Cynthia Lewis

Critical Issues: Limits of Identification: The Personal, Pleasurable, and Critical in Reader Response

In this article, I argue that the most common use of reader-response theory in the classroom is misguided in its emphasis on personal response and identification. After reconsidering the meaning of the “aesthetic stance” as defined in the work of Louise Rosenblatt, I discuss the social and political nature of readers, texts, and contexts. I include two examples of teachers talking about a work of childrens literature to illustrate that when a text is about characters whose cultures and life worlds are very different from the readers, disrupting the readers inclination to identify with the text can heighten the readers self consciousness and text consciousness. This stance should not be viewed as less aesthetic than a more direct or immediate relationship between reader and text. Finally, I argue for a broader view of what aesthetic reading can mean, one that addresses the social and political dimensions of texts and invites students to take pleasure in both the personal and the critical.

Mobilizing Emotion in an Urban English Classroom

In this paper, we argue that emotion in English classrooms is a mediated action mobilized through discursive and material practices that transform texts and signs. We first provide an overview of the current state of English as a secondary school subject in the United States to provide a context for our work on emotion within a critical literacy framework. Next, we theorize emotion as mediated action rather than as an internal psycho-physiological state. Finally, we offer an example of how emotion was mobilized in a racially and ethnically diverse classroom that focused on documentary film analysis and production in ways that constrained and enabled particular ideologies, identities, and opportunities for learners. We argue that personal growth models of English focus on the right and tasteful kind of affect (or feeling) and mask the ideological roots of language which emotion – when we cease to police it – has the potential to illuminate.

Already Reading Texts and Contexts: Multicultural Literature in a Predominantly White Rural Community

Abby, a White teacher in a rural community, shared this sentiment in a multicultural literature discussion group she had joined with other fifththrough ninth-grade teachers. As teacher educators, we began this multicultural literature discussion group four years ago at a middle school. It is part of a long-term research project aimed at better understanding the conditions that shape how teachers select the multicultural literature they teach and how they use such texts in their classrooms. In addition to acting as researchers of and participants in the reading group, we also interviewed teacher participants, administrators, and other community members about their beliefs concerning multicultural education. Finally, we each taught a short unit using multicultural literature in one of the book-group members’ classrooms. In the discussion group meeting referred to above, we had just shared a critical book review of a novel used in Abby’s district, a book that was considered by teachers to have a “multicultural” theme. Abby felt that the book communicated a color-blind message, which she saw as a positive feature of the text. That we agreed with the negative book review—finding that the ideology of the text served to naturalize whiteness—was disturbing to Abby and the other teachers in the group. Like many educators, they were looking for practical answers about which multicultural texts to use and how to use them in their classrooms. They felt frustrated when confronted with purposes for teaching multicultural literature that conflicted with their beliefs and those of others in their community on how to teach multicultural literature sensitively and positively. It is this conflict of purposes that we, as authors, address in this article. In doing so, we use the illustrative example of a key event that created tensions in the rural community where this book group took place. We explore how the beliefs of the teachers, researchers, and concerned community members about the selection, interpretation, and teaching of multicultural literature shape and are shaped by their perceptions of the key event we describe. In telling this story, we address how ways of “already reading” multicultural literature complicate teachers’ decisions about what literature should be taught and how to teach it. As White teacher educators of primarily White preservice teachers, we strongly believe our students need to consider how their own whiteness affects their interpretations of multicultural literature and their choices about what literature would be appropriate to teach. This argument is particularly Jean Ketter Cynthia Lewis

A Critical Pedagogy of Race in Teacher Education: Response and Responsibility

We teach in a land-grant university located in an urban setting, but it is not an urban university. Rather than reflecting the cultural and linguistic diversity of the metropolitan area and schools, students who attend the university and enroll in our courses for preservice teachers are predominantly white. This context creates a specific set of challenges related to our work as critical educators. We have found that a critical pedagogy of race with white preservice teachers needs to position them as “responsible” without necessarily positioning them to feel “guilty.” While the challenges of doing this work are complex, in this chapter we share texts and pedagogies we have used to constructively address them.

