CREATIVE INTERFERENCE IN THE TEACHING OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: 

A CRITICAL APPROACH TO TEACHER EDUCATION 

By 

 

Mark D. McCarthy 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A DISSERTATION 

 

Submitted to 

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the degree of 

 

Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education—Doctor of Philosophy 

 

2018 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

CREATIVE INTERFERENCE IN THE TEACHING OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: 

A CRITICAL APPROACH TO TEACHER EDUCATION 

ABSTRACT 

 

 

By 

 

Mark D. McCarthy 

 

In this dissertation, I elaborate a pedagogical practice of creative interference. I use 

curricular and instructional disturbances to open the possibility for different ways of thinking and 

acting. I aim to confront problematic representations of people and cultures through complex 

social contextualization, and to interfere with discourses that legitimize a disposition toward 

multiculturalism grounded in equality that allows, promotes, and strategizes silence about 

difference. My focus is less on what students did, despite situating myself in teacher education. 

Instead, I consider the text, myself as a teacher educator, and the context of community-based 

learning. This project is one of reflective practice: of the curriculum, my own teaching, and the 

reflective practices of students engaged in service learning. However, I hope to reframe 

reflection away from prescriptive models toward diffraction, in which interference is the 

outcome. 

My dissertation is centered on three distinct articles. This alternative format allows me to 

employ a variety of qualitative research methods, including: critical literary analysis, 

autoethnography, and community-engaged scholarship. While children’s literature provides the 

background for these articles, the projects are not exclusively possible in the context of 

children’s literature as a part of teacher education.  

The first article asks teacher educators to consider how they make curricular choices and 

challenges simplistic binaries to determine what is good. This article focuses on a literary text, 

and as a result is very much about children’s literature. The second article troubles the notion 

 

 

that student learning is the only way to think about teaching. It explores the unintended 

consequences of instructional choices resulting from sociopolitical stance-taking relative to the 

teaching of children’s literature. I argue the process of inquiry is more valuable than achieving 

the development of an abstract disposition. Children’s literature then becomes the site for the 

final article. I consider a pedagogical choice to collaborate with community and to send students 

to unfamiliar territory where they negotiate relations in teaching and learning. With the multiple 

levels of expectations and requirements, my understanding of community partnerships evolved in 

ways that incline me toward increasing student agency. 

Taken together, these chapters begin to develop a pedagogical framework for engaging 

difference. This pedagogy considers the risks and uncertainties inherent to the difficult 

conversations in teacher education (and the world more broadly), with the intention of 

deconstructing preconceived notions of multiculturalism that prospective teachers might hold. 

The articles represent pedagogical rehearsals of diffraction as a means to challenge and re-think 

the ways that teacher education limits the possibilities of reflection. I offer diffraction as a 

pedagogical practice of creative interference. 

 

Keywords: multicultural literature, teacher education, inquiry, critical pedagogy, 

complexity 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright by 
MARK D. MCCARTHY 
2018

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

 
 
 
 
I begin with my committee. Dr. Laura Apol invited me into the world of children’s literature—

thank you for that. She has been supportive throughout my experience as a doctoral student. Dr. 

Sandro Barros has been a consistent reader and supporter of my well-being. We share a (crazy) 

worldview, and his presence provided me with a sense of community. Dr. Avner Segall 

challenges me to think differently. We share a desire to confront difficult knowledge and as a 

result can ourselves be difficult, but his challenges make those with whom he interacts better—I 

hope to do the same. Dr. Carrie Symons graciously joined my committee at a late stage, and I 

cannot thank her enough for supporting me and my work with such little notice. 

Dr. Janine Certo, my advisor throughout my doctoral program, has always answered me 

with honesty and shared her love of life with me. Unfortunately, she was unable to serve as a 

committee member, but I would not be here if it weren’t for her. 

I also want to acknowledge Mary Hennessey’s contributions to Chapter IV specifically, 

and more broadly her support of my service to the community. 

I thank my family: my mom, the first reader of my writing for over two decades; my dad 

for making me attentive to the details, and for his strength in the face of illness; my brother for 

showing me that human lives are shaped by contingency; my aunt for writing to me while I 

wrote this dissertation; and the support from many others. 

I appreciate my friends and colleagues—they put up with the experimental exchanges and 

confrontations that shape my thinking.  

And most of all, I want to thank Miley, my accomplice in life, for getting on a plane to 

Michigan with no idea what to expect but trusting that we would find a way to be happy. 爱你 

 

v 

PREFACE 

 
 
 
 
My journey to improve self and society resembles the Islamic notion of jihad. Ahmed Rashid 

(2002) explores the notion of jihad as struggle. Appearing rather innocuous, struggle refers to 

wresting free from some restraint. To struggle implies acting in opposition to, and as a result is 

divisive: those who share your struggle and those against whom you struggle. The struggles that 

I consider in this dissertation are internal and external: to push myself and society to be better. In 

part, better means to seek to improve oneself across physical, intellectual, and other capacities. I 

also believe it means working against social practices that perpetrate harm toward cohabitants of 

this world. Many take up a similar struggle, and we work and live in opposition to the systems 

that perpetuate inequity and their agents. 

Rashid (2002) describes two levels of jihad: the greater jihad “involves the effort of each 

Muslim to become a better human being, to struggle to improve… In doing so the follower of 

jihad can also benefit his or her community” (p. 2). The personal struggle to become better, and 

to have the community benefit as a result, emerges from the ethics of my learning: it is 

insufficient to unquestionably participate in society when learning about one’s choices could 

reveal a negative impact on others. For example, I learned that owning a car makes me complicit 

in the exploitation of people and resources to maintain an unsustainable fossil fuel economy. 

Thus, I do not own a car. I undertake the greater jihad in this way among others. 

The lesser jihad arises as “rebellion against an unjust ruler, whether Muslim or not, and 

jihad can become the means to mobilize that political and social struggle” (Rashid, 2002, p. 2). 

My teaching is one social forum in which I undertake the lesser jihad. I use an institutionally-

provided platform to bring social issues to the forefront, especially those that may not be part of 

 

vi 

the everyday discourse or thinking of students. I confront students with the realities of racism 

and colonialism, and model my acknowledgement of my complicity in the atrocities of the 

neoliberal military state. 

In Chapters II and III of this dissertation, a central theme I address is the perception in the 

neoliberal West that Islam is not only a threat, but fundamentally at odds with and excluded from 

“our way of life” (Mann, 2015)—in Chapter IV I shift toward consideration of language 

minorities, but the West similarly frames speakers of languages othered by English as 

antagonists. While the “capacity to cut up the world is biologically rooted and culturally 

elaborated” (Davis, 2004, p. 6), the West’s cultural elaboration of its epistemology through 

dichotomization (Davis, 2004) results in Othering (Derrida, 1976): distinctions that divide, 

disguised as a natural order. 

Distinction as an acknowledgement of difference can avoid deficit models, but often 

difference is imposed instead of engaged. For example, Homi Bhabha (2012) claims stereotyping 

is when an image becomes the identity of a group: stereotyping erases the individual and 

imposes this image on the Other. As a result, the narrative of threat – found in the actions of the 

Mullahs, Sheikhs, and Caliphs of militant Islam conscripting suicide bombers and killing 

innocents – becomes the image that the West imposes on all Muslims. There is more to the 

struggle of jihad than this image provides. I aim to complicate this perspective. 

The establishment of Islamophobic narratives in Western minds began with the rise of 

Islam, but post-9/11 discourse reaffirms this hatred for another generation. For this reason, 

readers of this preface are perhaps already concerned that I am taking up jihad. Rashid (2002) 

explains, “In Western thought...jihad has always been portrayed as an Islamic war against 

unbelievers” (p. 1). Likened to the Christian Crusades, Westerners “focus on the bloodshed, 

 

vii 

ignoring not only the enormous achievements in science and art and the basic tolerance of 

[Islamic] empires, but also the true idea of jihad that spread peacefully throughout these realms” 

(Rashid, 2002, p. 2). The Western perception emerges from a regime of truth (Foucault, 1980) – 

a socially constructed truth paired with power – in which Others, often brown-skinned, are 

dangerous because they are not like us; we are not perpetrators of violence against them. This 

ideology is dangerous, perhaps more than the threat of Islamic militancy. 

The omission of violence against the Other is of particular concern. In an active, 

Lacanian ignorance, the Western mind creates an ahistorical context in which political 

interference, colonialism, and global oil economies, for example, are absent. The narrative rests 

on the dichotomy of good and evil, wherein the goodness of the West is unquestioned. This 

narrative tends to be reproduced through teaching and formal schooling. 

Good and evil are a common dichotomy invoked in the Western tradition. The most 

dangerous aspect of Western dichotomization is that it disguises self-serving bias as universal 

truth: 

Dichotomization, because it is rooted in the assumption that it is a process of labeling 

parts of the universe as they really are—that is, as if the observations were independent of 

the observer—has tended to be cast as an ethically neutral, objective process. (Davis, 

2004, p. 10) 

The world is more grey than black-or-white, and good tends to include some bad. Brent Davis 

(2004) proposes that we reframe dichotomies as bifurcations to be “attentive to the partialities 

associated with any distinction... a bifurcation foregrounds both the biases that prompt a 

distinction and the biases instilled by a distinction” (p. 10). My jihad is about acknowledging the 

 

viii 

bad in what I once thought was good, and more abstractly to recognize that these are not so 

distinct or different from one another. 

Difference is at the heart of this dissertation, but difference is not absolute. Davis (2004) 

claims, “The bifurcation attitude is concerned with samenesses and shared assumptions, in 

contrast to the dichotomization attitude that is attentive principally to differences” (p. 11). I hope 

to avoid dichotomies here, preferring to center the multiplicity of experience; however, I honor 

difference. I recognize that difference exists internally, and that sameness results from the 

complex entanglements of our universe. This dissertation explores sameness and difference, 

inviting readers to join me in jihad to better self and society. 

 

 

 

Mark D. McCarthy 

Between East Lansing, MI and Newton, MA 

2017 

 

ix 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 
 
 
 
I – INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 1 
Questions of Ethics in Teaching ................................................................................................. 4 
Background: A vision of the future ........................................................................................ 6 
A Vision of Self: Diffraction ...................................................................................................... 8 
An Inequitable Present .............................................................................................................. 12 
Interfering Whiteness ................................................................................................................ 14 
The Shape of the Dissertation ................................................................................................... 17 

 
INTERLUDE – EMPATHY ...................................................................................................... 21 
 
II – (RE)CONSIDERING AUTHENTICITY AND INSIDER-AUTHORS IN 
MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE ....................................................................................... 25 
The Author as Insider............................................................................................................ 27 
Purpose and Questions .......................................................................................................... 29 
Theoretical Framework ......................................................................................................... 30 
Methods..................................................................................................................................... 33 
Arab as Children’s Literature ................................................................................................ 33 
Selecting the Text ................................................................................................................. 35 
Researcher Subject Position .................................................................................................. 35 
Readings ................................................................................................................................ 36 
Findings and Discussion ........................................................................................................... 37 
The Arab and the Implied Reader ......................................................................................... 38 
Arab in a Xenophobic West .................................................................................................. 42 
Implications for Teacher Education .......................................................................................... 46 
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 48 

 
INTERLUDE – READER BELIEFS AND DIFFERENCE ................................................... 50 
 
III – CRITICALLY TEACHING CRITICALITY?: MODELING SOCIAL AND 
PEDAGOGICAL INQUIRY WITH LITERARY TEXTS ..................................................... 53 
Developing a Critical Purpose .............................................................................................. 55 
Teacher Education for Superdiversity .................................................................................. 57 
Teacher-student demographic disparity. ........................................................................... 58 
Multicultural literature in teacher education. .................................................................... 59 
Reflection to address beliefs. ............................................................................................ 60 
Theoretical Perspectives: Teaching and Learning Critical Literacies .................................. 61 
Understanding teaching through learning. ........................................................................ 62 
Teaching as participation and communication. ................................................................ 63 
Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 64 
Course Context...................................................................................................................... 65 
The nodal text. .................................................................................................................. 65 

 

x 

Engaging a literary text. .................................................................................................... 66 
Additional texts. ................................................................................................................ 67 
Data Sources and Analysis.................................................................................................... 67 
Student journals. ............................................................................................................... 67 
Analysis of teaching. ......................................................................................................... 68 
Power and Participation ........................................................................................................ 69 
Findings and Discussion ........................................................................................................... 70 
Establishing Initial Conditions .............................................................................................. 71 
Introducing Disturbances ...................................................................................................... 73 
Understanding Arab and Muslims ........................................................................................ 75 
Concluding Remarks ................................................................................................................. 78 

 
INTERLUDE – LIMINALITY .................................................................................................. 81 
 
IV – RECIPROCITY AND COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS INVOLVING EMERGENT 
TEACHERS................................................................................................................................. 85 
Theoretical Frame ..................................................................................................................... 85 
Language as Social ............................................................................................................... 86 
Diversity and Social Teacher Education ............................................................................... 88 
Context and Researcher Position .............................................................................................. 91 
Methods..................................................................................................................................... 94 
Power in Research................................................................................................................. 95 
Participants ............................................................................................................................ 95 
Data Sources ......................................................................................................................... 97 
Critical Discourse Analysis................................................................................................... 98 
Findings and Discussion ........................................................................................................... 99 
Teacher and Learner as Power Positions ............................................................................ 100 
Desiring Equal Power ......................................................................................................... 102 
Critical Reflections on/with Collaboration ......................................................................... 103 
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 105 

 
V – CONCLUSION................................................................................................................... 108 
 
APPENDIX ................................................................................................................................ 113 

REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 116 

 

 

 

xi 

I – INTRODUCTION 

 

 

In this dissertation I explore what it means to be a teacher educator. Along the way, I 

make choices as a teacher and researcher that, according to Karen Barad (2007), inherently 

create possibilities and exclusions. While exclusions are unavoidable, my goal is to open 

possibilities: as a teacher, I hope for students to consider ways of thinking that challenge their 

accepted knowledge; as a researcher, I intend to extend conversations about diversity and 

difference in teacher education. In choosing to foreground curriculum and my own instructional 

practices, I exclude what students do. I situate teacher education – the verb, the process of 

preparing students to become teachers – in the background to foreground my learning 

about/through being a teacher educator. My thinking about teacher education – the noun, 

university-based teacher preparation programs as well as courses, teachers, and curriculum – has 

led me to develop pedagogical practices that challenge prescriptive notions of learning and 

reflection, and to embrace uncertainty as possibility. 

I begin from the premise that one can learn by questioning that which one knows to be 

true, and that this inquiry is reflective. These truths are often social constructions tied to power 

(Foucault, 1980), and in my context include the inherent negativity of stereotypes, the notion that 

learning is a measure of teaching, and that the learning of students who use languages othered by 

English is the domain of ESL instructors. Questioning “truth” is counterintuitive, and thus often 

requires a catalyst. In this dissertation, I explore my attempts to be a catalyst and to introduce 

disturbances with the intention of opening possibilities where normalized/ing discourses close 

them—for students and for myself. I call this a pedagogy of creative interference. 

 

1 

My experience inclines me toward a complexity view of teaching and learning—a 

position from which I embrace unpredictability and uncertainty. In an educational climate that 

continues to value standardization, uncertainty can be understood as something to be controlled 

or minimized. Uncertainty could also be framed as possibility. In my teaching and its 

representations in the chapters that follow, I attempt to enact creative interference as a pedagogy 

of possibility (Simon, 1992). I use disturbances and other instructional choices to try to create 

opportunities to imagine worlds beyond the familiar to deconstruct preconceived notions of 

multiculturalism that prospective teachers might hold. My notion of creative interference is 

complex and not easily summed up concisely. As a result, I will elaborate my stance via several 

entry points throughout this introduction. 

This dissertation emerges from ethical and pedagogical questions about teaching and 

teacher education; from epistemological and methodological questions about educational 

research; and from ontological and social questions about the nature of my and others’ 

experience in/of the material world. I wonder about questions like what social purpose do 

teaching and schooling serve in an unjust society?, what can we come to know through research 

(about teaching and its relationship to learning)?, and what role do I hope to play as an 

educator in a shared world? While these questions are not necessarily answered in the chapters 

that follow, I extend these three threads throughout this dissertation. They are complex and 

entangled, and they provide a conceptual background against which I establish an ethical 

position as an educator (an agent of a social institution), critical social researcher (member of the 

resistance), and White man (holder of multiple identities discursively constructed as dominant).  

I use this project to explore such questions locally through my teaching practice as an 

instructor of a children’s literature course for undergraduate prospective teachers. While this 

 

2 

work could have emerged in many contexts, children’s literature makes possible central features 

of my pedagogy: I could engage students in consideration of beliefs because literary texts for 

children are ideological (McCallum & Stephens, 2011); and I could address social and cultural 

topics because the sections I taught were designed with a global focus. However, the importance 

of children’s literature varies across the three chapters that follow as the focus shifts from 

curriculum and text selection (Chapter II), to inquiry into my own pedagogical choices (Chapter 

III), to my instructional application of external commitments to community and language 

(Chapter IV). These chapters provide multiple perspectives on a similar project: my teaching as 

interference with normalized discourses surrounding how White America responds to a world of 

difference and superdiversity. 

While I claim to be critical, I do not advocate for critical readings of literature—

approaches that hold texts accountable for assumed-to-be-universal discursive constructions. I 

intend to use those taken for granted constructions, such as stereotypical characters, to direct 

questions away from the text toward people and systems that influence everyday struggles in the 

lives of teachers, students, and unimagined others. Allen Luke (2012) notes that critical literacy 

approaches “view language, texts, and their discourse structures as principal means for 

representing and reshaping possible worlds” (pp. 8-9), but how educators enact critical literacies 

is “utterly contingent” (p. 9). To be critical, as I understand Luke, examines power relations 

through analysis of textual discourse, but its objective is to engage in social critique and action, 

not solely to understand the text. As a result, the articles that follow begin with textual analysis, 

then provide critique of my teaching, and work toward action as part of teacher education. 

