conversation with you as you discuss these topics. A minimal risk to you is that the topics raised or the conversations had may make you feel uncomfortable at times. This group is not graded or connected in any way to your grades in The Literacy Course. There is no grade benefit for: participating, not participating, or, participating and dropping out of my study. I will ask if you would be willing to share 2 course assignments with me: (1) your pre-course survey and (2) your “Life as a Reader” assignment. These two pieces of data will help me better understand your experiences with literacy. I will not assess or grade these assignments and I will not share any of my own reflections on your work with your instructor for the course. All of the data that I collect, via video and audio recording during our book club, as well as the notes that I take during book club, and in follow up interviews (which I will schedule separately, after the end of the book club meetings), will be kept confidential and I will give you pseudonyms in my data analysis (you may pick your pseudonyms). When the data that I record is not being used for data analysis, the video and audio data as well as my notes will be stored on a password protected computer. Upon completion of my dissertation and publications from my dissertation, I will destroy my notes, audio and video files. I have a passion for picturebooks and I am really excited about doing this study and learning with you. I have selected some really interesting and thought-provoking books (I think) and I am excited to talk about them. I am so grateful that you would consider participating and I look forward to getting to know those of you who do choose to participate.

All the Best,

Vanessa Winn

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Appendix C: Participant Consent Form Description of the Research: The purpose of this study is to understand how preservice teachers discuss social identity while engaging in a critical literacy book club. Specifically, my research question is: How does a critical literacy book club serve as a social space for preservice teachers to construct critical literacy and discuss social issues?

Research Procedures and Time Required for Participation: Should you agree to be part of this study, you will be allowing me to use your audio and video recorded conversations during the critical literacy book club to be a part of data collection. You will also allow me to use two course assignments (1) the Pre-Course Survey and (2) your Life as a Reader Papers in my data collection. I may also request that you join me for a post-book club interview. No names or identifying factors will be used when collecting data.

Risks: There are no known physical risks to participating in this study. Through self-reflection during conversation or writing, you may begin discussing memories and previous events that were emotionally hurtful to you in the past. If necessary, you will be provided with information on counseling and you will be reminded that you can withdraw from the study at any time.

Benefits: Participation in this study will contribute to the larger body of knowledge on critical literacy pedagogy with preservice teachers, using critical book clubs in preservice teacher education, and understanding how teachers narrate their social identities. The results of this study will contribute to scholarship on these topics and inform the practices of teacher educators.

Confidentiality: All data materials remain confidential, and your name will not be attached to any data. Pseudonyms will be used for all people, proper nouns, and identifiable events. No references will be made which could link participants to the research. All data will be kept in a password- protected file on the principle investigator’s personal computer.

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Voluntary Participation: Your participation in this study is voluntary. You may stop participating at any time by emailing [email protected] or calling 814-207-0486. Or, you may contact my dissertation advisor Dr. Brittany Aronson at any time by emailing [email protected] or calling 513-529-6845.

You may choose to only include what you feel comfortable with contributing and request certain information not be included in the study.

Contact Information: If you have any questions at any time about the study or the procedures, (or you experience adverse effects as a result of participating in this study) you may contact the researcher (Vanessa Winn) or the doctoral advisor (Dr. Brittany Aronson):

Vanessa G. Winn (Researcher) Dr. Brittany Aronson (Doctoral 210 East Spring Street Advisor) 306 McGuffey Hall 210 East Spring Street Oxford, OH 45056 306 McGuffey Hall (513) 529 -6825 (Department) Oxford, OH 45056 (814) 207 -0486 (Cell) (513) 529-6845 (Office) [email protected] [email protected]

If you have questions about your rights as a participant, you may contact the Office for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship (513-529-3600) or [email protected] CONSENT I have read the above information. I have received a copy of this form. I agree to participate in this study. Participant's signature ______Date ______

Investigator's signature ______Vanessa G. Winn ______Date: 1/30/18

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Appendix D: Critical Literacy Discussion Guide and Visual Thinking Strategies Prompts

Critical Literacy Book Club Discussion Guide (Adapted from Janks et al., 2014 & Zapata, Fugit & Moss, 2017)

