Tracy Smiles

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Invitations and Negotiations: Preservice Teacher Education

By Marie LeJeune & Tracy Smiles, Western Oregon University

As teacher educators we believe we must engage future teachers in the important work of finding quality children’s and adolescent literature students they or their students might not find otherwise. We encourage students to read a wide variety of recent texts and discourage students from using overly popularized texts, not because we necessarily dismiss the quality of these texts, but because we believe that often texts with the richest possibility for critical, social, and intellectual richness may not be a part of the popular mainstream. Furthermore, we want to expose preservice teachers to texts that portray diverse groups that mirror the students with whom they will eventually work.

This week, following our theme of “Invitations and Negotiations,” we use the framework we created week 1 to discuss our beliefs, challenges, and tensions around sharing international and multicultural texts with preservice teachers.

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Invitations and Negotiations: Informal Spaces

By Marie LeJeune, Ph.D. & Tracy Smiles, Ph.D., Western Oregon University

Again we draw upon our framework that “reflects a mixture of our past experiences as literacy teachers, teacher researchers, and teacher educators, and our current perspectives on literary and pedagogical theories and how they might play out in practice.” Our framework revolves around three main aspects of the literacy invitation — the texts we choose, the literary theories we employ and ground our work within, and the actual pedagogical strategies and methods we engage in with students. This week we consider a new context for invitations — working with students in out of schooled spaces such as after school book groups, literacy clubs, and collaborative research.

This week’s blog focuses on Marie’s past work with a voluntary, after school book group for girls at the high school where she taught. Students met weekly over a semester, to read and discuss young adult literature related to issues of body image and embodied identity. All literature was self-selected by the group of girls and Marie drew on her past work with literature circles (Short, Harste & Burke, 1996) in her classroom to guide her role in the book group and with the girls.
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Invitation and Negotiation: K-12 Classrooms

By Marie LeJeune, Ph.D. & Tracy Smiles, Ph.D., Western Oregon University

Pages from The Librarian of Basra

Last week we presented a framework that, as we said, “reflects a mixture of our past experiences as literacy teachers, teacher researchers, and teacher educators, and our current perspectives on literary and pedagogical theories and how they might play out in practice.” We will use this framework to describe and reflect on some of those experiences in K-12 classrooms. Our framework revolves around three main aspects of the literacy invitation — the texts we choose, the literary theories we employ and ground our work within, and the actual pedagogical strategies and methods we engage in with students.

We also discussed how important it is for teachers and researchers to claim a theoretical framework that guides their work — this week’s blog focuses on Marie’s past work with 9th grade students at a time when she was first beginning to grapple with and attempt to adopt tenets of critical literacy within her own classroom practice and pedagogy. Marie was preparing to teach Farewell to Manzanar (Houston, 1973), a required text for the 9th grade students at the high school where she was teaching, and wanted to approach issues of multiple perspectives and issues and concerns related to impacts of war. A recent graduate course in critical literacy had inspired her to more fully embrace texts that offered possibilities for deconstructing issues of social justice and equity. At the same time, she was deeply grounded in her beliefs in the importance of response based pedagogy — of honoring the responses and experiences of individual readers (Rosenblatt, 1938).
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Invitations and Negotiations

By Marie LeJeune, Ph.D. & Tracy Smiles, Ph.D., Western Oregon University

Image of children reading

Like many of you who work with (or who are) graduate students, this is a busy time of year for us. We’re in the mad rush of the last few weeks before graduate theses are due for spring graduation and spending many hours working alongside graduate students on their research, analysis and writing. This is work we both dearly love, not only for all we see it teaching the action researchers we work with, but for all it teaches us as readers, writers, and researchers. One of our latest lessons and “aha moments”? How vital — yet slippery — claiming a theoretical framework can be for many teachers and beginning researchers. Recently we worked with a graduate student who claimed she didn’t have a theoretical framework to base her research on, even though she had a detailed research question, methodology, and data analysis plan already in place. She was working with middle school students on authentic vocabulary and language based practices and planned to incorporate rich literature selections and readalouds to investigate its impact upon students’ vocabulary growth. Trying to push her towards reflecting on the “whys” of her project—the theoretical framework she was operating from, Marie asked her (anticipating her reply), “Well if you’re working on developing vocabulary with kids why aren’t you simply doing the practices you said your principal has been encouraging, like ‘word of the day’ and vocab packets with worksheets?” Our graduate student gave us a stricken glance and said, “Well, because I would never use such inauthentic literacy practices!”
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