My perspectives – as teacher and as researcher with motivations that bridge social, 

personal, and professional commitments – are taken up in the subsequent chapters, not exclusive 

 

3 

of one another, but I foreground different commitments in each chapter. I agree with Davis’ 

(2008) claim that “educational research and educational practice might be considered aspects of 

the same project—namely, expanding the space of human possibility by exploring the space of 

the existing possible” (p. 63). In the following sections of this introduction, I situate my work 

within an ethical dialogue, consider a notion of self as multiple, and frame my interference 

within a social context. I conclude with an overview of the remaining chapters, and my purpose 

in undertaking and organizing them as I present them here.  

 

 

Questions of Ethics in Teaching 

In Teaching Against the Grain, Roger Simon (1992) puts forward two questions to guide 

teachers toward “a purposeful vision that can provide the ethical grounds for the determination of 

pedagogical practice” (p. 14). He first asks, “what are the desired versions of a future human 

community implied in the pedagogy in which one is implicated?” (p. 15). The ethical principle I 

adopt here, like Simon, is that teachers can and should imagine a future world, and that they have 

agency to build, shape, or create that world through their pedagogical and curricular choices. 

Agency is a privilege and community is a responsibility, as he indicates with his second 

question, “how should we relate to other people who also have a stake...in articulating future 

communal possibilities?” (p. 15). In consideration of other inhabitants in the future world I 

envision, my purpose is to describe, elaborate, and advocate for an ethical practice in/of teacher 

education: what I call a pedagogy of creative interference. 

 

The context I consider here is a class with a teacher and students, and those students 

intend to teach other students in mainstream school contexts. It is not my intention to advocate 

for teachers’ control of the future – or classrooms and students – when they assert agency. For a 

 

4 

start, agency in schools is limited by structural obstacles. Teaching and learning in a practical 

sense, or schooling, are part of this work, but I also intend for this dissertation to model learning 

in a broader sense—my own learning. Schooling is one way to imagine teaching and learning, 

but this dissertation embodies a notion of learning that goes beyond school. I draw from 

transdisciplinary sources to coalesce my learning into my thoughts about teaching and what 

teachers might do. 

I can influence the next generation of teachers, so I acknowledge that “pedagogy is 

hardly innocent” (Simon, 1992, p. 56), and, as a result, my choices may cause harm. As a teacher 

educator, my pedagogy can impact students, and students of the students I teach. I justify my 

ethical stance through consideration of larger networks of stakeholders and community. My 

responsibility is not only to students, but to their future students and to the future world I 

imagine. Yet interaction with and consideration of students in the present is integral to teaching. 

I must build rapport before embarking toward a future world. Otherwise, students would not 

accompany me in inquiry. With a foundation of rapport, I can begin to open possibilities, but 

Simon (1992) cautions,  

a progressive pedagogy cannot proceed from the intention of getting...people...to think 
and act as we do… the task for the progressive cultural worker is to engage...people so as 
to provoke their inquiry into and challenge of their existing views of ‘the way things are 
and should be’. (p. 46) 
 

As a result, a practice of creative interference is intended to provoke inquiry, and to understand 

inquiry as a vital part of teaching, but not to determine its outcomes before inquiry has begun. 

In this dissertation, I investigate the experience of being a teacher educator of children’s 

literature working with multicultural and global texts to encourage prospective teachers toward 

social criticism and personal exploration. Inquiry is inherent to the reflexive, recursive practice 

of teaching. Teachers can research their practice to improve their work and the outcomes 

 

5 

possible for their students. Therefore, teaching – including my practice as a teacher educator – 

occurs in the present and looks to the past to shape the future. Learning, however, extends into 

the other identities I explore here. Ultimately, I aim to contextualize teacher education in ways 

that maximize the ability of prospective teachers and their future students to engage difference in 

a complex world, but not to dictate how that should be done or to “insist on a fixed set of altered 

meanings” (Simon, 1992, p. 47). The world is far too complex for static, universal reductions. 

 

Background: A vision of the future  

According to Lesley Kuhn (2008), our universe and our ability to make sense of it are 

“multi-dimensional, non-linear, interconnected, far from equilibrium and unpredictable” (p. 182). 

Reconciling unpredictability with a vision of the future is therefore a daunting task. Because I 

frame uncertainty as possibility, I believe that an uncertain future is also one in which 

possibilities are open. Closure, through the illusion of certainty and the reduction of choice, is 

often how education, a normative activity (Kuhn, 2008), operates. Teacher education can prepare 

teachers who resist this closure. In developing a pedagogy for an uncertain future, I aim to 

preserve choice and challenge certainty. 

I draw upon complexity theory to understand “a dynamically changing, complicated, 

complex, and chaotic but understandable universe” (Mitchell, 2009, p. 118). A complexity 

perspective is ontological and epistemological, however Mason (2008) laments how “complexity 

theory has been largely silent” (p. 17) regarding the normative commitments of education, and 

“on key issues of values and ethics” (p. 6). My application of complexity includes an ethical 

commitment to a vision of the future, and therefore breaks the silence to which Mason refers. I 

 

6 

aim to extend that which is possible by challenging the taken-for-granted “certainties” of 

normative conceptions of knowledge. 

 

The nature of our knowledge of the world is limited despite a desire to know completely. 

Mitchell (2009) claims, “the contingency of complex structures impels us to modify our 

conception of the character of usable knowledge claims beyond the narrow domain of universal, 

exceptionless laws” (p. 3), and to “expand our conceptual frameworks to accommodate 

contingency, dynamic robustness, and deep uncertainty. The truths that attach to our world are 

not simple, global, and necessary, but rather plural and pragmatic” (p. 5). Probability, rather than 

certainty, is a more accurate way to frame knowledge claims.  

However, despite the contingent-knowledge position to which I adhere, I do believe there 

are near-certainties. From these I derive my vision of a future human community. On a timescale 

that some people find so abstract it borders on insignificance or absurdity, life will not exist on 

Earth in perpetuity. As far as we know, life exists only on our planet, but an infinite universe 

probab(ilistic)ly harbors life elsewhere. In any case, the null hypothesis suggests that life is 

anomalous to the particularities of our world. I feel responsible to begin from the assumption that 

in the distant future life must leave Earth to continue—not just human life. We are far too 

entangled with our ecosystems and tools to imagine that a future star-faring, multi-planetary 

society will solely consist of humans piloting fleets of metal, mechanical ships. More likely, 

future humans will continue to interface with machines and neuro-biological enhancements, and 

interstellar transports will require biological systems to sustain internal environments. From this 

imagined distant future, I interpolate two accessible and pertinent conclusions. 

The first is that the differences that lead us to war and choices that accelerate the 

destruction of our planet need to be respectfully ended. Human conflict is inconsequential 

 

7 

compared to extinction. Different as we are, the various cultures and communities of the world 

need to work toward life-sustaining, peace-building, equitable norms of behavior. People will 

need to overcome conflict to unite in the common goal of continuing life. As a result, I begin my 

pedagogical pursuits with a desire to end larger global conflicts, which begins with inclusion of 

these conflicts in the curriculum and classroom interactions in ways that allow students to 

identify them as meaningful. Teacher education would do well to foreground contemporary 

social conflict. My second conclusion is that I need to care about others and provide 

opportunities for them to make choices. I believe many of our own choices limit others’ in ways 

of which we are unaware. Teacher education can resist dismissal based on the notion that “it 

doesn’t affect me”—a comment I hear often, to which I respond by asking, “But do you affect 

it?” Changing the state of global conflict might begin with choices to know and followed by 

choices to act. 

These conclusions connect my vision of the future to the material present. Conflicts arise 

from people’s identification with groups, communities, or states, and are fueled by the perception 

that other people/identities are at odds with their own. Interactions are material and discursive, 

and constitute the self in the world. Addressing these conclusions to bring about my imagined 

future is central to my teaching and research as well as personal commitments. The teacher and 

researcher to which I refer are parts of the self, another complex concept. 

 

A Vision of Self: Diffraction 

I inhabit a variety of spaces taking on diverse roles, so the objectives of this work include 

those of a teacher educator, an emerging qualitative researcher, and a social being in contexts 

rich with history. Largely due to my vision of the future, I care about the learning of others and 

 

8 

the ways they live in society; and how society shapes education and vice versa. As a teacher 

educator, I want prospective teachers to ask questions, develop an awareness of their ideologies 

and a respect for those of others, and to consider the complexities of context. Teachers could 

model for students a way to be in the world that promotes adaptability, a peace-building and 

equitable way of interacting, and curiosity about the complex system of global society/ies and 

cultures. This ethical notion resonates across my identities as a teacher and researcher. 

To inspire thinking about interconnectivity and the self-in-the-world, teachers and teacher 

educators often use reflection, a common pedagogical tool. Lynn Fendler (2003) believes that 

teachers are inherently reflective, but guided teacher reflection may be less effective. The ways 

teacher educators utilize reflection might harness people’s natural tendency to be introspective, 

as opposed to directing reflection toward a particular outcome. Fendler (2003) notes that 

criticisms of reflection highlight “the degree to which reflective practices serve to reinforce 

existing beliefs rather than challenge assumptions” (p. 16), and that perhaps “reflection will 

reveal no more than what is already known” (p. 21). While I believe, like Fendler (2003), that 

reflective practices can be beneficial, I also wonder whether introspection is indeed reflective, 

and what that might mean.  

For instance, I come to know my appearance through a reflection, but any who observe 

me see the opposite of what I saw in the mirror. My reflective knowledge of self is actually a 

distortion of the reality experienced by the other selves with whom I interact. Given the desire to 

reach new insight through introspective practices, extending the metaphor of reflection to 

incorporate optics more broadly can lead us to other ways of knowing. 

Throughout my life I’ve had an interest in the universe that led me to learn about physics, 

namely cosmology and quantum mechanics. These fields include the study of the behavior and 

 

9 

properties of light, or optics. In recent years, I have thought a lot about optics in relation to my 

work as a teacher educator. We describe colleagues as brilliant, and our work is meant to shed 

light on things, so we do not remain in the dark. Light-based metaphors abound, yet we limit 

them to the realm of geometric optics: lenses and mirrors. We can focus and reflect with these 

tools, but they are hardly the only ways to learn about light. Telescopes can magnify a small 

space, but scattered light can reveal a star’s chemical composition. Various approaches to optics 

complement one another, but few have caught on elsewhere. 

The value of physical optics for revealing much of our visible universe is undeniable. 

Mirrors (i.e. catoptrics) and lenses (i.e. dioptrics) reflect and focus light. Other optical 

phenomena, such as diffraction, reveal other qualities of light (and matter). Diffraction is an act 

of interference that reveals more of reality than what we might assume. These manipulations are 

material acts that create and limit possibilities. Karen Barad (2014) interprets a popular 

experiment from quantum physics as challenging common dichotomic understandings of light: 

The two-slit diffraction experiment queers the binary light/darkness story. What the 
pattern reveals is that darkness is not a lack. Darkness can be produced by ‘adding new 
light’ to existing light – ‘to that which it has already received’. Darkness is not mere 
absence, but rather an abundance. Indeed, darkness is not light’s expelled other, for it 
haunts its own interior. Diffraction queers binaries and calls out for a rethinking of the 
notions of identity and difference. (p. 171) 
 

Diffraction therefore offers another perspective, and in addition to reflection, it may provide new 

ways of understanding self and others. Where reflection imagines a unified, unitary self, 

diffraction asks us to see difference (i.e. the other) within, and perhaps the self without. The 

creation of difference within is a vital quality of interference, and I will refer to this phenomenon 

as creative interference as I apply it to pedagogy throughout this project. Barad identifies “the 

material multiplicity of self, the way it is diffracted across spaces, times, realities, imaginaries” 

(2014, p. 175). This is the self I hope to be and to acknowledge. 

 

10 

 

This self, or these selves, materialize as/in my body, and also in digital and discursive 

spaces. This dissertation, for instance, may be read as a single product of one author, but it was 

written across a variety of temporal iterations of the self, expressing and making sense of ideas 

that at times feel foreign to other iterations of me. Consistent throughout, however, like Barad 

(2007),  

I am interested in understanding the epistemological and ontological issues that quantum 
physics forces us to confront, such as the conditions for the possibility of objectivity, the 
nature of measurement, the nature of nature and meaning making, and the relationship 
between discursive practices and the material world. (p. 24) 
 

Thus, I consider the entanglements of ontology, epistemology, methodology, society, ethics, and 

pedagogy; not to disentangle them, but to diffract them to better understand their entangled 

nature. 

Reflective practices in teacher education are widespread and take on a variety of 

meanings. My concern is a lack of depth, or that reflecting does not offer the means to 

understand as much as we might about self and world. I believe these entangled questions are 

vital for White prospective teachers to examine the values and ideologies of a society that 

maintains privilege and oppression. The other tools used in the study of optics may be 

metaphorically applied to teacher education. In addition to reflection, diffraction (and perhaps 

refraction) can provide multiplicity. Additive viewpoints from which different information can 

be revealed. Diffraction is interference, but interference can be creative in this sense: it can 

create light within darkness and dark within light. An educational enactment of creative 

interference expands possibility. 

 

 

11 

An Inequitable Present 

Maxine Greene (1998) described ours as a “society of unfulfilled promises,” in which 

education is proclaimed as a panacea for inequities yet reproduces the disparities between the 

majority and the minoritized. Similarly, Simon (1992) explains, “forms of power and 

legitimation in schools structure a field of possibilities and regulate actual behaviors, including 

thought, speech, image, style, and action. In this process of regulation, particular identities, 

knowledge…are normalized and privileged” (p. 10). My context is distinct from the schools to 

which Simon refers, but I can help shape the thoughts, beliefs, and values of future teachers in 

ways that challenge the normalized and privileged identities and discourses. 

Persistent deficit ideologies in research influence educational and social policy. “This 

climate, and the policies and teaching practices resulting from it, has the quite explicit goal of 

creating a monocultural and monolingual society based on White, middle-class norms of 

language and cultural being” (Paris, 2012, p. 95). I believe in interfering with the attainment of 

that goal. To that end, Simon (1992) offers a starting point: “educational practice should 

participate in a social transformation that is aimed at securing fundamental human dignity and 

radically reducing the limits on expression and achievement imposed by physical and symbolic 

violence” (1992, p. 17). Part of my vision of the future, then, is that prospective teachers aim to 

transform society. 

Educators and educational researchers are positioned to conform and to bring others to 

conformity, rather than to support revolutionary transformation. Fortunately, one of the goals of 

educational research, especially over the past quarter century, has been to identify and dismantle 

social injustices as they are enacted in research and education. Emerging from Critical Race 

Theory, culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), for example, focuses on the 

 

12 

teacher’s conception of self and others, social relations, and knowledge. More recently, Paris 

(2012) offered culturally sustaining pedagogy because teachers could be “more than responsive 

of or relevant to the cultural experiences and practices of young people—it requires that they 

support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities 

while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence” (p. 95). I find myself 

aligned with and inspired by this vision of teaching, and imagine a better future is possible when 

opportunities are widely offered. Teacher education could prioritize these approaches to 

pedagogy. 

Teaching and teacher education continue to be mostly White so preparation for cultural 

and linguistic diversity is necessary. However, Paris and Alim (2014) later ask, “What would our 

pedagogies look like if the gaze weren’t the dominant one?” (p. 86). Teacher education runs the 

risk of ignoring this question because the dominant gaze is normalized for many of those 

involved. While not necessarily intended for White people, I heed the advice to “turn our gaze 

inward, on our own communities and cultural practices” (Paris & Alim, 2014, p. 92). As White 

prospective teachers work to develop positive attitudes about minoritized groups, and research 

guides education toward sustaining the cultures of the minoritized, the gaze rarely falls on 

Whiteness—if it does, the participants in discussions around these issues are often White. Yet the 

inhabitants of the White world often either blame minoritized groups or try to save them. 

Another approach is to acknowledge that there are systems that oppress, and quite often White 

people are complicit in those networks. An acknowledgment that White people may not be/have 

the solution could go further to explore how we might be/have the problem. 

 

 

13 

Interfering Whiteness 

Whiteness is a complex concept. I use this term for the sake of brevity, but more broadly 

to include labels that can describe me: Western, American, cis heteronormative, middle-class, 

valued dialect-English-speaking, able-bodied, man in a patriarchy. These are all normative and 

normalizing discourses constructed as exclusionary dichotomies, distinct but entangled with 

what it means to be White. Normalizing discourses do not invite revision from the outside, which 

is doubly problematic if White people “ultimately misunderstand the world they have created” 

(Matias, 2016, p. xii). Whiteness is difficult to confront – it’s both elusive and shameful – but 

that difficulty is an ethical obligation precisely because it is self-serving not to. 

One example of misunderstanding the world is that research enacts White middle-class as 

the standard against which others are measured. In an editorial for Journal of Literacy Research, 

Anders and colleagues (2016) call attention to “the subtle and dangerous argument embedded in 

the language gap rhetoric” (p. 131) that maintains “White middle-class approaches as the 

unchallenged norm” (p. 132). They go on to point out how “insidious biases in measurement 

continue to be promoted, primarily by privileged White researchers who seek to rank and 

diminish populations different from themselves” (p. 132)—biases embedded across the 

disciplines, though I focus on language and literacy in teacher education. I hope to avoid these 

practices in my own research and have thus diffracted variations of my selfhood. 