Critical Literacy Prompts Questions on Language and Positioning (Adapted from Janks et al., 2014): 1. How does the picturebook construct the reader? (p. 17) 2. How does the picturebook author /illustrator construct him/herself in this text/image? (p. 17) 3. How does the author /illustrator construct his/her relationship with the reader? (p. 17) 4. How does the author /illustrator construct the reader in this particular part of the text/illustration? (p. 17) 5. What positions does the [Name of Text] create for [social identity]? Who benefits from this? (p. 18) a. E.g. “What positions do Cottin and Faria, the author and illustrator of The Black Book of Colors, create for sighted readers? Who does that benefit?” 6. How does the writer /illustrator use language to position [social identity group or individual]? (p. 19) 7. Who is the ideal reader for this picturebook? (p. 19)

Questions about Context (Adapted from Janks et al., 2014): 1. What is the purpose of this picturebook? (p. 23) 2. Where was the text written? Where is it being read? (p. 23) 3. When is the date this picturebook was produced? What has gone before? (p. 23) 4. Who is speaking / writing / illustrating? (p. 23) 5. What other texts do you, as readers, have to compare with this picturebook? (p. 23)

Questions about How Power Works in Texts (Adapted from Janks et al., 2014): 1. Does this picturebook legitimate any groups or ideas? (p. 29) 2. What does this picturebook conceal? (p. 29)

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3. Does this picturebook support unity of any groups of people? (p. 29) 4. Does this picturebook fragment any groups of people? (p. 29) 5. What, if anything, is presented as natural or unnatural? (p. 30)

Questions of Identity and Diversity (Adapted from Janks et al., 2014) 1. Can you give examples of conflicting demands made by your different identity positions? (p. 37) 2. How do you use language differently in your identity positions? (p. 37) 3. How does the use of language in this picturebook position you as a reader? (p. 38) 4. Who are you connected to by the languages you speak? How are the protagonists and supporting characters connected to or distanced from you by the language they speak? (p. 42) 5. Who gives order or instructions in this picturebook? (p. 52) 6. Who speaks? Who speaks the most in this picturebook? (p. 52) 7. Whose voices are listened to and believed? (p. 52) 8. How does word choice affect how you respond to the context of the picturebooks? (p. 123)

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Visual Thinking Strategies

“Examples of Questions Initial visual analysis  What’s going on in this picture? What do you see? Who or what is the main focus? What colors are most vivid? What do you see in the foreground and what is hiding in the background? Where does your eye go first? Structural analysis  What do you see that makes you say that? Why would the illustrator have drawn it like that? Why do the colors matter? What visual features, themes, and/or recurring images do you see? How do the visual features provide understanding? Extended analysis  What more can you find? What details did you not see the first time? What do you think is not shown in the picture? What perspective is the author taking? How is that impacting the image? Where would you be if you were in the picture? Aesthetic response  How does this image make you feel? What emotions arise as you take in this image? What does your heart say in response to this? What is your body doing as you read this image? How does that feel?” (Zapata, Fugit & Moss, 2017, p. 63)

References

Janks, H. Dixon, K., Ferreira, A., Granville, S. & Newfield, D. (2014). Doing critical literacy: Texts and activities for students and teachers. New York, NY: Routledge.

Zapata, A. Z. Fugit, M. M. & Moss, D. D. (2017). Awakening socially just mindsets through visual thinking strategies and diverse picturebooks. Journal of Children’s Literature, (43)3, 62-69.

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Appendix E: Individual Interview Questions Guide Introduction: The purpose of this interview is for me to better understand how you experienced the critical literacy book club (CLBC). I have already listened to our meetings and I have transcripts from each of them. But before I start my own meaning-making from our meetings, I would like to know more about how you experienced and thought about the CLBC. So I would like to start with some general questions about your experience and then ask more specific questions about some things I have been reflecting on personally after re-listening to and transcribing our conversations during CLBC.  To the extent you feel comfortable, how do you describe your social identities?  How did you prepare for book club participation each week?  In your own words, how would you describe your participation in CLBC?  Was there a book, or books, that you felt drawn to more than the others?  Were there times when you felt more comfortable than others? Or experienced discomfort?  Is there anything else you would like me to know or that you want to share?

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