Towards Socially Just Literacy Teaching in Virtual Spaces

Abstract

This study inquires into preservice teachers’ teaching experiences within a virtual tutoring field experience in a literacy methods course. Our work is situated against the greater institutional and social-political context of a competency-based model in education and the Covid-19 pandemic that led to a shift to online instruction. From a social justice lens, we approach the research questions: What are undergraduate preservice teachers’ literacy teaching experiences in a newly-transformed-to-online literacy methods course? In what ways does a virtual tutoring field experience prepare preservice teachers towards socially just literacy teaching? By engaging in Narrative Inquiry, we unraveled preservice teachers’ experiences in facilitating literacy lessons that combine print-based and multimodal instruction, while learning about the specific tensions and questions that they confronted during the process. We realized that preservice teachers’ virtual teaching experiences develop towards more socially just teaching along the areas of knowledge, interpretive frames, teaching strategies, methods, skills, and advocacy and activism. We further found that this approach is a complex process characterized by the personal, contextual, and relational aspects of teaching.

Transition to online learning by a teacher education program with limited 4IR affordances

“…The building of empathy is important because as Williams et al (2021) observed, there are inequitable access to technology and limited digital efficacy issues experienced by learners in online classrooms. One of the challenges for teacher education is to determine ways in which the preservice teachers can fulfil the work-integrated learning requirements of the teachers' qualification when face-to-face learning is not possible (Mutton, 2020;Isidro & Teichert, 2021). Carrillo and Flores (2020) concluded that teacher education needs to adapt by developing new pedagogies in the wake of online learning.…”