In a context that is often White – teacher educators, prospective teachers, the institution, 

the nation – it can be difficult to position ourselves to turn our gaze inward. Social pressure to 

conform is difficult to overcome. While I may want future teachers to take up culturally 

sustaining pedagogies, I do not in my own practice because there is no need to sustain a 

dominant culture. Instead, teacher education for White prospective teachers may need something 

 

14 

different: pedagogies of creative interference that challenge the normalized experience of 

Whiteness. 

Simon (1992) theorizes a pedagogy of possibility “capable of both affirming and 

challenging the immediacy of our everyday experiences” (original emphasis) in which 

participants “construct and present representations of the world beyond immediate experience so 

as to dialectically engage that experience and enable the articulation of new human possibilities” 

(p. 139). I support dialectical engagement with and among students using global books and 

editorial perspectives to contextualize our dialogues in ways that are uncommon to the students’ 

experiences. The underlying ethics is resistance to unconscious conformity. Teaching, then, 

becomes 

a counterdiscursive activity that attempts to provoke a process through which people 
might engage in a transformative critique of their everyday lives… addressing the 
‘naturalness’ of dominant ways of seeing, saying, and doing by provoking a consideration 
of why things are the way they are, how they got to be that way, in what ways change 
might be desirable, and what it would take for things to be otherwise. (Simon, 1992, p. 
60) 
 

Countering the discourse of a dominant culture, or any culture for that matter, is likely to lead to 

confrontation. People tend to resist criticism, and conformity is easier. Simon (1992) draws upon 

the Hebrew concept of hevrutah to imagine how this counterdiscursive interference can work. 

Hevrutah refers to “a sense of belonging to a moral culture that allows one to argue over its 

definition without feeling that an experience of collectivity has been dissolved” (p. 66). A future 

world built from arguments over morality that maintain community requires comfort, honesty, 

and authenticity (in the Heideggerian sense). Teacher educators need to establish rapport with 

prospective teachers before they engage in such critique. 

However, the challenges and potential harm I ask White teacher educators to navigate are 

necessary. The pressure to fulfill socially constituted norms is incentivized by the economic 

 

15 

dominance and sociocultural hegemony of Whiteness. We risk becoming Heidegger’s (2010) 

anonymous das Man: the social conformist who lives inauthentically, pursuing that which one 

values and foregoing their own choices. Whether or not a person willingly conforms to social 

norms, or if it is possible to avoid it, the conformist is complicit in society’s deeds.  

Whiteness needs to be critiqued from within to have any lasting effect. White people 

have not internalized important critiques of Whiteness that call for revision. For example, the 

narrative of Whiteness redacts militarism and colonization, slavery and oppression; omits 

Dresden, Pinochet, and eugenics; and includes with little impact Hiroshima, Iran-Contra, and 

Katrina. Neoliberal, colonial, White supremacy is critiqued for its greed and oppression 

domestically by #BLM and Occupy, internationally by #BDS and Boko Haram, and countless 

communities spanning a range of ideologies and methods. We need to acknowledge those views 

in our narrative, and I aim to provide challenging narratives as part of my teaching. 

To bring creative interference into pedagogical and methodological practice, I consider 

recent literacy research that draws upon the baroque as a disruptive art. Burnett and Merchant 

(2016) operationalized six techniques of the baroque to “sensitize us to those affective, material, 

and embodied dimensions of meaning making that defy representation” (p. 260) because they are 

messy. The authors harness the “disruptive power” (p. 262) of the baroque “to look but also to 

feel differently about the everyday and the mundane” (p. 264)—that which conformity makes 

invisible. They use these baroque techniques to “animate literacy research” (p. 264), and I 

embrace four as the basis of my pedagogy because they parallel the insights I draw from 

complexity. Inspired by Law (2011), I guide my pedagogy with the understanding that: there are 

multiple viewpoints, and each is limited; boundaries are uncertain; meaning is made with 

different materials in different media; and transporting beyond everyday experience builds a 

 

16 

notion of otherness. The dominant, certain narrative is that with which I intend to interfere, and 

through this interference I aim to create possibilities to choose different understandings. 

 

The Shape of the Dissertation 

It’s difficult to know where a dissertation begins, and to delineate where it ends. A 

dissertation is the product of research, and it’s personal as well: a struggle between individual 

experience and the more broadly meaningful. The pressing questions I hope to pursue as a 

researcher emerge from and extend into the personal and the social. While this dissertation is a 

representation and product of my teaching, research, and service, it also involves more personal 

ideologies and ethics. These are entangled. It is not my intention to artificially disentangle these 

various aspects of a diverse me. I break them apart momentarily to acknowledge the multiple 

over the binary or singular; and blurred borders between. This diffraction helps me elaborate 

themes interwoven across these various professional and personal commitments. 

My dissertation is comprised of three distinct scholarly articles. This nontraditional 

format allows me to employ a variety of qualitative research methods, including: critical literary 

analysis, autoethnography, and community-engaged scholarship. Like Burnett and Merchant 

(2016), who were inspired by the baroque, I present one of “a multiplicity of stories that could be 

told” and the chapters that follow “are drawn from...empirical materials...and stack onto one 

another in a precarious fashion” (p. 267). Presenting the stories in interference with one another, 

like diffraction, looks for understanding in the margins: “it is the gaps between the stories that 

are important” (Burnett & Merchant, 2016, p. 267). I attempt to reveal some of the meaningful 

spaces in – and in between – the stories make up the chapters that follow.  

 

17 

Chapter II – the first article – is a critical content analysis of Riad Sattouf’s (2014/2015) 

The Arab of the Future. This chapter focuses on a literary text. Critical multicultural educators 

would benefit from training around selecting multicultural literature, and often, selecting quality 

multicultural literature requires consideration of authenticity—a multifaceted, difficult-to-define 

term that may include among its criteria that texts be written by insiders and be free of negative 

stereotypes. The Arab of the Future troubles the binary criteria teachers often apply when 

evaluating multicultural literature, perhaps causing teachers to avoid it. I situate the text within a 

broader sociohistorical context, supporting its pedagogical value for teacher education as a text 

that can be used to confront ideologies grounded in Othering. I argue that controversial texts 

support critical conversations by foregrounding difficult knowledge otherwise avoided by 

teachers selecting texts. 

Chapter III – the second article – focuses on my reflective teaching practice. I initially 

intended to explore prospective teachers (i.e. the students in my class) as readers. However, now 

convinced of the unpredictability of learning outcomes, I methodologically abandoned the belief 

that one reader could predict outcomes for another. With the initial intention of affecting 

transformation of students’ beliefs, I instead found that unintended outcomes may undermine my 

purpose. I conclude that developing prospective teachers’ self-inquiry and reflection in broader 

social contexts offers access to critical ways of thinking and underlies teacher educators’ work. 

The final article –Chapter IV – traces the evolution of a service learning project I 

developed with a community volunteer group. This piece attends to service learning as a part of 

coursework in consideration of community. In it I explore the relationship between teacher 

education and community, and foreground language diversity as an area where schools and 

teachers could draw upon community knowledge. I elaborate some of the goals of pedagogical 

 

18 

scholarship and highlight the positions of power that influence community-researcher-teacher 

partnerships. 

There are other intriguing elements of the data that I can pursue in future projects. I 

provide multiple perspectives of my work as a teacher educator through these articles, and I have 

made choices that inherently exclude other possibilities. I acknowledge important stakeholders, 

but my goal is to be free from the constraints of any single disciplinary view of what counts as 

data, what frameworks are acceptable, and what conclusions are valid. As a result of situating 

this project within, without, across, and in the margins of the traditions of educational research 

associated with teacher preparation, I leave many questions unanswered. I can provide only what 

I have examined, analyzed, and written. 

Between these chapters I include a series of Interludes. Each is intended to highlight an 

orienting idea that frames the work that follows: empathy, reader beliefs and difference, and 

liminality. I draw from a variety of sources that contributed to my own thinking and learning 

about my teaching, this research, and my role in the world. These Interludes are intended to 

extend the dialogue that may emerge from the articles themselves. 

I conclude this dissertation with a discussion across the findings from these three studies 

in consideration of my larger purpose to ethically orient myself as a teacher educator and 

educational researcher. While this work may appear deeply autoethnographic – and therefore 

raise questions as to why it is not framed more prominently as such – the gravitational center of 

these various pieces is not me, or my personal link to the data or phenomena I investigate. These 

chapters are the materialization of my reimagining reflection as diffraction: different intellectual 

and temporal perspectives, at times in interference with one another, producing information and 

insight inaccessible with/to a single mirror. This project is and represents multiple rehearsals of a 

 

19 

pedagogical framework for teacher education grounded in expanding possibility through creative 

interference. 

 

 

 

20 

INTERLUDE – EMPATHY 

 

 

Reading, or more generally a literacy event, is commonly made up of a transaction 

between text, reader, and context. The first study I include began as an exploration into texts 

because teachers can select texts and therefore wield influence through curricular choices about 

which texts to use. As an educator aligned with critical multiculturalism (McLaren, 1995), or 

multicultural education for social change (Banks, 2008), I question what it is I hoped to achieve 

with texts. 

 

Karen Spector (2007) describes narrative frames as “a window to the outside, an aperture 

that may embellish, distort, or obscure from view that which would otherwise be seen differently 

through another window” (p. 9). These frames are not inherently good or bad, but they offer 

access to difference. Throughout my teaching I had aligned with Thein and colleagues’ (2007) 

notion that perspective-taking through literature would help the mostly White prospective 

teachers in my class develop new ways of understanding the world, their experiences, and those 

of others. This view derives from a sense that empathy can bridge differences. However, in 

Empathy and the Novel, Suzanne Keen (2007) argues that literature has no meaningful 

connection to empathy or to prosocial action. She makes the point that guided reading like what 

might occur in classrooms can boost literature’s impact in this regard, but ultimately the average 

American consumers of fiction do not identify with characters different from themselves in ways 

that inspire readers to act to change the world. Yet the idea that books nurture empathy is still 

quite common. 

Gene Seymour (2017) elaborated this sentiment in a literary review that I read shortly 

after defending my dissertation proposal. Considering literature’s ability to grant White people 

 

21 

access to the pain of racism, he wrote, “Empathy is where most solutions begin regarding 

problems that are thought to be too abstract or formidable to confront. But empathy requires 

imagination, and the American psyche insists on seeing imagination as, at best, an indulgence…” 

(p. A11). His comment resonated with me as an educator on both counts: first, empathy might 

help us resolve the most difficult conflicts, and second, that the US cares too little about 

imagination. My inclination to agree became a point of curiosity as well: why did that seem so 

true to me even though I was aware that empathy is not linked to action, and neither are caused 

by reading? 

Empathy is widely thought of as good. Empathy is to be cultivated, producing good 

people who care for others. People lament its absence in others. Empathy commonly refers to 

vicarious experiencing or feeling; in contrast to sympathy, which relates to feeling badly for 

others’ suffering. But how has an emotion tied to immediate experience become a moral social 

good? 

The empathy-altruism hypothesis was put forth and tested a generation ago (see Batson, 

et al., 1988), and it appears to have entered the public discourse. The notion is simple: when 

people empathize with, they are more likely to help others. It’s logical enough to assume a 

society of good individuals, defined as those who would help others, would be a good society. 

Empathy helps to overcome selfishness, and societies function better for it. But is it an outcome 

of empathy or the ability to overcome selfishness? 

Selfishness might be acting in one’s own best interest. However, selfishness can be 

disguised as altruism. Derrick Bell’s (1980) interest convergence theory indicates, at least in the 

case of White people regarding Brown v. Board, that people act when it’s in their better interest, 

and not necessarily because it is the right thing to do. His theory suggests that selfish actions can 

 

22 

be made to appear altruistic. People will disguise self-serving actions because selfish is a dirty 

word, even if doesn’t always mean that others become victims to your desires. Defining one’s 

best interest in exclusively selfish ways is generally perceived as immoral or bad for society, 

socio- or psychopathic. Yet these are the values espoused by neoliberal consumer capitalism. 

Common US ideology labels selfishness individualism to help resolve this tension, or it hides 

selfishness when interests converge. 

Empathy might be morally superior to selfishness, but that does not necessarily make it 

the best framework for social policies or interpersonal relationships, as Paul Bloom argues in a 

series of essays that coalesced into Against Empathy (2016). Jesse Prinz (2011) put forth a 

similar argument of the same title suggesting that empathy is biased and narrow, and as a result 

potentially harmful. Bloom (2014) notes “Laboratory studies find that we really do care more 

about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one” (n.p.). 

Assuming people have more personal information about those close to them, we may tend to feel 

empathy for those we know, and my concern is this extends to people like us. 

Bloom’s utilitarianist argument for the greater good raises serious questions about 

empathy used to exclude others—what does it mean to put America first? We might be aware of 

our globally-entangled existence, yet few policies are made at the supranational level. There is a 

structural obstacle to empathy being broadly applied through policy in that nation-state 

governments – like corporations – are inherently insular and selfish, unlikely nor often asked to 

be empathetic. Bloom (2013) concludes an essay for The New Yorker with this consideration: 

Such are the paradoxes of empathy. The power of this faculty has something to do with 
its ability to bring our moral concern into a laser pointer of focussed attention. If a planet 
of billions is to survive, however, we’ll need to take into consideration the welfare of 
people not yet harmed—and, even more, of people not yet born. They have no names, 
faces, or stories to grip our conscience or stir our fellow-feeling. Their prospects call, 
rather, for deliberation and calculation. 

 

23 

Instead of empathy, he offers compassion: “compassion involves concern and love for your 

friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s 

anguish” (Bloom, 2014, n.p.). So, are we at a semantic impasse, or is there a valid challenge to 

the primacy of empathy in the zeitgeist? 

I struggle with whether empathy – truly feeling what another feels – is even possible, or 

if it echoes the crisis of representation as Patti Lather (2009) suggests, raising concerns about 

imposed sameness and sentimentalization. Perhaps it’s not empathy at all that we need to 

cultivate. Bloom thinks it might be compassion. Seymour (2017), although following the 

common trend of empathy-appreciation, offers a hint at another idea: imagination. Maybe 

empathy is the trending term, but compassion and imagination are the vital characteristics. But 

does any of it matter if no action follows? 

Ultimately, though, empathy is not useful if it doesn’t lead to action to alleviate suffering. 

“As Mother Teresa put it, ‘If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.’” 

(Bloom, 2014, n.p.). Without action, empathy offers very little. I want to have the courage to 

honor and value difference, feel compassion and help others – known, imagined, and unimagined 

– regardless of my own better interests. I bring this desire to my selection of texts. A text may 

not change a person for the better, but I believe it can begin a discussion. 

 

 

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II – (RE)CONSIDERING AUTHENTICITY AND INSIDER-AUTHORS IN 

MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE 

 

The normalization of xenophobia in the US and throughout Europe is alarming. As 

globalization of communication and trade networks blur borders and bring formerly disparate 

cultures in proximity, a major challenge for contemporary society is to overcome divisive 

worldviews that lead to violence and inequitable distribution of material resources. As educators 

take up this task, perhaps inspired by critical approaches to multiculturalism (e.g. McLaren, 

1995), they need to foster student dispositions and capacities that can replace exclusionary 

primary group identification. While deconstruction of problematic worldviews is an initial step, 

Kathy Short (2017) adds: “Freire makes it clear that we should also be looking for 

reconstruction…in order to develop counter-narratives, and to offer new possibilities for how to 

position ourselves in the world” (p. 6). Therefore, teachers would do well to be prepared to 

reconstitute social narratives that maintain status quo inequities. 

 

Over the Spring and Fall of 2016, concurrent with the divisive US presidential election, I 

took an explicitly anti-Islamophobic position in teaching a children’s literature course as part of a 

teacher education program at a large Midwest land-grant university. I intended for the 

undergraduate prospective teachers in the class to envision multicultural education for social 

change (Nieto, 1992) through the enactment of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies 

(Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris, 2012). These commitments lead teachers – both me as a teacher 

educator and the students as prospective teachers – to multicultural literature (ML), a contested 

term (see Cai, 2003) that I return to in the implications for teacher education. 

 

25 

Teachers selecting ML often intend to provide their students with reading experiences 

that reflect their lives (a mirror), and that allow them to see other people and worlds (a window) 

(Bishop, 1990). I am committed to selecting ML that functions as a window for the mostly White 

prospective teachers in teacher education because they will likely go on to teach in less 

monocultural environments. In this way, prospective teachers gain experience with unfamiliar 

texts and characters that may serve as mirrors for their future students. Here, I make a distinction 

between texts that contribute to teacher preparation and ones that might be used in the classroom. 

While there is overlap, the purpose of this analysis is not to advocate for using a particular text in 

K-12 contexts. 

 

As part of my ongoing work as a teacher educator, I explore the pedagogical possibilities 

of critically engaging a controversial book in which the criteria teachers often use to evaluate 

multicultural literature begin to break down: Riad Sattouf’s (2014/2015) The Arab of the Future 

(Arab). I begin by elaborating upon authenticity in/as text selection, specifically regarding 

authorship. The author of the focal text could be considered an insider, but one who is inside 

multiple cultures and therefore might also be outside each of them. A critical reading provokes 

questions about what it means to be an insider and considers the problematic representations of 

Arabs that may cause teachers to avoid this text. Sattouf is a satirist writing a memoir, but his 

characters and his humor can be interpreted negatively, and his book dismissed by teachers. My 

analysis challenges the notion that authentic ML must be written by easily-defined insiders and 

free from stereotypes—especially in teacher education. 

 

 

26 

The Author as Insider 

 

One part of teacher preparation in children’s literature is text selection, which requires 

consideration of authenticity, “the basic criterion for evaluating multicultural literature” (Cai, 

2002, p. 38). Authenticity in ML, like culture itself, is a complex and elusive notion (Fox & 

Short, 2003). As a result, authenticity is not easily applied as literary evaluation. Selectors of 

texts (e.g. teachers) would do well to critically undertake their consideration of authentic ML.  