Teaching Literature to Adolescents

Book reviewed in this article: On the Brink: Negotiating Literature and Life With Adolescents. By Susan Hynds. 1997. Reading Across Cultures: Teaching Literature in a Diverse Society. Edited by Theresa Rogers and Anna O. Soter. 1997. Authorizing Readers: Resistance and Respect in the Teaching of Literature. By Peter J. Rabinowitz and Michael W. Smith. 1998. Knowledge in the Making: Challenging the Text in the Classroom. Edited by Bill Corcoran, Mike Hayhoe, and Gordon M. Pradl. 1994.

Fostering Sociopolitical Consciousness With Minoritized Youth: Insights From Community-Based Arts Programs

In this chapter, we review the literature on community-based arts programs serving minoritized youth to identify the conditions and practices for fostering sociopolitical consciousness. Community-based arts programs have the capacity to promote teaching and learning practices in ways that engage youth in the use of academic skills to pursue inquiry, cultural critique, and social action. In this review, we pay particular attention to literary arts, theatre arts, and digital media arts to identify three dimensions of sociopolitical consciousness: identification, mobilization, and cosmopolitanism. By advancing the principle of sociopolitical consciousness within the theory and practice of critical and cultural relevant pedagogies, our review provides ways toward mitigating social and educational disparities.

Moving Forward with Exceptional Literacy Research and Practice amidst Educational Policy Changes.

In this Insights column, four authors address the question: Given current and potential shifts in education policy, what should literacy educators keep in mind to move forward with exceptional literacy research and practices? Majors and Lewis urge white scholars to reach out to scholars of color in learning how to generate counter-arguments that speak back to alternative facts. Tierney encourages the field to learn from scholars who are engaged in community based participatory research and activism, especially those who are engaged as allies with groups of people who are indigenous, marginalized, transnational, and cross-cultural. Beach calls on the field to consider research that examines implementation of the Common Core State Standards, such as argumentative writing and translanguaging.

Stabilizing and Destabilizing the "Ideal" Teacher in a Rural Teacher Book Group: Protective Guide, Moral Exemplar, and Purveyor of Middle Class Values.

This research is an ethnographic case study of a book group focusing on the reading and teaching of multicultural literature in a rural, predominately white, middle school setting. We examine how participants co-constructed teacher identities through the parallel narratives they created about themselves and their students. We discovered that the socio-historical models of teaching circulating in the group were taken up, recontextualized, and contested according to local notions of the ideal female teacher, particularly as inculcators of middle-class values. Despite efforts to challenge limiting identity constructions of teacher and student through creating more liberatory narratives, participants struggled to imagine a pedagogy that interrupted their stable notions of teaching and selfhood. We found that the choices about what literature to read with students and how to engage with them in critical conversations about that literature were implicated in the possible teacher selves one could enact in the classroom.

Emotion as Mediated Action in Doing Research on Learning

In this chapter, the authors theorize emotion as action mediated by language and other signs and argue that emotion has consequences for learners as it constrains and enables identity production and opportunities to learn. In particular, Lewis and Crampton apply the theories and methods of mediated discourse—discourse in action—to explain how they can be methodologically useful in the study of emotions in learning. This work foregrounds action in social spaces and provides a lens through which to understand the meaning of signs/tools in practice. Particularly important is the concept of linkage across space-time scales that include the histories of participation and practices within and outside the context where the mediated action occurs. Examples from a secondary English/Language Arts class focused on media production and analysis are used to illustrate the methodological implications of the theory of emotion developed in the chapter.

Literacy, Equity, and Imagination: Researching With/In Communities

This article focuses on the meaning and practice of publicly engaged scholarship. The authors use examples of research in partnership with communities to demonstrate what it means to be with or in a community, how mutuality can be established, and how trust can be earned. The article addresses how university-based researchers can be fully present in shared work with communities and stand with community partners in an effort to answer questions together. The first author discusses the idea of teaching as a form of publicly engaged scholarship that is community-centric, collaborative, humanizing, and guided by equity and justice. The second author discusses what it means to “stand” with community in the fight for justice and argues that we need to rethink what counts as knowledge production when working authentically alongside community instead of at or for them. The third author considers what it means to take seriously children’s ideas and perspectives as we imagine new possibilities for literacy, learning, equity, and diversity in local and global community spaces. The fourth author concludes with a discussion of issues raised and features of community-engaged literacy research evident across all examples.