Pre-service teachers’ negotiation of identity and figured worlds through the reading of multicultural literature

Abstract

This paper explores the effect of a multicultural literature course on pre-service teachers' abilities to examine themselves and their figured worlds through a practice known as perspective-taking. Using critical discourse analysis as a tool to analyze three pre-service teachers' work completed in the course, this study offers a series of complications and tensions embedded in classrooms like this, where white students read multicultural literature for the purposes of change and social justice in an educational context: the tension between the student-as-student and the student as-future-teacher, the contradiction between oral and written discourse connected to identity and positioning, and the role or "power" of the multicultural text. With implications for teacher educators and pre-service teachers in a multicultural society, this study theorizes the role figured worlds play in maintaining and re/creating students' identities.

Emotions while reading literature in multicultural groups

“…In multicultural contexts, teaching Literature can make readers reconsider complex situations (Farren, 1999;Macaluso, 2015;Thein, Beach, & Parks, 2007;Thein & Sloan, 2012), and may engage them with fictional Others in a way that stimulates discussions with actual Others in the learning group. It offers an opportunity to address questions of identity and belonging (Beach & Myers, 2001;Sumara, 2002;van de Ven & Doecke, 2011) and thus raise awareness of social, ideological, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the classroom and community.…”

TeachingTo Kill a MockingbirdToday: Coming to Terms With Race, Racism, and America's Novel

“…4–5). In this sense, traditional multicultural education can run the risk of cultural tourism (Haddix, ; Lewis & Ketter, ) rather than critical perspective taking grounded in notions of difference and cultural diversity (Boyd, Causey, & Galda, ; Haddix & Price‐Dennis, ; Macaluso, ). In considering Atticus and multiculturalism, TKAM , it seems, marginalizes its black characters to validate and tell a story by, about, and for its white protagonists (and intended readers).…”