The contributors to Dana Fox and Kathy Short’s (2003) edited volume understand 

authenticity as the portrayal of beliefs and values of a culture – not just facts about it – and an 

accurate depiction of life and language. These academics and children’s authors tend to agree 

that authenticity is not easily defined, and the editors deliberately arrange the chapters to provide 

a dialogue that encourages text selectors to think critically about authenticity. 

An important thread regarding authorship emerges in considering ML authenticity: the 

question of who has the right to write. As Shelby Wolf and her students (1999) describe, there 

have generally been two positions taken up in response to this aspect of authenticity. The first 

proposes that the author’s prowess at the craft of writing – or “aesthetic heat” (Wolf, et al., 1999) 

– allows for the imaginative representation of the unknown. Literary worlds are imagined by 

readers; thus, authenticity relates to authorial literary world-building that allows for the reader’s 

suspension of disbelief. As such, regardless of an author’s cultural identity, it may be possible to 

authentically depict an un-experienced culture. This premise underlies fiction more broadly: if 

authors only wrote about what they knew firsthand, literary worlds would be much smaller. 

Another position toward authorship believes cultural insiders are better positioned to 

write about the experiences they know firsthand. The location of the author relative to the culture 

portrayed is thought to be assessable; because cultural outsiders tend to be easily identified, one 

 

27 

might imagine the opposite is also true. Authority is granted based upon insider-status because 

they know and have lived a culture. One foundation of this position is the belief that outsiders 

might misrepresent a culture (with plenty of evidence). This stance is further supported by calls 

to diversify the literary canon used in schools. Even though “gifted, caring, and responsible 

outsiders can write authentically, we nevertheless need the voice of insiders as well” (Torres, 

2016, p. 206). This perspective suggests educators should select literature authored by cultural 

insiders, and thus diversify students’ experiences with window- and mirror-texts (Bishop, 1990). 

The exclusivity of the cultural insider can be tempered by a broader understanding of 

knowing a culture. Jacqueline Woodson (2003) includes among insiders those who have 

experienced the world of those about whom they write (see also Mo & Shen, 1997). Even this 

expansive notion of a cultural insider remains ill-defined/able, especially for teachers unfamiliar 

with the culture represented. Elaborating the difficulty of determining an insider in her 

examination of depictions of Muslims in picturebooks, Heidi Torres (2016) found that cultural 

insiders can more accurately depict a culture, but what it means to be an insider is complicated: 

To be authentic, authors must go beyond surface elements of culture to include ways of 
thinking, values, beliefs, and norms of behavior. Given the complexity and diversity of 
experiences within any culture, it is difficult even for cultural insiders to agree on what is 
considered authentic... (p. 203) 
 

Evaluating authenticity based on insider-authors may not be tenable because culture is not fixed. 

As a result, labeling an author inside a culture may reinforce a binary, categorical worldview, 

when binaries can be insufficient or problematic. 

 

The perspective that anyone can write about unknown cultures tends to be unpopular 

because it allows for the continued White male dominance of published/taught literature. 

Outsider-authored ML may exploit the represented groups and may be inaccurate. As a result, 

educators turn to the other option: stories authored by insiders. The assumption is that these will 

 

28 

not be problematic. However, the insider-author is capable of both troublesome and inaccurate 

depictions. While broader cultural representation in authorship remains necessary, especially for 

teachers selecting texts, the insider label can manifest as cultural essentialization. 

Ultimately, authorship straddles text and context, two components of the experience of 

reading (with readers being a third). One perception of reading, as Lawrence Sipe (1999) notes, 

is that “meaning resides not in the author’s intentions (nor in the text itself)” (p. 121). Many 

factors contribute to the world in which the reader reads. Regardless of the author’s location 

relative to the depicted culture, there are other factors contributing to the meaning a reader 

derives from an encounter with literature, such as their lived experiences and encounters with 

other texts. Teachers might also consider how reading evokes meaning-making and make this a 

central part of text selection and evaluation. 

 

Purpose and Questions 

Arab may be controversial because it contains negative representations of Muslims. 

There are many reasons to avoid such representations, for instance, to interrupt their 

perpetuation. However, another outcome of avoidance is ignorance of troubling narratives. 

Ignoring stereotypical representations prevents educators from confronting them and their 

sources, and erases opportunities to provide counternarratives. 

In her review for The New York Times, Leila Lalami claims Sattouf’s representations may 

do “little to complicate most people’s perceptions” (Lalami, 2015, n.p.) of the Arab world. She 

focuses on Riad’s father, Abdul, the primary Arab character. Western readers are likely to agree 

with Lalami’s (2015) observation, “The portrait Riad Sattouf draws…is far from flattering… 

[nearly] the cliché of the Arab brute” (n.p.). If cliché stereotypical representations do not 

 

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complicate our perceptions, then the stereotype must already be (in) our perception. This existing 

belief needs to be challenged by complicating the acceptance of the stereotype. Pedagogical 

choices to accompany these representations can create possibilities to interfere with 

unquestioned ideologies. However, avoiding a text like this and the discussions that can emerge 

through a critical reading, may close opportunities to question the broader social narratives of 

stereotyping that make this text uncomplicating. 

I found the text complicating, especially regarding my notion of how texts can operate in 

teacher preparation. To dislike and to take as representative a character like Abdul might incline 

a reader toward negative impressions of Arabs, but without a context for his development I was 

making assumptions and generalizations about him. I wondered whether the text was the primary 

source of the changes a reader might undergo when encountering a text, and whether that 

depended on the reader or context. When considering authenticity, I imagine critical analysis – 

the reading and contextualizing – can transcend problematic representations found in the text. As 

a result, I pursued the following questions through a critical reading of this text: 

1.  How is the implied reader discursively positioned in Arab? 

2.  In what ways, if at all, might the text reify or reinforce (or undermine) Western 

stereotypes of Muslims in readers/readings? 

 

Theoretical Framework 

Because I situate Arab as children’s literature (I return to this), I consider how children’s 

literature functions ideologically. I then overlay postcolonial criticism and a framework for 

understanding difference through Othering to situate this ideological inquiry. 

 

30 

The subject position of the implied reader provides a theoretical framework to approach 

content analysis. Robyn McCallum and John Stephens (2011) elaborate the entanglement of texts 

and ideologies, providing an understanding of texts and their relationship to ideology: 

all aspects of textual discourse, from story outcomes to the expressive forms of language, 
are informed and shaped by ideology, understanding ideology in its neutral meaning of a 
system of beliefs which a society shares and uses to make sense of the world and which 
are therefore immanent in the texts produced by that society. (p. 360) 
 

Beliefs, discourses, and social relationships are entangled, and children’s literature is both a 

product and producer of culture. The authors go on to specify that texts serve social functions 

and contain “an assumption that writer and implied reader share a common understanding of 

value” (McCallum & Stephens, 2011, p. 360). Social values can establish and be established by 

the subject positions available in a text, including the implied reader. McCallum and Stephens 

(2011) explain “subject positions implied within texts...inevitably seek...reader alignment with or 

against the social attitudes and relationships that constitute the narrative” (p. 362). Clare 

Bradford (2017) similarly notes, “readers are positioned to align themselves with protagonists 

and hence to acquiesce to textual ideologies” (p. 20). In other words, the implied reader subject 

position indicates the values the author assumes as shared with the reader and often conveys 

through the protagonist—and in some cases, deliberately satirizes to engage the reader in 

questions about these values. 

 

In addition to the implied reader, subjectivity shapes how people understand difference. 

Western individuality centers human experience around the Self, delineating an identity through 

exclusion of the not-Self, or Other (Derrida, 1976). While perhaps inescapable, Othering 

(re)produces binary thinking: us and them. Acknowledging difference in itself is not objectively 

wrong, and it can be good at times; however, crossing over into stereotyping is troublesome. 

Stereotyping is when an image of the group becomes the identity of those within the group, 

 

31 

erasing other characteristics; broad narratives replace individuals (Bhabha, 2012). The White 

Western worldview (and those Othered by it) learns to notice the differences that set Others 

apart, and often uses these images as the basis for exclusion and inequitable social practices, 

consciously or otherwise. Accessing multiple narratives could presumably work against 

stereotyping by challenging the image. 

Specifically, postcolonial criticism reveals the Western construction of an Othered Arab 

world in relation to a normalized Europe. For instance, the hijab is often taken up by the West as 

a symbol of the oppression of Muslim women, while Western women’s fashion is decoupled 

from its patriarchal roots. Edward Said (1978) deconstructs how the West created the Orient as 

an object of study. The construction of cultural distinction serves to locate the Orient outside the 

normalcy of the West and has the capacity for stereotyping and division—traditionally used to 

bolster White supremacist narratives. Bhabha (2012) suggests that culture can be liminal, and his 

notions of ambivalence and mimicry challenge the neat categorization of culture that emerges 

from Western Othering. When binary categories break down, so do the grand narratives that 

uphold Western exceptionalism. Gayatri Spivak (1988) similarly argues that Europe constructs 

itself as the “Subject” of the modern world, that which gives shape to the non-European world, 

but one that cannot exist without the Other. Further, according to Norbert Elias (1982), Europe is 

made to appear as an achieved state of civilization, one which cultural Others have yet to attain, 

establishing a sense of progress with the West as its terminal. The identity of the West is in part 

built upon a devaluation of Others. 

When readers (un)consciously hold these views – that Arabs are inherently different and 

lesser, or the West is the benchmark of progress – stereotypical representations that appear in 

controversial texts may be difficult to confront. Othering erases nuanced Arab identities in favor 

 

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of stereotypes and makes invisible the subject who constructs and erases. As a result, texts may 

not complicate the views of readers aligned with the implied reader; further engagement with 

context can facilitate complication. 

 

 

This study emerges from my work as an instructor of a children’s literature course for 

Methods 

undergraduate education majors. I interrogate a text to explore the possibility of meaning-making 

to enact social change. To that end, I use critical content analysis to contextualize and consider 

The Arab of the Future (Sattouf, 2014/2015). 

 

Critical reading can be practiced by readers, applied pedagogically, and provide the 

framework for a critical content analysis. This approach “involves bringing a critical lens to an 

analysis of a text...to explore the possible underlying messages within those texts, particularly as 

related to issues of power” (Short, 2017, p. 6). For some, critical approaches are used to 

deconstruct a text, but I use texts to engage in social criticism: deconstructing and reconstituting. 

Like Short (2017), I begin from the notion of critical as “a stance of locating power in social 

practices in order to challenge conditions of inequity” (p. 1). Identifying the West as privileged 

in a binary of its own construction, I believe teachers and researchers have an ethical 

responsibility to reject the ideologies that support inequity by offering alternate narratives. 

 

Arab as Children’s Literature 

 

Set in the late 1970s, Sattouf (the author) recounts his early childhood (as Riad the 

character), told through the story of his father, Abdul-Razak al Sattouf1. After receiving his 

                                                 
1 Sattouf uses Abdul (p. 2) and Abdel (p. 6), though this second reference could be contextually interpreted as 
incorrect. Both can be transliterated from the Arabic name دبع. I use Abdul throughout. 

 

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doctorate in history from the Sorbonne, Abdul, a Syrian, takes his family – his French wife 

Clementine, and Riad, their son – from France to Libya then Syria to pursue his academic career 

and dreams of realizing pan-Arabism. Riad’s childhood provides glimpses into his father’s 

ideological journey of alternating admiration and disillusionment with each nation and its leader, 

never far from Sattouf’s skepticism and satire. Parallel to his father’s arc, Riad makes friends and 

meets bullies while trying to make sense of a changing world, often looking to Abdul for 

guidance as Abdul looks to national leaders; rarely do either receive it. 

Despite not having been written specifically for children, I consider Sattouf’s graphic 

memoir within the genre of children’s literature. Children’s literature is ideological and 

expresses an author’s understanding of society via the assumptions and desires expressed 

regarding children. Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer (2003) define this distinct genre by some 

shared characteristics, like focalization and narrative structure. “Children’s books tend to...be 

focalized through children or childlike characters” (p. 208), and Nodelman (2008) later claims 

this “marks a text...as one intended for child readers” (p. 19). Arab is primarily focalized through 

Riad, the child-character, suggesting its inclusion in the genre. 

Children’s stories often follow some variation of the home-and-away narrative structure 

(Nodelman & Reimer, 2003): born in France, Riad goes away to Libya and Syria, and returns 

home to France. The theme of home and away also serves to locate oppositional binaries, like 

boredom/excitement or civilized/barbaric (Nodelman & Reimer, 2003), indicating an 

understanding of the world as divided between the normalcy of home and the strangeness of 

away. Those residing in the away are Othered (Derrida, 1976) by their difference from home and 

the implied reader, but when characters return home, it often appears changed. The recognition 

 

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of difference everywhere – home as well as away – is a necessary step to move past the binaries 

of Othering, for characters and readers alike. 

 

 

Selecting the Text 

I included Arab in a set of global books as part of a children’s literature course for 

undergraduate prospective teachers specializing in global education. Having used translated 

graphic memoirs in the past (Abirached, 2007/2012; Satrapi, 2000/2003), I sought another to stay 

contemporary. I selected this text set to explore literary representations of Arab and Muslim 

experiences—two identities often entangled and conflated by outsiders. 

I initially selected global books based on insider authorship, though I frame these books 

as outside students’ experiences: I want students to become comfortable reading and selecting 

window-texts (Bishop, 1990). In a course text, Reading Globally, K-8, Barbara Lehman and 

colleagues (2010) define global books as “international either by topic or origin of publication or 

author” (p. 17). I desired multiple representations (see Gibson & Parks, 2014), and thus 

considered the presence of stereotypes in any individual text as an entry to discussing cultural 

representation, not a reason to censor a text. Because Arab contains what can be considered 

stereotypical representations, class discussion surfaced beliefs worth interrogating, making the 

text pedagogically valuable for preparing teachers. 

 

Researcher Subject Position 

I read Arab as a window-text because I am an outsider. I have spent most of my adult life 

living outside the US, including in the Middle East, but I do not know the world, cultures, or era 

that Sattouf portrays. I have learned from my experiences that a single narrative does not 

 

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represent a culture, and the recognition of being an outsider forces me to make more of an effort 

to understand what is being portrayed. Through critical reading and content analysis, I connect 

cultural representations to a continued search for knowledge, justice, and community. 

Regarding the multiple roles teacher-researchers hold, Short (2017) explains: “Critical 

content analysis is embedded in a tension, a compelling interest in exploring texts around a focus 

that matters to the researcher and, because we are educators, that matters to young people as 

readers” (p. 7). I designed the course section and selected the texts in critical response to growing 

xenophobic sentiment in the US manifested as Islamophobia. Whether this is a priority for young 

people – and this is where I might diverge from Short – is less relevant than if prospective 

teachers see it as a priority after the course. This is to say my role as a teacher educator cannot 

simply be compartmentalized. Short (2017) describes a difference between teacher researchers 

and other scholars, claiming “our intentions as researchers differ in significant ways because of 

our commitment to, and knowledge of, children, adolescents, teachers and classrooms” (p. 2). 

Likewise, I cannot disentangle my research from my desire to prepare teachers who will enact 

critical readings and dialogue in their future classrooms. 

 

Readings 

Although Short (2017) imagines the “first step of analysis is immersion as a reader, rather 

than as a researcher, in the identified texts” (p. 8), I first read as a teacher. I selected Arab as a 

course text, reading it before the semester. My initial reading was personal, but I was deeply 

engaged pedagogically, considering what content, contexts, and perspectives were made 

available. Specifically, the settings in Arab – France, Libya, and Syria – stood out to me as ways 

to connect literature to global events.  

 

36 

My “second” reading, as a researcher, occurred after the course; though I had engaged 

with the text multiple times in the interim throughout the course. I read specifically for 

focalization, social processes, and closure (Short, 2017, p. 11). Because I noticed a cultural 

dichotomy, postcolonial criticism informed my third reading, which “focuses on broad themes or 

issues that emerge from the interplay of data and theory” (Short, 2017, p. 12). I considered how 

progress was entangled with Eurocentrism, and referred to book reviews (Atassi, 2016; Lalami, 

2015; Shatz, 2015) to understand wider social response as represented in mainstream media. I 

present my findings in the next section. 

 

Findings and Discussion 

I include as part of my findings a bottom-up analysis and top-down framing of the text 

(Bradford, 2017). I begin with a text-level examination to explore the subject position of the 

implied reader, highlighting representations and stereotypes that situate this text as problematic. 

The focus is on Abdul, the primary Arab character. How readers may be positioned to view him 

– as a representation of the Arab of the Past – uncovers problems associated with an 

unquestioned alignment with the implied reader. Abdul’s expressed stereotypes compel the 

implied reader to dislike him (and find this text unacceptable for classroom use), but readers’ 

classification of Abdul as a stereotype instead of a character is problematic. Readers can avoid 

viewing Abdul as representative of Arabs, by acknowledging him as a single character that adds 

texture and nuance to a complex culture, which, like all cultures, contains some negativity as 

well. 

Critical reading also utilizes a top-down understanding to place a text within a social and 

historical context, much like how texts can be used in classrooms. I situate Arab within more 

 

37 

expansive textual and contextual webs, intending to support an approach to critical reading that 

relies less exclusively on the text itself. 

 

The Arab and the Implied Reader 

Riad’s initial presentation as stereotypically European – blonde hair, “refined and 

delicate” (p. 3) – challenges the reader to view him as Arab at all, yet in the final line of dialogue 

Abdul refers to Riad as “the Arab of the future” (p. 153). Left unspoken, but present nonetheless 

is the Arab of the past: perhaps Abdul, who earns a doctorate in history (p. 6). The story is 

focalized through Riad, positioning the implied reader to observe Abdul without necessarily 

understanding his motivations except as mediated through his son, a character equated with the 

West.  

