Interpreting Diversity in Elementary Content Area Texts: Preservice Teachers’ Curricular Reasoning and Pedagogical Intentions

Over the last twenty years, teacher education programs have increased efforts to prepare critically conscious teachers for enacting transformative classroom instruction. Much of this work has centered on social justice-oriented coursework and taken up diverse children’s literature as curricular tools. There continues to be a gap between teacher education program experiences and what actually happens in elementary classrooms. While abundant literature dissects preservice teachers’ (PSTs) engagement with critical children’s literature for reading instruction, less research explores how they transfer skills to make sense of critical texts for elementary content area instruction. In this mixed-methods study, two teacher educators utilize a curricular noticing lens to examine how PSTs selected, analyzed, and planned to use critical children’s literature for content area text sets. Although findings show alignment between instructor and PST perceptions of texts as diverse, PSTs need support in deeper critical analysis to interrogate underlying messages and stereotypes across disciplines. This is particularly true for informational texts. We consider the implications for researchers and teacher educators as we weave social justice discussions across coursework to help PSTs notice and name opportunities for diverse perspectives in content area literacy instruction.