Hope in the Wobbles: Negotiations into, Out of, and between Critical Dispositions

ABSTRACT

There is an ever-present need for scholarship that addresses how to prepare preservice teachers to approach literacies as political, learn with children who have different cultural, linguistic, and racial identities than them, and navigate the continual becoming inherent in equity-oriented practice. This article explores the affordances of participating in a place-based practicum and connected university course, the EPIC program, to negotiate critical dispositions. University partners negotiated critical dispositions through engaging in the child-driven creation of fictive superhero worlds at an afterschool club and through mediation of those experiences in a connected university course. The afterschool club is grounded in sociocritical literacy practice and serves as a practicum site for a elementary teacher education program. I used a critical literacy framework to analyze negotiations of critical dispositions by university partners. Findings highlight how one university partner wobbled along a spectrum of equity-oriented practice. The study illuminates the value of an analytical framework in naming dispositions as people wobble in order to surface and mediate them. Wobbling is a conceptual tool that can support both teacher educators and preservice teachers in moving further toward equity across the many settings in which they will teach and learn.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term “university partner” to refer to university students in EPIC to indicate that some participants were not enrolled in the teacher education program and did not intend to pursue the teaching profession while other participants were enrolled in the teacher education program. All proper names, aside from Francisco whose name was used with permission, are pseudonyms.

2. As reported in university data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aaron Guggenheim

Aaron Guggenheim is a doctoral candidate in Literacy Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research focuses on critical approaches to socioemotional learning, narrative youth media production, and project-based learning in English Language Arts.