Abdul’s expressed beliefs are accessible and obvious, and he affirms the privilege of the 

West. Abdul thinks “France is wonderful” (p. 5) as he pursues his degree. During this time, he 

elaborates a vision for the future derived from a Western notion of progress: “I would change 

everything in the Arab world. I’d make them stop being such bigots, get educated and join the 

modern world” (p. 5). Arabs, bigoted and uneducated, have yet to progress to the developed state 

of the West. This troubling perspective introduces the binaries of Western Othering—but this 

practice is not likely what readers will question. 

Hypocrisy, often utilized in satire, is Abdul’s most obvious characteristic, and his desire 

to rid Arabs of their bigotry is a clear example. In Libya, Abdul reads Gaddafi’s Green Book, 

giving voice to his resentment of colonialism and White supremacy. In the following panel, 

however, Abdul is upset that Gaddafi “thinks Arabs are black” (p.15). His critique of the West is 

interrupted by his desire to distance himself from Others perceived as less. Abdul’s racism 

 

38 

emerges more intensely when he equates monkeys with “Africans. They’re completely black 

with big thick lips and curly hair…” (p. 38). Abdul’s abrasive personality undercuts any 

consideration of Western oppressive policies. At Clementine’s insistence, Abdul reluctantly tells 

Riad, “Some of them [Africans] are nice” (p. 38), but his message indicates his skepticism. Riad 

then notices the monkey character “looked a lot like my father” (p. 39). Even though this 

comment erases the distinction between Black and Arab constructed by Abdul, it does so in favor 

of a Eurocentric model of Othering that categorizes both as animal, and unlike White Europeans. 

A similar conversation Abdul has with Riad is about Jews. Because Riad has blonde hair, 

he is often referred to as “Yahudi” (Jew) by his Syrian peers, a product of nationalist propaganda 

against Israel. For contemporary Western audiences, anti-Semitism is among the worst forms of 

bigotry, and Abdul further entrenches himself as a pariah, saying, “The Jews are our enemies. 

They’re occupying Palestine. They’re the worst race in the world…” (p. 133). Again, Clementine 

disagrees with the “total crap” he is telling Riad. The text offers binary positions toward bigotry: 

the Arab racist hatred of Others, and the Western (distant) compassion toward Others. The 

implied reader holds the modern, Western perspective, and by contrast the Arab of the past holds 

different, lesser values. This dichotomy obscures how the West perpetuates racism. 

Abdul became disenchanted with the West, his exodus from Europe precipitated by 

institutional racism (his degree without the highest honors, and a job offer misspelling his name, 

p. 6). He recognizes that to be an Arab in the West is always to be Other. Justifiably, he harbors 

resentment: “Westerners think the whole world should be exactly like them… Just because 

they’re the most powerful… But that’s only temporary” (p. 151). His desire to become modern 

equates to a desire for Western-ness, and this causes him to disdain his own culture’s lack of 

progress while also hating the West for its inaccessibility. While his views of his own culture are 

 

39 

troubling, the racism that he experiences fails to garner more sympathy because the implied 

reader is set to respond to his bigotry—the image of the bigoted Arab overrides his identity, his 

humanity. 

Abdul’s initial desire to educate bigoted Arabs remains unchanged throughout the story 

despite his changing views toward the West. Abdul reasserts his perspective in a dinner 

conversation with his French in-laws toward the end of the book: 

“You have to be tough with [Arabs]. You have to force them to get an education, make 
them go to school… If they decide for themselves, they do nothing. They’re lazy-ass 
bigots, even though they have the same potential as everyone else…” (p. 150) 
 

Persistent deprecation could incline the implied reader toward believing him, but Abdul is both 

bigoted and educated. For the implied reader, his contradictory qualities call into question 

whether progress is even possible. Abdul’s characteristics challenge the binary he sets up as the 

difference between Arabs and the West, a vital deconstruction perhaps lost to readers in his 

cantankerousness. 

Abdul’s desire for and rejection of the West are at the center of his struggles. He desires 

Western modernity, but he cannot be Western, despite his efforts, because he is marked as Arab, 

as Other, not of the West. The resulting resentment he has for both Arabs and the West is 

difficult to reconcile, and the implied reader is not encouraged to sympathize with Abdul and his 

identity tension. To focus on the stereotypes Abdul expresses is to overlook his experience as a 

stereotype in the West, and ultimately to disregard the most poignant critique of the West. The 

Arab of the past has no place in the world, so readers are positioned to align with Riad, the Arab 

of the future—but how are readers meant to understand this future Arab? 

 

One possibility is that Abdul is referring to Riad’s generation, but this is troubling. Out 

for a walk in Syria, Abdul beats three kids who tease Riad. Abdul refers to these uneducated 

 

40 

young Syrians as “Stupid filthy Arab retards!” (p. 91). These children provide an alternative 

definition of the Arab of the future, different from Western, educated Riad. The implied reader 

might consider two models of future Arabs: those who maintain the un/educated, bigoted, 

uncivilized traditions of lazy Arabs (p. 101), and those who assimilate into the West, leaving 

behind Arab culture except the occasional taste for unrecognizable food (p. 79).  

A critical reading of this text provides a context to explore how Western media affirms 

this binary, providing an entry point to understanding the work teachers could do toward social 

change. We might begin to ask why the West requires Others to be less than or to assimilate, and 

what this means for understanding insider authors who may be pressured to assimilate to be 

published; or how these narratives uphold certain values over others. Validation of these models 

is not of curricular value but examining the Western narrative that constructs them is. The 

construction of an Arab of the past meets the expectations of a Western audience even if what 

Abdul says might inflame their liberal, tolerant sensibilities. The alignment with the implied 

reader subject position can provoke readers’ curiosity about their beliefs, not just animosity 

toward the beliefs of a dislikable character. 

Taking Abdul’s depiction as representation – to see Abdul as more than the story of one 

character – is troubling: “Sattouf…seemed to want people to read as little into his work as 

possible and insisted that his project was to write about his childhood in a remote village, not 

about Syria, much less about the Arab world” (Shatz, 2015, n.p.). Thus, the implied reader might 

understand Sattouf’s account of his father – “a man he once worshipped but came to despise” 

(Shatz, 2015, n.p.) – not as representative of Arab men. The scathing portrait of his father is 

meant only as that, not to be understood by readers as the narrative of Arabs. However, Adam 

Shatz (2015) points out, “Sattouf didn’t call the book ‘The Boy from Ter Maaleh’; he called it 

 

41 

‘The Arab of the Future’” (n.p.). With such a title, the implied reader is positioned to take this 

story as representative, considering everything Abdul says to be racist and stereotypical while 

ignoring the systemic injustices that he is victimized by and fights against. As a result, the text 

calls for further contextualization to consider its contemporary social importance. This 

contextualization is where I locate the potential for change in the reader’s (i.e., prospective 

teachers) views and actions. 

 

Arab in a Xenophobic West 

Recently, a few popular graphic memoirs about childhoods in the Middle East translated 

from French have been critically well-received in the US: Marjene Satrapi’s (2000/2003) 

Persepolis recounts her rebellious youth in Tehran during Islamic Revolution; Zeina Abirached’s 

(2007/2012) A Game for Swallows relates the stresses of a community living through the 

Lebanese Civil War; and Sattouf (2014/2015) retells his transient years following his father from 

France to Libya and Syria in the time of Pompidou, Gaddafi, and Hafez al-Assad. 

These graphic novels were contemporaneous with Muslim outrage at cartoon depictions 

of the prophet Muhammed, highly publicized in the Western media. These provocations led to 

attacks in the Netherlands and in France, where these graphic memoirs were first published. The 

satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was targeted in a well-known attack, and Sattouf was once a 

cartoonist for the publication, though his relationship with the magazine was professional, not 

political (Shatz, 2015). In this context, the graphic novel becomes a symbol of free speech and 

artistic expression – values associated with Western democracies – in opposition to traditional 

(i.e. yet to achieve modernity) censorship by the Othered Muslim extremist. Although these 

stories are perhaps more different than they are the same, in common they represent the Middle 

 

42 

East and Middle Eastern characters to a Western audience from the perspective of an insider-

author who left the Middle East for the West; they might all be described as authentic. 

The authenticity of these cartoonists’ stories is thought to be inscribed in their identities, 

but labeling authors insiders can be reductive. Sattouf recounts being named the Arab of the 

future by his father, despite reader alignment to identify Riad more with the West than with 

Abdul’s Arab world: he is out of place in the Middle East, both in his and others’ perception, but 

he fits in easily in France. The notion that he is an Arab insider is troubled by his own story, yet 

his insider status is imposed from without. Further, Sattouf resists cultural and national labels in 

referring to himself (Shatz, 2015). Readers encountering insider-authored texts may imagine 

them to be authentic, thus accurate and unproblematic – in many cases they may be – but the 

insider label is a product of a categorical worldview grounded in Othering that can disregard the 

author’s identity.  

It might be challenging to not consider Sattouf an insider of his own memoir, but that is 

distinct from labeling him an insider of a culture. Perhaps his ability to both claim and distance 

himself from his Arab identity, muddying the waters for determining his insider-ness, creates the 

controversy elaborated by Yves Gonzalez-Quijano (quoted in Shatz, 2015): 

Because he’s part Arab, everything he says becomes acceptable, including the most 
atrociously racist things. What he’s written is very personal, a kind of self-analysis, 
really. But this analysis has entered a very public arena, in a totally explosive context 
that’s much larger than he is. (n.p.) 
 

If Sattouf were not Arab at all, the assumption is his work would not be acceptable. The trouble 

is that in the West (1) insider-authors, a label imposed from without, seem to be given carte 

blanche to represent a group if it is Othered by the West, and (2) readers may not critically 

engage the text, perhaps accepting these representations as typical or resisting them as 

stereotypical. 

 

43 

The authors of these graphic memoirs may not intend to represent a group, but their 

Western readers seem to impose it. These authors’ representations are far from ideologically 

neutral: their memories, like many immigrant narratives, teeter between fond longing for a lost 

culture and anger at the forces that displaced them. Robyn McCallum and John Stephens (2011) 

argue that literary discourse “serves to produce, reproduce, and challenge ideologies” (p. 370), 

and readers perceive no author bias when the ideology aligns with their own. Perhaps Western 

audiences want these authors to be “inside” another culture because their texts align with 

Western values, affirming the West and its worldview from outside, the Other. Especially 

relevant in these graphic memoirs, the “interplay of overt and invisible ideologies is most evident 

in realist texts which thematize social issues, especially in representation of bodies and behavior 

marked by…race/ethnicity” (McCullum & Stephens, 2011, p. 370). If Sattouf is inside another 

culture, his representations are viewed as accurate, but the invisibility of his Western-ness only 

serves to reinforce a Western view of the Other. Representations of Arabs in literature can 

socialize Western readers into ideologies that conform to or interfere with the dominant Western 

narratives and beliefs. The West needs to be mindful of how the practice of labeling authors 

“insiders” can also make invisible the Western ideologies to which these texts conform. 

In terms of Sattouf’s representations, readers must be careful of how representative they 

imagine characters to be. Clearly, the stereotypes that emerge from Abdul are problematic, but a 

desire to limit stereotypes might assume texts have fixed meanings, influenced by their authors, 

where readers have little agency. In contrast, Nader Atassi (2016) places responsibility on the 

audience: 

The Arab of the Future can be read in many ways. In certain contexts and by certain 
audiences, it would be read simply as a scathing critique of Arab politics and society. Its 
cartoonish—verging on Orientalist—depiction of Arabs as anti-Semitic, sectarian, 
unclean, and submissive to authoritarianism doesn’t exactly help combat long-held 

 

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western stereotypes about Arabs. If anything, this graphic memoir may simply serve to 
reinforce existing prejudices regarding Arab ‘backwardness.’ (n.p.) 
 

Readers make meaning from cultural representations, yet the expectation is for the author to 

produce accurate, stereotype-free material. Culturally and especially within education, the West 

insists upon positive representations by authors despite long-held stereotypes going unaddressed 

among readers. Palestine’s ambassador to UNESCO, Elias Sanbar reiterates the importance of 

reader responsibility: “The problem isn’t Sattouf, who has written a funny and sympathetic book. 

It’s the readers who think they’ve understood a society as complex as Syria because they’ve read 

a single comic book” (quoted in Shatz, 2015, n.p.). Readers making the leap from a single, 

problematic narrative representation to cultural understanding are mistaken, and this indicates the 

need for critical reading. The purpose of critically reading multicultural literature is not to 

understand the Other, but to engage in dialogue around the very controversies that emerge 

from/in these texts.  

Although many Syrians in France “vouched for the accuracy of Sattouf’s depiction” 

(Shatz, 2015, n.p.), readers would do well to be careful about how they take up this knowledge. 

Even if Arab contains accurate cultural representations, it will not provide readers with a 

complete understanding of Syria or Syrian culture, Arabs, Muslims, France, or Libya. An 

authentic text may, to an outsider, seem to be how it is, especially when the author is labeled 

“insider.” To understand culture takes more than a single book. Atassi (2016) explains that 

“Sattouf leaves out causality” as the story explores the political and social failures of Arabs, and 

“absent political and economic factors to explain social failure, the book lends itself to culturalist 

explanations” (n.p.), which is where responsible readers could, and teachers can intervene. His 

conclusion resonates with what teachers can assume as a guiding principle of critical pedagogy, 

the need for critical reading with social contextualization: 

 

45 

Sattouf presents a portrait of Arab society and politics that must be reckoned with. These 
are undeniable historical failures that cannot be written off as mere dishonesty pandering 
to western Orientalists. But societies that are broken and divided do not emerge in a 
vacuum. Political authoritarianism, economic catastrophe and underdevelopment, as well 
as the dependency wrought by imperialism have wide-ranging effects on social cohesion 
and resilience. It is within this context that Sattouf’s portrayal of the failure of Arab 
societies must be understood. (n.p.) 
 

Providing this broader understanding to critically engage dominant Western narratives is how 

teachers begin to change ideologies. 

 

Implications for Teacher Education 

Multicultural teacher education takes several forms with a variety of goals, but Paul C. 

Gorski (2009) notes that course syllabi indicate a tendency “to focus on celebrating diversity or 

understanding the cultural ‘other’” (p. 309). The latter aims for understanding to reduce that 

which we don’t understand about them and perpetuates the Western ideological tendency toward 

Othering. The former, a pedagogical focus on celebration, suggests literature should be free from 

negative stereotypes. Teachers learn to select texts without stereotypical representations written 

by insiders with the intention to learn about them, comfortable that their selections are 

unproblematic. 

Authenticity has come to mean positive representations in multicultural education, but 

authenticity can be negative, identities are always multiple, and representations are rarely 

generalizable. Authenticity is more complicated than the insider label. Authenticity is only 

somewhat and imperfectly measurable, but the practice of evaluating texts around authenticity, 

authorship, and stereotypes imagines it differently. While multicultural literature provides 

students of a variety of cultures with opportunities to experience texts as mirrors and windows 

 

46 

(Bishop, 1990), some of these texts can contain problematic cultural representations. I believe 

teachers’ efforts to avoid these texts are misguided. 

A first step toward social change is for teachers to include books written by authors from 

a range of cultural backgrounds, but labeling an author “insider” does little to break down binary 

categorizations derived from Othering. Othering leads readers toward understanding any 

representation of culture as typical and universal. 

As a result, I propose that multicultural literature be understood as a body of work that 

represents the multiple experiences of a diverse population, not taken as representative. It is 

difficult to apply the label multicultural to any single text because it functions differently than 

other categorical labels. For instance, children’s literature can be applied to an individual text 

given that it meets certain criteria (see Nodelman, 2008). Individual literary works can only be 

multicultural literature in relation to other texts in a set: applying ML to a single text absent from 

its relative position in a broader canon or text set stems from an identification of its characters’ 

or author’s non-mainstream identities—Othering (Derrida, 1976) despite the intentions of the 

labeler. A distinction emerges from how we might imagine texts operating in a class of culturally 

diverse students: texts and authors could be representational of the diversity of a classroom or 

society (about the presence of difference) as opposed to representative of a culture (about 

essentializing and making Others knowable). While this notion of multicultural literature as a 

body of work begins to move away from essentializing and stereotyping, text selection is only 

part of a teacher’s work. 

Readers’ practices can be more powerful than the representations themselves: readers 

might evaluate in comparison to the normalcy of their own experience, viewing culture as static, 

understanding representations as typical; or they understand a representation as one story of 

 

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many, that may share some qualities with other characters in other stories. A book is by no 

means representative of an entire culture, just as its author cannot be either. Instead of censoring 

controversial texts, teacher educators might encourage a practice of engaging with cultural 

representations through critical content analysis and critical reading in the classroom (Johnson, et 

al., 2017). A starting point may be to move away from authenticity as a measure of quality, or to 

redefine it so as insider-authors are not so central. 

 

Conclusion 

This critical content analysis highlights the pedagogical value of confronting problematic 

representations through complex social contextualization. When evaluating multicultural 

literature for use in a children’s literature course with prospective teachers, critical dialogue 

(inclusive of perspectives and broader contextualization) is more valuable than non-confrontation 

with difficult knowledge, even if readers feel apprehensive about such engagement. It is far 

easier to categorize multicultural literature as good or bad – defining “good” as authentic, 

insider-authored, stereotype-free – but teacher educators might also consider the educative value 

of texts that meet some of these criteria, and ones that trouble either/or binaries of quality. 

