Rob Simon

“Without Comic Books, There Would Be No Me”: Teachers as Connoisseurs of Adolescents’ Literate Lives

This article explores the notion of connoisseurship as a framework for learning about adolescents’ lives and literacies and developing relationships in literacy classrooms. Drawing upon data from a two-year qualitative study of the collaborative inquiries of a community of student English teachers, the author examines inquiry projects written for an English methods course in which two student teachers, Alex and Jared, construct counternarratives about the promise of students who had been positioned as problems within their schools. These examples illustrate how becoming connoisseurs of adolescents’ distinctiveness and abilities can be a basis for developing counterpractices in literacy classrooms, opening spaces of possibility for otherwise struggling students to begin to reorient their negative trajectories in school. Among other implications, this work suggests the positive consequences of teachers’ attentiveness to students’ literacy practices, and the importance of teachers cultivating more relational stances toward students.

On the Human Challenges of Multiliteracies Pedagogy

Drawing on examples from classroom practice, this article explores implications of regarding multiliteracies pedagogy in early childhood settings as relationally and culturally situated. The author argues that investigating human dimensions of multiliteracies pedagogy involves interrogating assumptions about children and their capacities—viewing their cultural legacies and languages as powerful resources for teaching and learning, embedded in social contexts and relationships—as well as teachers—considering their positions in classrooms as sites from which theories of literacy learning can not only be applied, but also developed.

Literacy Teacher Education as Critical Inquiry

When you go at life with a question and simply try to follow the trail of answers, then all the familiar contours of culture begin to shift. Everything is connected to everything else, and the web shakes with any touch at the farthest margins.

“Just Don’t Get Up There and ‘Dangerous Minds’ Us”: Taking an Inquiry Stance on Adolescents’ Literacy Practices in Urban Teacher Education

Teacher candidates assumptions about urban students shape their expectations and approaches to teaching them . In this chapter I document how a community of teacher candidates learned about teaching English in urban high schools through investigating adolescent literacies with their students. Beginning with an examination of the social construction of “risk,” I analyze teacher candidates’ inquiries into urban adolescents’ literacy practices and the cultural and linguistic resources they bring to classrooms. Findings suggest how a critical inquiry stance encouraged individuals to interrupt deficit perspectives and “risk-laden discourses” (Vasudevan and Campano, Rev Res Educ 33(1):310–353, 2009). This informed counter discourses about the talents and capabilities of urban students that provided a basis for developing more culturally relevant and relational approaches to teaching them.

The Shifting Landscape of Literacy Teacher Education

We have taken a novel approach to this concluding chapter. Rather than simply outline some next steps for literacy teacher education, we used the previous 14 chapters as a form of data. We read through the chapters to identify common themes which we present here as a kind of educational significance of the work of our exemplary literacy teacher educators.

Navigating the “delicate relationship between empathy and critical distance”: Youth literacies, social justice and arts-based inquiry

Purpose This paper features artwork and artists’ statements by middle school students who participated in a research collaboration that involved co-authoring critical literacy curriculum for Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivors Tale (1986) with teacher candidates from the University of Toronto. Design/methodology/approach Youth explored personal and social justice issues through writing and artwork produced in response to Maus. In the process, they navigated what historian Dominick LaCapra (1998) has referred to as the “delicate relationship between empathy and critical distance” (pp. 4-5), between closely identifying with the agonizing experiences Spiegelman documents and using their inquiries to cultivate more critical positionalities and assume activist stances on historical and contemporary social justice issues. Findings As they describe in their brief statements included alongside their artwork, creating these projects allowed youth to bear witness to a terrible moment in human history and to envision how they can make a difference in their own communities. Originality/value This work suggests how the arts can be mobilized in critical literacy as a vehicle to interrogate difficult historical moments and multifaceted identity issues.