MeToo Moments: Teacher Candidates’ Disclosures of Sexual Violence

ABSTRACT

Rape culture and sexual violence have especially entered popular discourse in recent years, largely due to the significant activism of Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement. As such, because educators are increasingly taking up these topics, approaches to such intense subject matter in literacy learning need to be creatively and critically (re)considered so as to privilege more inclusive stories of sexual trauma and cultivate radical resistance against rape culture. Emerging from a feminist qualitative study that examined how secondary teacher candidates responded to a trauma text set of sexual assault narratives, as well as proposed antirape pedagogy for the secondary English classroom, this paper explores the testimonial discourses that surfaced. Teacher candidates participants either offered their own “Me Too” moments – that is, disclosures of experiencing sexual violence in some way, or disclosed witnessing trauma testimony, usually by a loved one.

KEYWORDS:

• Disclosure
• MeToo
• rape culture
• secondary teacher candidates
• teacher education
• trauma literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This scholarship was generously supported by The University of British Columbia’s Department of Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty of Education (4YF Scholarship), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship), the Killam Trusts (Killam Doctoral Scholarship), as well as several UBC Endowed Awards.

Notes on contributors

Amber Moore

Amber Moore is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at The University of British Columbia. Her research interests include adolescent literacies, feminist pedagogies, teacher and teacher librarian education, arts-based research, rape culture, and trauma literature, particularly YA sexual assault narratives. Her work can be found in journals such as Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and Qualitative Inquiry, among others.