Arab is a memoir, and thus has authenticity, but perhaps not relative to a static notion of 

monolithic culture. Sattouf is a Western Arab, inside multiple cultures and therefore outside each 

of them, complicating the notion of insider author. While in- and outside both worlds, he can 

write as an insider while also Othering the Arab world. With a text like this, prospective teachers 

can engage in the dialogue about what it means to be an insider or not, and consider how 

stereotypes emerge in literature to support or undermine beliefs held widely in society. Such 

 

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inquiry cannot be achieved solely through consideration of author and text: context requires 

greater elaboration. 

Using complicating texts that contain negative portrayals, some readers from dominant 

groups will find their stereotypes reinforced while other attentive readers will be disturbed. 

Critical perspectives, like postcolonialism’s challenges to Western Othering, are necessary to 

surface deeper cultural beliefs about stereotypes held by Sattouf, the students, and me (i.e., 

authors and readers). Without examining stereotyping, we (Westerners) maintain privilege and 

power, accepting the image as identity of all the non-Western, non-White Others; perhaps 

especially when these stereotypes are authored by those we label inside another culture. A 

postcolonial lens calls into question Western normalcy and challenges us to scrutinize the ethics 

of our reading of text and context.  

Controversial texts can help prospective teachers recognize troubling perspectives, but 

engaging affirming multicultural literature will not offer similar opportunities. Narratives like 

Arab shift value from authenticity to the practice of reading—something teachers might 

influence. How readers engage with the text will determine if they view representations as 

conclusive, or as an entry to critical dialogue. 

 

 

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INTERLUDE – READER BELIEFS AND DIFFERENCE 

 

I often hear White American students say a book is not relatable when the characters and 

events are culturally different. I also hear them assert that “all people are equal,” as if those 

unrelatable characters are no different from themselves. Statements like these arise in my 

children’s literature course for prospective teachers, and they strike me as problematic because 

the discourse is dissociative, relying upon a morality that does not require recognition of 

difference. It’s as if to say, I don’t need to acknowledge you because I already know we’re the 

same. The unrelatable-ness of the book is an excuse that assumes there is nothing to be done. 

The discourse shuts down investigation, and the default belief that all lives matter prevails.  

I am concerned that these discourses conceal themselves as morally defensible, though I 

believe they are unethical because they silence. Freire’s (2000) notion of dialogue is built upon 

trust, respect, and love, wherein participants embrace uncertainty and strive to transcend limiting 

situations, and new knowledge may be created. Equality is only the starting point from which 

dialogue can take place, but it appears to be an ending in the context of my course (and White 

America). I hope to cause interference to discourses that legitimize a disposition toward equality 

that allows, promotes, and strategizes silence among readers about difference. 

These student responses are of interest to me because I intentionally select texts that are 

culturally distant, unrelatable by design. I hope for students to join me in a reading practice that 

follows Nodelman (2008), who describes his reading as emerging from his life on the margins:  

My reading practices focus on thoughtful response and critical thinking. Perhaps I am 
merely unable to respond either as insiders naturally do, with relatively thoughtless 
involvement, or as complete outsiders do, with absolute objectivity. I then privilege my 
inability as a goal for others to aspire to. (p. 89) 

 

 

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I aspire toward reading, teaching, and living a little less comfortably in the mainstream, 

embracing the margins. I hope for students to do the same in my course. 

In the preceding chapter, I justify text selection by engaging in critical reading, but each 

semester brings different students and my work begins anew. This recurrence is both the most 

promising and most frustrating part of teaching: I can hone my craft with each repetition, yet 

sometimes it can feel Sisyphean. 

As a teacher educator, I frame my claims to knowledge within my teaching practice. I 

define teaching as recursive and reflexive. It includes teacher inquiry in dialogue with students 

through their written work and in-class interactions across time. I adapt during a course to the 

evolving context, and I examine the past to inform the future. How I come to understand it as 

teaching or learning, or both, is at the center of my next chapter, in which I trace my trajectory 

over two semesters as a learning-teacher. I make the claim that teaching improves through 

continued inquiry. I further stress that teachers would do well to not measure their ability to 

teach solely based on the learning outcomes of the students in their class. 

While I began this work as an investigation into readers, I quickly came to find that 

learning was unpredictable, and that readers’ outcomes were not replicable—if that is desirable. 

There is no universal reader about whom I can make claims that hold true for all readers. What 

claims could I make regarding readers that would be of value the next time that I taught the 

course with a different group of students? How would these claims, as representations, be of any 

use to other teacher educators in different contexts? Could I possibly represent students as 

readers in ways that honored their multiple selves?  

I wondered about these questions in consideration of the partiality of knowledge and 

came to believe I should avoid making claims about learners or learning, especially if I want to 

 

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know more about teaching. That reality is not discouraging. It makes me curious. The nature of 

our knowledge and our universe is uncertain: “Some of the uncertainty rests in ignorance of the 

many factors that contribute to complex processes… yet some is due to the role of chance or 

chaos affecting the process itself” (Mitchell, 2009, pp. 3-4). We can build our knowledge of 

contributing factors by investigating our actions and adapting them to meet our goals more 

effectively—but this cannot necessarily be said about influencing others. 

To achieve a stance that encourages a more just world, I believe people can examine 

themselves to know themselves to whatever degree that might be possible. Knowledge of self 

can help equip us to better interact with others for mutually beneficial ends. Heidegger (2010) 

would refer to this knowledge of self as living authentically. I believe one can begin to know 

oneself well, and in the next chapter I explore myself as a teacher in greater detail. 

 

 

 

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III – CRITICALLY TEACHING CRITICALITY?: MODELING SOCIAL AND 

PEDAGOGICAL INQUIRY WITH LITERARY TEXTS 

 

This chapter is derived from an Accepted Manuscript of an article (McCarthy, 2018) published 
online by Taylor & Francis in Studying Teacher Education on 14 March 2018. The Version of 
Record is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17425964.2018.1449103. 

 
 
Obviously if we are to have teachers who are change agents, we must also have teacher 
educators who are prepared to be the same. Conceptualizing the education of teacher 
educators as a process of continual and systematic inquiry wherein participants question 
their own and others’ assumptions and construct local as well as public knowledge 
appropriate to the changing contexts in which they work provides a way to think about it 
as a process of change. In this sense, the education of teacher educators from an inquiry 
stance can be understood as playing a significant part in the future of society. 

But...unlearning is also a significant part of the process of inquiry, especially 

when groups are trying to interrogate their own assumptions about race and racism, social 
justice, and what it means to succeed or fail as teachers. The word, unlearning, signifies 
both growth and the undoing or reversing of that growth. This contradiction is 
intentional, chosen to signal not only the potential but also the enormous complexity 
inherent in the ongoing education of teacher educators. 

—Marilyn Cochran-Smith, 2003, p. 25 

 

If formal education is entangled with a society’s desires for its adult members (i.e. 

citizens), teacher education provides an opportunity to examine social and personal values, 

explicit and implicit, and their implementation through teaching and curriculum. Teacher 

education can be introspective for both teacher educators and prospective teachers; a process of 

inquiry into what and how we teach and why. Inquiry as a stance, free from time-bounded 

projects, enriches teaching, schooling, and education (Cochran-Smith, 2003). The 

autobiographical method of currere (Pinar, 2004) – one imagining of an inquiry stance – is “one 

of subjective risk and social reconstruction” in which “teachers remember the past and imagine 

 

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the future” (p. 4). Such inquiry consists of, according to Pinar (2004), complicated conversations 

we have with ourselves, history, society, people.  

These conversations are difficult yet hopeful: despite structural limits, teachers have 

agency to influence individuals and society. Teacher educators and prospective teachers can 

examine personal and societal values and build a disposition toward (re)shaping the world. This 

self-study explores my teaching of critical literacies as part of a children’s literature course for 

pre-practicum prospective teachers. I examine my pedagogy of creative interference: I remember 

my teaching to help me better meet my ethical commitment to social change as I imagine the 

future. I use inquiry to explore and perhaps justify this ethical stance, understanding inquiry into 

prospective teacher development as only part of a teacher educator’s work.  

A vital continuation comes through the (un)learning of teacher educators, including less-

frequently researched graduate student teacher educators (Cochran-Smith, 2003). I share this 

inquiry to participate in the complicated conversations of teacher education. Teacher educators 

have many commitments: to content, to schools, to stakeholders, to name a few. The ethical 

commitment driving this project derives from a notion of education for social change (Nieto, 

1992). Part of this work includes a vision of social justice. Ken Zeichner (2006) explains 

“advocates for teacher education for social justice have emphasized the development of 

sociocultural consciousness and intercultural teaching competence among prospective teachers 

so that they will be prepared to teach...increasingly diverse students” (p. 328). In this approach to 

teacher education, a central purpose is to develop capacities and dispositions among prospective 

teachers, particularly regarding how they navigate intercultural interactions.  

Following my description of the purpose of this project, I elaborate a US-based context of 

teacher education that aims for social change through building prospective teachers’ capacity for 

 

54 

and disposition toward culturally responsive teaching (Villegas & Lucas, 2002), commonly 

through literature and reflective practices. In this context, prospective teacher transformation is 

often prioritized over teacher educators’ reflexive examination. While these intentions may be 

good, I challenge teacher educators’ assumption – one that I shared – that transformation is 

necessary, or that it is possible in any predictable way. As a result, next I consider what it means 

to teach, drawing on a complex notion of teaching as communication (Rasmussen, 2005).  

Within this context and theoretical framing, I investigate two semesters my own teaching 

of children’s literature using books I consider “global” – literature written by non-US authors, set 

outside the US (see Lehman, et al., 2010) – to communicate multiple perspectives of and through 

Muslim characters. My explicit intention was to work against broader social narratives and 

discourses of Islamophobia through discussion of texts and readers’ responses, though I fell short 

in some ways. I initiated this work to understand how interfering with beliefs influences 

prospective teachers’ responses to literature and the world; however, without a model for 

students to confront disturbances, my pedagogical choices were less successful. I conclude that 

self-inquiry into teacher educator pedagogy is necessary for teaching criticality, though I find it 

difficult to make claims about prospective teacher learning. 

 

Developing a Critical Purpose 

I teach a section of “Reading and Responding to Children’s Literature” intended for a 

cohort of global educators-in-training. The global section was first offered in the Spring of 2014. 

After observing that first semester, I taught the section in Fall 2014, and again in the Spring and 

Fall 2016 semesters I investigate here. Over time I was given more autonomy, and the global 

 

55 

section became the space for me to explore pedagogy and curriculum. I believe I was asked to 

teach the section because I spent time abroad as a teacher. 

I spent much of my adult life living outside the US, including in the Middle East, but I do 

not know the world, or culture. The world is too complex to possess as knowledge, but one can 

experience and learn for future interaction. I have experiences with people and cultures across a 

wide geography that lead me to consider how existence is entangled. I learned that a single 

narrative does not represent a culture, and at times being an outsider requires more effort to 

understand the world. From this personal perspective, my teaching and research connect 

sociocultural contexts to a continued search for knowledge and justice in a shared future. 

I’m a White, anglophone, middle class, cis hetero male from the US. I am granted a 

privileged position in the global neoliberal system’s hierarchy. Privilege doesn’t disappear when 

I leave the US. Recognizing the system’s inherent injustice creates my ethical struggle: I 

acknowledge my complicity and strive to minimize my negative impact while considering people 

and cultures. Perhaps paradoxically, I chose to live in places where I was a numerical minority, 

removed from the cultural, linguistic, and social comforts of my home culture. I called this trying 

to be a minority in Korea in 2007. But Western culture was never far away: I taught in my native 

language, I had access to my home culture, and I was perceived as a product of it. As a result, 

safety and status were secure. Instead of remaining complacent, I acknowledged the colonialist 

project that education can be, and began to question my role as an educator. Why are White 

people teaching English all over the world?  

Setting aside economic implications, at the heart of this question is the notion that 

education is a transmission of values. It’s ideological. English has value; particularly dialects 

common to a White cultural mainstream. A similar question can be asked of children’s literature: 

 

56 

why are the majority of mass published books written in English by, published by, and about 

White people? And likewise, about US teachers and prospective teachers: why are most teachers 

White when fewer than half of students are White?  

My agency to address such broad sociocultural questions is limited to personal 

interactions, the products of my research, and my teaching. In teacher education, my teaching 

can influence future teachers for a potentially wider impact. I speculated that teachers without a 

broad sense of self-in-the-world would contribute to the normalization of mainstream cultural 

experience that occurs in schools despite attempts at multicultural education. As a result, I 

designed the course section and selected the texts in critical response to growing xenophobic 

sentiment in the US manifested as Islamophobia. 

 

Teacher Education for Superdiversity 

Contemporary society is superdiverse: its diversity is diverse (Vertovec, 2007). While 

this level of diversity may be framed as a strength, it also challenges teachers to respond to 

students’ cultural idiosyncrasies and to promote positive social and learning outcomes. Teacher 

education for social justice takes up this challenge. Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2010) explains 

Teacher preparation that fosters justice must deal with the tensions involved in meeting 
the needs of both white teachers and teachers of color and also focusing in the curriculum 
on the worldviews of social groups that have been marginalized or oppressed. (p. 460) 
 

Social justice teacher education responds to the complexity of superdiversity by addressing 

individuals and the cultural experiences that shape their lives. While Karen Ragoonaden (2015) 

notes that TE programs “are natural sites to develop coherence around social justice, 

multicultural education, and culturally relevant pedagogy” (p. 82), justice and change are 

specific to critical multicultural education (McLaren, 1995). Teacher educators need to model 

 

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and use critical approaches to prepare prospective teachers to be culturally responsive (Villegas 

& Lucas, 2002) and to support positive outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse 

students. 

Teacher-student demographic disparity. Teacher educators often problematize the 

cultural gap resulting from “a homogeneous teaching force...working with an increasingly 

heterogeneous K-12 student population” (Haddix, 2008, p. 255). The culture gap between 

teachers and students, more bluntly, implies teachers’ cultural Whiteness2 often precludes direct 

knowledge of or experience with the oppressive conditions many cultural identities experience—

a cultural (predis)position present among teacher educators as well. The knowledge gap that 

emerges from this culture gap indicates prospective teachers have limited capacity to identify 

and work to change these conditions. As a result, teacher educators are often concerned with 

shaping courses around White prospective teachers’ transformative learning (Mezirow, 2000). 

In her review of research on preparing prospective teachers for cultural and linguistic 

plurality, Christine Sleeter (2001) found courses were commonly intended to develop positive 

attitudes toward diversity among White prospective teachers. Teacher educators aim to transform 

attitudes and beliefs because they often observe that incoming White prospective teachers hold 

problematic ideologies. For example, Kumar and Hamer (2013) found a quarter of prospective 

teachers in their longitudinal study held stereotypic beliefs. More commonly, perhaps, 

prospective teachers lack “critical awareness of themselves as cultural or linguistic beings” 

(Haddix, 2008, p. 260); Whiteness is often invisible (see Matias, 2016; McLaren, 1995). Course-

based interventions to transform these initial positions take myriad forms, including exploring 

                                                 
2 Not exclusively racial, but indicative of a larger English-speaking, Western, US, Christian, middle-class, cis-
heteronormative, able-bodied, neoliberal, and otherwise intersectional dominant identity – apart from gender in this 
context, although women certainly experience patriarchal oppression. I use ‘White’ and ‘Whiteness’ for brevity. 

 

58 

and exposing deficit beliefs through reflective writing (Brock, Moore, & Parks, 2007; Mueller & 

O’Connor, 2007; Haddix, 2008) and literary analysis (Brindley & Laframboise, 2002). While 

counteracting stereotypes is important, critical researchers and teacher educators would do well 

to be cautious of deficit models—including those they might apply to their White students. 

Multicultural literature in teacher education. Research involving literature has 

prioritized prospective teachers’ examination of their beliefs through experiences with 

multicultural books. Other ways of understanding and valuing become accessible through 

experiences with window-texts (Bishop, 1990). Global literature, a subset of multicultural 

literature, “not only illustrates and reflects the culture from which it comes, but it also gives us 

insights into the reasoning and belief systems of people whose outlooks and life experiences may 

be far different from our own” (Lo, 2001, p. 84). Alternate ways of knowing and being provide 

contrast to prospective teachers’ own beliefs and identities, and teacher educators use this 

contrast to enter into discussions and self-reflection.  

In-class discussions are often the centerpiece of literature courses. Laframboise and 

Griffith (1997) used multicultural literature and discussions with prospective teachers to “create 

an environment where students are encouraged to examine values and attitudes, express 

divergent views, and learn reflective practices” (p. 382). Because confronting held beliefs can be 

difficult, teacher educators tend to ground these discussions in the text. Faust (2000) describes 

responsible reading as when a reader uses textual evidence “to account for their own reading and 

listen” (p. 29) to others’. Accountability creates a space for honest interactions centered on the 

text, and includes making real-world connections and considering absent voices, going beyond 

the local context of the book discussion—aspects of critical literacy. Similarly, Thein and Sloan 

(2012) extend the idea of trying on new perspectives to include an ethical reading and literary 

 

59 

discussion, which includes questioning beliefs and supports fluid, uncertain interpretations. 

Readers could voice opinions especially when they are uncertain. Uncertainty can inspire inquiry 

and lead to understanding. 

Reflection to address beliefs. Escamilla and Nathenson-Mejía (2003) found many 

prospective teachers felt reluctant to take risks expressing their opinions and engaging their own 

biases in class. Considering her use of controversial literature with teachers in Israel, Yael Poyas 

(2016) elaborates the dilemma teacher educators face: a “critical approach unravels the safe 

emotional in-between space in favor of a conscious, exposing discussion of social and political 

forces” (p. 280). Teacher educators may attempt to balance openness and honesty with conflict 

and disagreement but should accept resistance and reluctance in response to “pedagogical 

practises that are designed to more explicitly contend with the moral logic that undergird 

students’ [(un)conscious] commitments to inequity” (Mueller & O’Connor, 2007, p. 854). Often, 

prospective teachers sort through these complicated conversations through reflection. 

