Conversations, connections, and culturally responsive teaching: Young adult literature in the English methods class (original) (raw)

Despite the fact that we teach English education at two very different geographically and socioculturally situated universities—one a mid-sized rural Midwestern university and the other a large urban Southern university— we discovered through extended dialogue that we both aim to make our methods courses safe spaces in which preservice teachers can consider and (de)construct their own identities as readers while preparing to teach literature in secondary schools across the United States and beyond. We realized that to create lifelong readers in those schools, we should begin with our preservice teachers’ identities as readers, knowledge of intertextuality, and considerations of reading as a social practice before asking them to become English teachers who connect their students to texts and to the world around them. And to do this, we use young adult literature and culturally responsive teaching. Notwithstanding the prevalence of adolescent fiction in popular culture (e.g., Harry Po...