Theory and practice : preservice teachers negotiating critical literacy

In this qualitative research study, I examined how preservice teachers learned to implement critical literacy. I looked at four preservice teachers’ critical literacy teaching and learning experiences across contexts, from early schooling experiences to program coursework into student teaching experience. Ethnographic methods were used to collect data across one academic school year. The data corpus included observations in multiple contexts, field notes, interviews, and documents. Critical pedagogy (Freire, 1996; Freire & Macedo, 1978) and critical literacy theory (Lewison et al., 2002) provided the theoretical underpinnings for this study. The research findings revealed that student teaching in a public school with a rigid schedule is a challenging place to learn to do critical literacy. The findings also point to the importance of developing mentorship models with an emphasis on cooperating teacher-preservice teacher reflections. Implications for practitioners, teacher educators and researchers, and policy are discussed.