To build upon prospective teachers’ encounters with alternate beliefs, teacher educators 

often employ reflective writing. Fendler (2003) argues that teachers are inherently reflective, but 

teacher education is often “based on the assumption that teachers are incapable of reflection 

without direction from expert authorities” (p. 23)—a deficit model. Because it is difficult to 

confront beliefs, teacher educators may feel obligated to guide reflective practices, and they have 

had success in this regard. For example, Brindley and Laframboise (2002) found reflective 

writing in response to literature and classroom activities can lead to self-examination and 

discomfort, the consideration of multiple perspectives, and sensitivity to issues of 

multiculturalism. These findings indicate possibilities, not necessarily patterns, and teacher 

educators are not in control of these outcomes. As Fendler (2003) notes, “common practices of 

 

60 

reflection (journal writing and autobiographical narratives) may have unintended and undesirable 

political effects” (p. 23). For instance, journal writing may reinforce stereotypic beliefs about 

cultural Others experienced through literature when these stereotypes are present in a text. As a 

result, stereotypes may be confirmed through reflection. 

Teacher educators can select texts and create a space for discussion of texts, but the 

discussions and self-reflection that follow are unpredictable. Unpredictable learning outcomes 

challenge teacher educators to evaluate their teaching; however, prospective teacher 

transformation does not indicate successful teaching per se. An examination of teaching, not 

learning – including reflection on how prospective teachers are framed in/through teaching – 

may contribute to how teacher educators enact critical practices toward society and pedagogy. 

 

Theoretical Perspectives: Teaching and Learning Critical Literacies 

Teacher educators may intend to develop prospective teachers’ critical literacies to 

promote a disposition toward social criticism. Critical literacy understands that “one imbues a 

text with meaning rather than extracting meaning from it... [and] meaning is understood in the 

context of social, historic, and power relations” (Cervetti, et al., 2001, n.p.), extending 

Rosenblatt’s (1982) notion of reading as transaction by considering the social: connections 

between texts and social contexts are part of a responsible reading (Faust, 2000). Ultimately, 

“critical literacy approaches set the reshaping of political consciousness, material conditions, and 

social relations as first principles” (Luke, 2012, p. 7). This disposition toward change is often 

framed as a learner transformation, not as teaching practices: something the prospective teacher 

does, not what the teacher educator does.  

 

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Understanding teaching through learning. Certainly, teacher educators would do well 

to consider theories of learning. Jack Mezirow’s (1995, 2000) notion of learning as 

transformation accounts for the established beliefs held by adult learners, aligning with teacher 

educators’ intention to transform prospective teachers’ beliefs. Learning as transformation begins 

from frames of reference, like one’s habitus (Bourdieu, 1977): a network of beliefs and 

experiences that mediate learning and meaning-making (Mezirow, 2000). Often these frames are 

taken for granted so examining underlying beliefs, ideas, and emotions through critical practices 

can lead to transformation. Transformative learning promotes “not only awareness of the source 

and context of our knowledge, values, and feelings but also critical reflection on the validity of 

their assumptions or premises” (Mezirow, 2000, p. 8). Awareness and criticality are central to 

transformation, but according to Schön (1983), this type of learning is nonlinear and non-

rational.  

A linear understanding evaluates teaching through learning outcomes: teacher input 

produces learner output. However, belief-changing discussions and reflections are unpredictable 

and uncertain, presenting a challenge to linear conceptions and suggesting an avenue for teacher 

educator unlearning (Cochran-Smith, 2003). Understanding teaching through learning focuses 

inquiry on the development of particular dispositions that may not change within a single course. 

Further, unpredictable, subjective learning is an individual act, unlike teaching, a social act 

(Rasmussen, 2005). The challenges of developing criticality indicate that mediation or teaching 

is helpful, but transformation is ultimately achieved by the learner at their own pace, if at all. 

Even though teaching can encourage such learning, it is not possible to be certain of it.  

Therefore, transformative learning, while desirable in asset-based applications, is not 

necessarily a productive measure of teaching as part of reflexive inquiry. Often for teachers, 

 

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“what is essential is the establishment of a firm connection between the intention of teaching and 

its result” (Rasmussen, 2005, p. 225), but this desire for linearity may oversimplify a complex 

system. Teaching may be unsuccessful if it is dependent on unpredictable transformations.  

Teaching as participation and communication. As an alternative, Brent Davis (2004) 

describes teaching as “participating in the transformation of what is” (p. 184). The nature of this 

participation is contingent and perhaps unclear when considering students, but it offers alternate 

perspectives regarding the subject of transformation—teacher educators can participate in their 

students’ and their own transformation. 

To reconsider how teachers might participate in transformation of students, Jens 

Rasmussen (2005) understands teaching as communication: “a specialized form of 

communication aimed at stimulating learning…through deliberate disturbances to change the 

learner, [though] this intention is not always achieved” (p. 216). These deliberate disturbances 

are central to a critical literacy pedagogy, which often includes: disrupting the commonplace; 

interrogating multiple viewpoints, including those heard and absent; and focusing on 

sociopolitical issues, and connecting them to daily life (Lewison, et al., 2002). Teachers can 

participate in the transformation of their students by stimulating through disturbance: “the 

contents of teaching must appear as a problem for students, something they may each be 

disturbed or affected by, and which they therefore are prompted to deal with consciously” 

(Rasmussen, 2005, p. 232). The transformation of particular dispositions, then, results from 

posing meaningful problems, and teacher educators could model how to pose them. 

Teacher educators may teach to transform, but participation includes self-transformation. 

Teacher educators’ reflexive inquiry into teaching communicates to prospective teachers a 

critical stance intended to transform self and society. 

 

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Methodology 

This investigation of my implementation of inquiry as a stance (Cochran-Smith, 2003) 

explored my pedagogical choices as disturbances, and my learning from prospective teacher 

responses to those choices—responses I took to be their reduction of complexity (Rasmussen, 

2005).  

I approached this project as self-study (Loughran, 2005), a methodology that emerges 

from my inclination toward teacher inquiry as practice. Teacher educators engaged in self-study 

are participants in that which they research, following the “humanistic commitment of the 

qualitative researcher to study the world… from the perspective of the interacting individual” 

(Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001, p. 13). The interactions, recursive as they often are, contribute to 

the non-linearity of TE practices, embodying currere (Pinar, 2004): teaching in the present 

becomes a researched remembrance to inform future practice. 

In an analysis of self-studies with a multicultural focus, Schulte (2004) found the 

intention is often to explore the “evolution of one's own understanding and perspectives in order 

to meet more effectively the needs of all students… marked by a disruption of values or cultural 

beliefs through critical reflection with the goal of more socially just teaching” (p. 712). Teacher 

educators as well as prospective teachers need to go through this evolution. The “value of self-

study in relation to multiculturalism resides in engaging preservice teachers in transformative 

experiences while simultaneously modeling one's own transformation process” (White, 2009, p. 

9). These two layers are entangled, though I intended to explore the latter here. 

My investigation is not about the extent to which students transform. Rather, I consider 

my own transformation as I respond to nodal moments in my teaching to learn how to model this 

process. Nodes, as I use the term here, are points of interaction (between me and students, among 

 

64 

students, and with texts) that recur from one semester to the next. I trace my transformation 

through choices I make differently when I encounter a node again.  

 

Course Context 

 “Reading and Responding to Children’s Literature” is required for elementary education 

majors as part of an undergraduate teacher education program at a large Midwest university. 

Classes meet once weekly for three hours, and five of the fifteen meetings are reserved for 

discussion around books selected for the whole class to read. Despite a somewhat more mixed 

group of students in the global sections, most students are female, White, 19-20 years old. Each 

section has roughly twenty students, mostly in their second year. 

The two sections of the course that serve as foci for this inquiry coincided with the 2016 

presidential election: the campaign season unfolded throughout the spring semester, leading to 

the election during the fall semester. The candidate who was eventually elected mobilized voters 

with talking points on immigration, diversity, and Islam, leading some to label him a demagogue. 

The magnification of social division throughout the year intensified my desire to promote critical 

conversations, and to communicate the importance of meaningful connections between the 

events of the world, our lives, and the books we read. 

The nodal text. The texts I selected for discussion included fiction, memoir, and graphic 

novels, and were authored by Muslim and non-Muslim men and women from outside the US. 

While not my intention to normalize the US in opposition to global books, I never addressed this 

issue. These were texts I believed better aligned with my critical pedagogy (Lewison, et al., 

2002). This is not to say all global books, or my narrowed subset, are effective. Poyas (2016) 

concluded that “asking [students] to critically examine the complex reality they live in, should be 

 

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done through rich, complex, multi-faceted texts” (p. 281). I focus on one text I selected and 

considered complex (see Chapter II): Riad Sattouf’s (2015) The Arab of the Future (Arab). I 

assigned Arab in both sections of the course, and it serves as a focal node because I continued to 

assign this book—partly because of its controversial nature. 

Arab provides an opportunity to confront representations of difficult, unlikeable 

stereotypes; characters are not celebrations. As Poyas (2016) notes of text selection, “My choice 

of a work, the way it should be read, and how it should be interpreted makes a political 

statement” (p. 272). The political statement I intend, stated from the beginning of the course, was 

to confront Islamophobia, including negative images perpetuated by social narratives constructed 

by dominant groups (i.e. US media and political discourses that vilify Arab Muslims) and others. 

Like Poyas (2016), the texts I chose were “culturally distant works that accommodated topics 

through which we could discuss issues of power relations, identity, gender, human conduct in 

times of stress and anxiety” (p. 274). Both Syria and Libya were undergoing serious changes 

following the Arab Spring, and US involvement (or lack thereof) empowered violent 

authoritarian regimes. These distant events and others displaced people, in turn fueling the 

xenophobia of the 2016 presidential election discourse, directly impacting the students and me, 

and our discussions. 

Engaging a literary text. While students are assigned to read the books outside of class, 

sharing responses with other readers takes place in class. These discussions included an hour in 

small groups, followed by whole class sharing of salient points largely directed by me. In terms 

of Rasmussen’s (2005) phases of teaching: I introduce a text as new information, prospective 

teachers select an understanding and begin to reduce it on their own, and discussions provide a 

forum to reduce uncertainty further while including peers’ perspectives as new information.  

 

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Additional texts. To facilitate the connections and meaning the students might make, I 

included a variety of additional sources throughout the course that draw upon current events, like 

editorials and documentaries regarding social issues and power relations in the Middle East and 

elsewhere (see Appendix A). As Poyas (2016) explains, “Teaching literature means hearing 

diverse voices and including them into the social fabric” (p. 271). I included voices not present in 

the text, but present in the contemporary world. I aimed to prioritize the development of critical 

literacies and meaning-making practices that extend across texts and contexts. 

 

Data Sources and Analysis 

Self-study can be considered “a research methodology in which researchers…use 

whatever methods will provide the needed evidence and context for understanding their practice” 

(Hamilton & Pinnegar, 1998, p. 240). Teacher educators as researchers need to make choices 

knowing data can (at best) partially represent teaching and learning, or the motivations of and the 

residual effects on participants. With this limitation in mind, data sources informing this inquiry 

include prospective teacher journal writing over the course of a semester in response to prompts 

intended as disturbances, or interferences meant to open possibilities; discussion notes kept by 

prospective teachers during their book discussion; my pedagogical reflections; and course 

documents informed by interactions with colleagues, students, and educational research.  

Student journals. I primarily investigate prospective teacher journals because they 

represent the most direct communication I used to prompt each student’s reduction of uncertainty 

regarding course themes.  

I asked students to keep a weekly journal used for structured freewriting shared with me 

through Google Docs. I provided questions or a prompt, and students wrote for about ten minutes 

 

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in response. While I agree with Fendler’s (2003) stance that teachers are capable of reflection 

without my guidance, my inclination was that some direction was necessary to consider course 

themes and topics. I clearly informed prospective teachers in class and on the syllabus that 

journals are only graded for completion; they are low-stakes. To create a space that felt 

comfortable enough to express their ideas, I did not read and respond to these journals during the 

course itself—I came to question this choice because their journals could have been a dialogic 

space to engage their ideas.  

Interactions I had with students throughout the semester led me to believe that the 

identities they chose to enact in class were like the voices I heard in their journals. These voices 

were often absent from the papers turned in for grades. Formal student work takes on an 

impersonal, professional tone that is less visible in face-to-face interactions, but these journals 

maintained an identity I had come to attach to the students. 

Analysis of teaching. I accept that my memory of the course and the individuals 

involved in it are not actually separable from my return to the data as a researcher. Anyhow, I 

anonymized the journals and read for patterns across the students’ responses collectively, hoping 

to shift focus from the unpredictability of individual experiences toward emergent patterns that 

could inform adaptations in my teaching. I understand that following up with an interview to 

further investigate emerging themes would enrich these data; I believe interviews would 

certainly extend my understanding of student learning. However, I am interrogating my own 

learning about my teaching practice. I rarely communicate with students outside of class, and 

email is almost exclusively the medium used when I do. Interviews are external to my teaching 

practice, and thus less relevant to me here. 

 

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While I initially considered multiple journals entries (the first day, following the book 

discussion of Arab, and the final day), the expectation of linear change over time is an 

assumption I hoped to challenge as part of this project. I instead framed my inquiry around 

specific nodes: points in the semester that emerged as important to my teaching. These nodes are 

not entirely disjointed, but linearly connecting them is less important than recognizing them as 

moments that recur across semesters, stacking upon one another in my teaching practice. While 

linearity might frame learner progression, I hope to situate this inquiry around teacher (i.e. my 

own) change: I can alter how I act in those moments that challenged my expectations because I 

will encounter them again, in another time and place with other prospective teachers. 

 

Analysis was iterative. The interplay of theory – teaching as communication (Rasmussen, 

2005) and critical literacies pedagogies (Lewison, et al., 2002) – provided the framework for a 

critical conversation (Pinar, 2004) in which I explored how I constructed disturbances intended 

to stimulate transformation. Removed from the local immediacy of the course, I returned to the 

journals to explore the patterns that emerged, putting these voices in dialogue with one another 

when they communicated to me similar notions or discourses. These patterns provided me with a 

sense of the students’ reductions of uncertainty, which in turn informed the evolution of my 

teaching. 

 

Power and Participation 

Most pertinent to this project is that I am both the researcher and the instructor of the 

course I am researching. This research project began after the completion of the two course 

sections to minimize any conflict of interest I might have as researcher and a theoretically 

objective instructor with the institutional power to give grades to students. 

 

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While I feel justified to ask students to participate in various projects as an instructor, 

returning to their reflections and thinking about the course as research changes the nature of the 

relationship. I invite students into the process by eliciting feedback through several avenues: 

institutional course evaluations, and multiple spaces for written and verbal feedback. While 

students may be powerless to decline to participate in class, I offer to share some power in 

shaping my future teaching of the course. 

While research is part of my teaching, I undertook the formal project represented here 

after the conclusion of the course, returning to the existing data retrospectively. As a researcher, I 

had power to represent students, and this presented an ethical issue: is it fair to those 

represented? On the one hand, I deal with the data anonymously and see their writing as artifacts 

of the course experience, not representative of the students themselves. As a result, our 

university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) determined this research exempt. On the other 

hand, I cannot escape the problem of representation. This report will represent some people 

incompletely. The image I provide is not intended to erase their identity (Bhabha, 2012); I hope 

for it to add texture to my and other teacher educators’ practice. 

 

 

Findings and Discussion 

In this self-study, I wanted to surface my teaching choices. My first choice was to use 

new material to disturb and stimulate prospective teachers’ critical engagement; the second 

choice involved decoding prospective teachers’ responses as representing their understanding, or 

reductions of complexity; the third was how to alter my teaching in the future to encourage 

prospective teachers to engage in critical reflection. 

 

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While Rasmussen’s (2005) “point of departure” aptly describes my first choice, the term 

conjures a linear understanding of teaching. Instead, I re-conceptualize these disturbances as 

recurring interactions in which I have an opportunity to communicate ideas to students that 

possibly interfere with their held beliefs. Regarding my second choice, prospective teachers’ 

reflective writing illustrated patterns of transformation in response to my disturbances, though 

not always as intended. The changes I made between semesters to alter future nodes illustrate my 

third choice: adjusting teaching to participate in intended transformations. 

The nodes I include are the initial journal prompt, my use of additional texts, and my 

confrontation with beliefs following a discussion of Arab. 

 

Establishing Initial Conditions 

The first journal prompt asked students to freewrite in response to the course themes, 

including Islam/Muslims. I provided a place for students to write about this topic so I could get a 

sense of how they entered the course. In addition to writing, I asked the Spring section to rate 

their knowledge of the topic (1–little knowledge, 5–very knowledgeable)—none of the students 

rated their knowledge as a 4 or 5. This low self-assessment was unsurprising; however, fifteen 

students’ responses indicated knowledge about Islam/Muslims. For example, one student (self-

rated 2) wrote: 

My knowledge of Islam or Muslims is pretty much entirely based on what I have read 
through the news or from my religions class in high school. I have been to a Mosque and 
have a basic understanding of the religion and practices of the Islamic people but I do not 
know enough to call myself an expert. I know a good amount also about the current status 
of Muslims and their perception in the United States because I keep up with current 
events. 

I would classify this student’s knowledge more highly based on references to sources and 

experience, despite not actually sharing any knowledge other than using “Mosque.” The 

 

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disclaimer of not being “an expert” indicates how my choice to include knowledge-rating shifted 

the focus, limiting how other forms of experiencing or valuing might be accessed. After the 

course, I speculated in my reflections that my “concern with beliefs about [was] derailed by 

asking specifically about knowledge.” I chose to omit the self-assessment in the next iteration of 

the course. 

