Creating a canon for change: how teacher candidates demonstrate readiness to reckon with rape culture through reading trauma literature

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how teachers in training co-created a canon of texts for teaching about trauma issues, including sexual violence. This paper represents a piece of a larger feminist study where 23 teacher candidate participants took up readings in a sexual trauma text set and responded to pedagogy for teaching such texts with Canadian adolescent literacy learners. Overall, the data strongly indicated that many participants prioritized promoting social action in their emerging pedagogies, including anti-rape efforts. Discourses of readiness to combat rape culture especially surfaced, signalling that overwhelmingly, participants were authoring themselves as educators who prioritize creating community and enacting resistances to oppressions in some way. As such, a key finding examined in this paper was how participants collectively built on the initial corpus of trauma texts in the study’s text set that they advocated for or planned to teach in their future education careers.

KEYWORDS:

• Canon
• intersectionality
• feminist pedagogy
• readiness
• rape culture
• sexual assault narratives
• teacher education
• text set
• trauma

Acknowledgements

I am so grateful to Dr. Mary Bryson, Dr. Annette Henry, Dr. Theresa Rogers, and Dr. Elizabeth Marshall for their excellent guidance throughout this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Geographical information

This project was completed on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, where the author lives and works as an uninvited guest and settler. These lands are also known as Vancouver, in British Columbia, Canada.

Notes

1. For snapshots of how I (1) pedagogically prepared for this work and (2) designed one of the primary learning activities (a Me Too gallery walk exercise), see, Moore (2020a, 2020b).

2. The primary trauma text set included the following: Block (2000), Gay (2014), Gilhooly (2018), Kaur (2015), and Leipciger (2017), and Rosema (2018).

3. For example, see, Moore (2020c).

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 a Banting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include adolescent literacies, feminist pedagogies, teacher 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. Email: [email protected]