“You gotta believe in something, something, something”: Evoking literacy lives as nostalgia for the future

Abstract

We render in this theoretical inquiry, informed by empirical data, understandings of how preservice teachers’ literacy lives come into curricular considerations of future teaching and learning in the secondary English classroom. In doing this work, we wondered about the past, present, and future lives of teachers: how might we understand the teaching of English as profoundly nostalgic work? Building upon the notion of “nostalgia for the future”, and drawing across curriculum theory, literacy research, teaching and teacher education research, and the music of Frank Ocean, we attend to dangerous nostalgia in the current political moment, while also finding nostalgia for the future useful for ways in which through this considering we may envision and enact more just futures. We assert this nostalgia for the future, one necessarily prospective and not solely retrospective, as informed by written reflections authored by preservice teachers and teacher educators, and reflections of teaching activities in undergraduate and internship-year teacher-preparation courses. Ultimately we argue the concept affords a frame for making sense of the past while also orienting preservice teachers forward, building on that past critically for the work of imagining and constructing more just worlds for their future students.

Keywords:

• Nostalgia
• literacy lives
• English education
• teacher education
• qualitative research

Notes

1 As context for the inquiry, Vaughn asked preservice teachers to write a “two-to-three page” response to the prompt: “Where do you see yourself across the paradigms of teaching English? What paradigms resonate with you, and which do not? What might you choose to foreground and background in your own curricular and instructional choices?” Vaughn and instructors sought for preservice teachers to consider the interplay of paradigms of secondary English, systemic inequities in teaching, and their own literacy lives at a time when white, middle-class women comprise the prevalent demographic in US schools (Phillip et al., 2018). Such work unfolded as particularly important, as of the 45 total students enrolled in the course in fall 2015 and fall 2016, three identified as preservice teachers of color.

The year following the methods course, students enrolled in a once-weekly seminar to accompany their year-long teaching internship. The seminar emphasized candidates designing teaching practices in conversation with their own experiences as former students. As a supplement to primary coursework, Scott and Alecia developed lesson materials (Kleon, 2010; Nye, 1998; Phillips, 2012) for a 75-minute workshop during the seminar on the interplay of teaching found poetry with texts from students’ literacy lives.

2 We use Frank Ocean’s preferred spelling of the mixtape, punctuation included.

3 We analyzed 45 written reflections authored by preservice teachers enrolled in two sections of an undergraduate course at a large research university in the U.S. Midwest, taught by Vaughn in fall 2015 and fall 2016. Following the methods course, preservice teachers undertook a year-long teaching internship in rural, suburban, “urban emergent” and “urban characteristic” school districts (Eckert & Petrone, 2013; Milner, 2012) reflecting racial, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic demographics of the state. We additionally analyzed teaching activities in a lesson on found poetry in the internship-year course.

4 Our analysis of written reflections authored by teachers and teacher educators began with an interest in how teachers’ own literacies shaped their teaching practices. In our first of multiple biweekly research-team meetings, we began a reading and discussion of Kirkland’s (2013) contextualizing of literacy lives of young Black men. We concurrently conducted three cycles of coding of preservice teachers’ written reflections.

5 Although we began with coding, the spirit of our manuscript composed its place and interests in the theorizing that arrived through our conversations around codes. We recall for example sharing with preservice teachers Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), a novel in which the author cuts apart his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles. Snippets of text left behind – codes fluttered across pages like blown leaves – unfolded the process of telling another story. We might do something similar with the codes we’ve made here. Our envisioning for this piece moved with us and through us as this simultaneous and complicated questioning and enacting of what we may mean by coding.

We returned then to the codes woven into the history of this piece and with them we complicated our theorizing. We had first each coded one third of 45 written reflections using sentence-level in vivo coding. Saldaña (2015) explains in vivo coding as an analysis approach that attends to “voice” of participants (p. 106). Therefore, we emphasized preservice teachers’ own languaging of how they understood teaching paradigms in conversation with course texts. We identified as first-cycle codes preservice teachers’ discussion of their own literacy lives in conversation with Kirkland (2013), Cremin et al. (2012), and Meyer (1996). We identified 191 first-cycle codes (for ex., “my favorite English teacher found participation important, and I was always able to say, ‘I never thought about it that way.’”; and “I see the English classroom as a place where students can synthesize the stories of others with their own experiences in order to further their understanding of life and the impact they have as global citizens.”) We then read across initial codes and developed 14 categories (for ex., “relationship between literature and literacy lives” and “preservice teachers in-school literacy / learning experiences as elementary/high school student”). We further collapsed the 14 categories; in conversation with analytic memoing, we asked comparative questions of the data such as “What texts do teachers of literacy decide to bring into their classrooms?” During the coding of preservice teacher’s written reflections, Scott and Alecia taught the found-poetry lesson, further prompting our analysis of questions posed by teachers that expressed notions of nostalgia.

Across the data set, we subsequently examined teachers’ literacy lives as enacted across four themes: exploring literacy lives as a student; enacting literacy practices; considering purposes of literature; and literacy lives as envisioning teaching stances. In developing themes, we were compelled by the intertwined nature of literacy lives and nostalgia. We considered in what ways may preservice teachers calling upon their literacy lives suggest nostalgic renderings of teaching and learning, gesturing toward a nostalgia for the future.

6 Names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott Jarvie

Scott Jarvie is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University. His most recent research focuses on the experiences of teachers, particularly with literature and poetry, and how literary perspectives inform their work.

Vaughn W. M. Watson

Vaughn W. M. Watson is Assistant Professor of English education at Michigan State University. His research engages qualitative participatory methodologies to examine literacy practices of youth of color within and across contexts of schools and community-engaged organizations. Vaughn has published research findings in journals including the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Research in the Teaching of English, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Alecia Beymer

Alecia Beymer is a doctoral student in Curriculum, Instruction, & Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Her research is focused on literacies formed by space and place, considerations of the interconnected resonances of teachers and students, and the poetics of education.