 

In the Fall, journals contained patterns of discourse that drew from social understandings 

and relied less on knowledge. Looking across both data sets, the distant objective authority found 

in Spring was not present in the Fall—perhaps because of the shift away from knowledge in my 

prompt. Positions taken up in the Fall but less present in the Spring included other forms of 

knowing:  

•  school (knowing of Islam): “I think back to when I first really learned about Islam. I was 

in high school history class and we had a unit on Islam. Personally, the religion seemed 
fine to me; it didn’t seem like the same religion that was being belittled by the US 
population and government. To me, Islam seemed like any other religion, and I remember 
changing my views on it because of that class”; 

•  media (knowing of Muslims): “I have not had any first hand experience or interactions 

with Muslims, so everything I think is based upon things I have seen or read. The 
common perception many people have is that they are bad people and they are all 
terrorists. I know this is a negative stereotype, one that is not always true, but because of 
things like 9/11, many people have this stigma of them”; 
 
local (knowing of Muslims in Dearborn, MI): “I grew up around Muslim children my 
entire childhood. Once Dearborn got too heavily populated, my parents pulled me and my 
brothers out of Dearborn schools and sent us to a private school in Allen Park”; 

• 

 

 

•  personal interactions (knowing Muslims): “I have had the fortune to know many Muslims 

in my life. I have had several friends who are Muslims and they are all decent people. 
Knowing many Muslims has allowed me the knowledge that Islam is no better or worse 
than other religions and that Muslims are no better or worse than any other person”. 
 

These responses indicated a variety of perspectives consistent with other findings: some in need 

of transformations, others not; some reluctant to discuss the topic, others comfortable. 

 

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These entry points are not meant to establish a baseline against which to measure 

transformation of beliefs. On the contrary, the data suggest that any group of students will be 

consistently unpredictable in both where they start and conclude the course. My introduction of 

course themes, however, indicated that I can discursively position prospective teachers to enter 

these conversations as students: distancing themselves from the expectations that come with 

being an expert, and bringing only their objective academic selves to the dialogue. The student 

identity, divorced from other selves, is perhaps less likely to be vulnerable and open to change 

because school often teaches students to succeed: to display competence, not uncertainty. 

Students learn to transform in the ways teachers wish them to, perhaps not undergoing 

intrinsically motivated change.  

 

Introducing Disturbances 

 

In the course sections under investigation here, I wanted to encourage students to make 

connections to lived experience and current events, hoping this would raise their sociopolitical 

consciousness. As a result, I introduced articles intended as deliberate disturbances that might 

stimulate prospective teachers to view these problems as their own. 

 

In the Spring, I shared four articles over the weeks leading up to our book discussions 

(see Appendix). The articles were intended to support connections between the themes of the 

course, the characters and books, and the lives of the prospective teachers. While inclusion of 

these articles was political, I did not engage the topics directly in class discussion. In my 

reflective notes, I expressed dismay at my hesitance to confront and perhaps alienate prospective 

teachers who voiced particular beliefs, leading to a lack of discussion. I responded to prospective 

teacher comments regarding the articles, but never initiated conversations beyond my prefacing 

 

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comments. My teaching choices, in later reflection, “did not provide space for engagement” nor 

model how prospective teachers might reduce uncertainty regarding these texts. Unsurprisingly, 

these articles did not appear in later responses to literature. 

 

For the Fall semester, I was perhaps a bit overzealous with the increase in materials I 

chose to share. Throughout the semester I asked prospective teachers to read about twenty other 

articles. In addition to the earlier pieces, I asked students to read an article about the state of the 

Arab Spring – a movement with which prospective teachers in both sections were largely 

unfamiliar – and myriad other topics including racism and Islamophobia in the US, and multiple 

perspectives on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Early on, we took 

time to discuss these articles, exploring what it meant to make connections and be critical. 

Despite our promising start, there was too much to cover and our conversations in class could not 

keep up, so often these discussions were cut in favor of other content. As a result, the students 

did not mention these topics in their journals or in other course writing. I had wanted to create a 

disturbance, but instead the students may not have engaged with the content, or at least did not 

indicate there was any further consideration of their role in the world vis-à-vis the cultures and 

characters in the literary texts. 

 

While these articles were intended to stir sympathies, and encourage recognition of real 

people suffering, I did not engage enough with prospective teachers’ reduction of uncertainty as 

part of their own inquiry. All I may have achieved is to provide a decontextualized contrast: 

prospective teachers are less bigoted than other Americans; prospective teachers’ childhood in 

the US was fortunate compared to those in Syria. Instead of engaging with a world that needed 

change and asking prospective teachers to participate, I allowed silence; a non-response that 

 

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positions prospective teachers voyeuristically, noticing the Other (Derrida, 1976) without any 

sense of shared existence or obligation. My first choices were spectacle, not critical.  

 

Understanding Arab and Muslims 

 

A few weeks later in each section, we read Arab, a text intended to invite critical 

readings. Following the book discussions, I asked prospective teachers to reflect on their 

thinking about Muslims in their journal writing. I repeated the same prompt after every book 

discussion (Arab was the third of five books in the Spring; fourth in the Fall). 

In the Spring, the prompt asked: “Has this book contributed to your thinking about and 

understanding of human migration? If so, how? Has this book added to or transformed how you 

think of Muslims? If so, in what ways?” Eleven students claimed a change occurred and six did 

not (one did not respond to the Muslim part of the prompt). The nature of the change prospective 

teachers claimed included specific things (e.g. learning the title Haji), but most were general and 

not entirely positive: they learned Muslims are many and varied, the religion is widespread, and 

not all practice it the same way; men dominate, women are oppressed. The transformations that 

they claimed to have undergone were not connected to contemporary social issues (in part due to 

my failure to engage the articles more deeply), and many were negative turns. 

The prospective teachers claiming no change had similarly undesirable reflections. Some 

did not notice Muslim characters despite my continued focus on Muslims. For instance, one 

student wrote: 

If there were Muslim characters and I didn’t notice them, then being Muslim must be 
different than an idea that I originally had. The Muslim belief must not be something that 
can easily be seen on a person. 
 

 

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While this reflection mentions a change in perception, the absence of Muslim markers led to a 

claim that no transformation had occurred. In my course notes, I was critical of my choice to not 

scrutinize these journals during the course. I thought I had “missed an opportunity” to engage in 

inquiry with them. 

 

 While the text, discussion, and prompt provided disturbances and multiple viewpoints, 

prospective teachers mostly responded in ways that worked against my intention. One student 

comment illustrated an understanding of my intention clearly: 

For a while, we were trying to break the stereotype that all Muslims are the same, and 
while this book goes along with that idea, this is the first book that the ‘bad guys’ are 
given an identity and ideas and perspectives. 
 

Introducing “bad guys” is part of a complicated conversation of what it means to understand and 

navigate difference critically—I noted this group’s book discussion in my reflection. Despite 

intending to engage the existence of the bad by selecting Arab, I failed to direct prospective 

teachers away from universalizing the bad into stereotypes. I had chosen to ask about Muslims, 

and left room for vague references and stereotyping, knowing the text was challenging. Between 

semesters, my reflections assumed I had not provided enough direction, though Fendler (2003) 

points out that more direction may not be the answer and undesirable outcomes are possible. 

In the Fall, to focus more specifically on the Muslim theme, I shortened the prompt to: 

“Has this book added to or transformed how you think of Muslims? If so, in what ways?” I 

hoped to allow more time to specifically engage the prompt and support critical engagement. A 

different pattern emerged in the responses: ten prospective teachers claimed to have had a self-

defined transformation, while twelve experienced no change. Again, those who claimed a 

transformation often mentioned Muslims are not all the same. One commented that Muslims are 

different from American stereotypes, beginning to make social connections, but not going much 

 

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further. Additionally, some changes derived from feelings about Abdul, seen as sexist and racist, 

elaborated clearly by one student: “I guess my contempt for the father shaped this view a great 

deal.” It seemed transformation reinforced negative views of Muslims. Not only was this 

unintended, but reinforced views indicated that disturbances can close possibility when they are 

not supported with appropriate modeling of how to open possibility. 

The prospective teachers who said they had no transformation elaborated this position in 

the least worrisome ways. They referred to difficulty passing judgment based on a few 

characters, often claiming characters were disagreeable, but not representative of a religion. Two 

prospective teachers drew from personal experience to frame their response, for example: 

If this was my only view of Muslims it would not be a good one. Dirty, savage - in a way, 
uncivilized.  I’ve learned enough about Muslims to know this is not the way to generalize 
them. 
 

While the more direct prompt in the Fall inspired more passionate responses, prospective 

teachers strongly stood by their previously held beliefs (i.e. not to generalize). Some prospective 

teachers were already at a point where my intention to transform their beliefs was misguided and 

unnecessary. In fact, my direct inquiry about Muslims seemed to incline prospective teachers to 

generalize, working against my intention. 

The journal prompts were intended to directly confront students with a cultural label that 

was also attached to the characters in the stories they just read and discussed, but this may have 

discursively positioned them in opposition to Muslims. By positioning prospective teachers in 

opposition to Muslims, they responded in defense of their views, and therefore never engaged in 

critical practices. One prospective teacher’s comment elaborates the trouble with my prompt in 

relation to a challenging text with dislikeable characters:  

More and more I learn and reinforce the idea that there are people of all spectrums that 
lay in certain categories. So to say that all Muslim people do (insert any commonality) is 

 

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not true because categories are socially constructed.  I think this book shows a very 
negative aspect of what some Muslims can be but there are all types of people in every 
religion, race, ethnicity, etc. 
 

Directly confronting prospective teachers with the general category of Muslims was 

unsupportive of nuanced understandings of an unfamiliar culture that avoid stereotypes. Instead, 

I perhaps led students toward generalizations, or made them defensive when they identified my 

prompt as implying they held negative views. I framed their transformation in ways that assumed 

a lack on their part, and in this way closed possibilities instead of opening them. 

What I had intended was not effectively communicated widely: the reductions of 

uncertainty found in prospective teachers’ journals indicated that the most promising reflections 

were exceptions, not patterns. Prospective teachers’ criticality was likely present independent of 

my guided reflection. Patterns included recognizing in-group difference among Muslims – a 

change I am ambivalent about because difference might have been expected, especially at the 

midpoint of the semester – or a comfort in nonjudgmental views of Others. My teaching choices 

did not inspire critical engagement, but instead produced patterns of discourse that supported 

previously held beliefs or superficial change. Prospective teachers’ reduction of uncertainty 

aligned with liberal or left-liberal, but not critical multiculturalism (McLaren, 1995): change 

reinforced why diversity should be celebrated; no change resulted from blindness to (negative) 

difference.  

 

Concluding Remarks 

Teaching and learning are entangled, but they are not the same. The responsibility of 

learners to desire and undergo transformation remains a complicating contingency for teachers: it 

is the learners who acknowledge external complexity and reduce it to something understandable 

 

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(Rasmussen, 2005). For teacher educators involved in projects aimed at developing critical 

literacies, prospective teacher discussions and reflective writing can illustrate certain patterns 

that inspire pedagogical responses. In this case, because critical responses were the exceptions, 

not the pattern, I found reflection in response to direct confrontation with a cultural label – 

“Muslim” – ineffective on its own.  

How I guided reflection positioned prospective teachers in opposition, and as a result 

they were resistant to the prompt I used. My choice of a journal prompt worked against my 

intentions by framing Muslims as a generalized group, discursively constructing Muslims as the 

Other. I repeated the same prompt, highlighting its importance, but also reiterating the inherent 

difference model that we never began to deconstruct. Initial journals offered a space where 

prospective teachers used discourses of knowing of, knowing about, and knowing Islam or 

Muslims. Exploring these differences and the possibilities that are opened and closed can help 

situate class conversations and reflections within a practice of reflexive inquiry toward social 

change. The transformation in which I should participate, then, is better modeling of reflexive 

teacher inquiry and reflection regarding social issues. 

My shortcoming could be the prompts themselves, but I imagine it was the lack of 

modelling criticality, and a hesitance to confront students more directly. While I hoped to teach 

confrontationally – disturbing the common cultural experiences of students – I needed to 

contextualize these confrontations better and signal my position not as in opposition to 

prospective teachers (asset- not deficit-models) or cultural Others. Davis (2004) refers to 

teaching as many things, including caring, which itself can be understood in many ways, though 

rarely as confrontation. In their discussion of caring in teacher education, Dwight Rogers and 

Jaci Webb (1991) consider the following belief: “Good teachers care, and good teaching is 

 

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inextricably linked to specific acts of caring” (p. 174). Caring can be understood as protecting, 

and therefore teaching-as-caring can mean avoiding confrontation through critical engagement; 

however, caring “is more than regard or protection, more than affect alone” (Rogers & Webb, 

1991, p. 174). Confronting beliefs regarding caring for/about whom/what might provide a 

catalyst for critical transformation through reflexive inquiry. I can be clearer that confrontation 

with beliefs is about caring: caring for prospective teachers, and their future students. 

Critical teacher educators can model what it means to select texts, have discussions, and 

reflect as part of a process of inquiry. Teaching is a reflexive, complicated conversation 

regarding pedagogy and society. I approach it as an ongoing process of change – (un)learning to 

teach (Cochran-Smith, 2003). I continue to try to do better, and to do good, but I recognize that 

without sustained inquiry, teachers and teacher educators may be liable to remain naïve to 

misalignments between their intention and practice. While like many teacher educators I hope to 

change prospective teachers’ dispositions, I no longer assume every student’s beliefs need 

transformation—or that immediate, measurable transformation effectively assesses teaching. 

Rather, I ask them to engage in inquiry with me. 

 

 

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INTERLUDE – LIMINALITY 

 

Informed by feminist arguments regarding the crisis of representation (for example, 

Britzman, 1995), I struggle with the (im)possibility of representing ideas and people. Further 

complicating my work is the abstraction that occurs in teacher education, where teacher 

educators teach students to teach students. The binary identities of teacher and student, so clearly 

demarcated in discursive constructions of the world, become blurred and challenged in this 

dynamic, shifting context. Who we are (the participants in teacher education) is less clear. 

A human notion of self is somewhat defined by what we claim we are not: “Man calls 

himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other” (Derrida, 1976, p. 244). This practice, 

Othering, allows us reduce Others to labels, even though we attribute great complexity and 

nuance to our own identities. This identification through exclusion is dynamic and relational, in 

that we may exclude or include others depending on the social circumstances, and thus social and 

cultural groupings are less stable than we may like to believe. Further, Bourdieu (1990) notes 

about historical realities that “one can always establish that things could have been otherwise, 

indeed, are otherwise in other places and other conditions” (p. 15). Recognizing these 

alternatives is essential. Not only are these alternatives important for us to apply to them (i.e. that 

Others have as much value as the Self), but we could also acknowledge the transitional state we 

often occupy (i.e. that the Self is the Selves, dynamic and multiple). 

Liminality refers to being in between spaces. To be liminal is to be in transition; 

becoming; at the threshold between. Anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) initially conceived of 

liminality in terms of social ritual: 

Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions 
assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention… As such, their ambiguous and 

 

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indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols… Thus, liminality is 
frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to 
bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. (p. 95) 

 
It is a relative concept. Between needs frames of reference. Scholarly work between research 

areas is transdisciplinary; diffraction is another frame of reference for reflection and shows us 

new things between our expectations. 

In many ways, this project occupies a fluid, uncertain space. I begin as a teacher 

educator: a teacher of prospective teachers motivated to enact social change through education. 

As a graduate instructor, I am a student and a teacher; I am not faculty, but I am of the 

institution. The students I teach are in transition, becoming teachers. Teacher education exists 

between the academy and the school; more institution than community. Embracing this 

liminality, I undertook reflexive inquiry into both my own practice (as evidenced in the 

preceding chapter) and that of the students in my course because inquiry as a stance enriches 

teaching, schooling, and education (Cochran-Smith, 2003). 

Another thread woven throughout my work is that of community engaged scholarship. As 

I transitioned into an academic in 2013, my doctoral cohort was advised to become involved in 

teaching, research, and service. The first two were clearly a part of the doctoral program, but the 

third was more elusive. In my liminal space, I knew too little of the academy to participate in 

service in any way other than volunteering my time and “expertise.” As a result, I volunteered 

with a language tutoring program. 

Over the next few semesters I noticed that the undergraduate students I was teaching had 

almost no experience with non-native speakers of English. It was clear that I should “volun-tell” 

my students to participate in the program: they would gain experience in a lesser developed part 

 

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of teacher preparation (experience with linguistic diversity), and the volunteer program would be 

able to fill their ranks to meet demand. 

With faculty approval, but no direct involvement with the bureaucratic apparatus of the 

institution, I undertook this independent service learning project. Language-related teacher 

preparation, like issues of multiculturalism, needs expansion across teacher education programs. 

Individual teacher educators can shape projects around a commitment to care about marginalized 

curriculum—a topic I hoped to elaborate in Chapter II. In response, I asked students to join me in 

becoming an agent of change, a quality of culturally responsive teachers (Villegas & Lucas, 

2002). The enactment of this project provided an opportunity for teacher education students to 

individually engage with the Other outside the institutional program requirements—an 

instructional decision that I consider creative interference because it blurs the distinction between 

courses (theory) and teaching (practice), while existing outside institutional requirements. Their 

interactions were not regimented or supported in ways that reproduce a singular experience, but 

instead were contingent, dependent on their agency and that of their partner.  

This next chapter describes the collaboration and its results but focuses less on what 

students did (again). Instead, I consider how they position themselves and what that does for 

community-based service learning in a more theoretical exploration of what it means for teacher 

educators to enact service learning as creative interference. Larger issues in language education 

emerge – for instance, how English remains the dominant language with social capital in the 

context of the project – but I do not address them fully in this article. At one stage, I had wanted 

to frame this chapter around a successful case in which one of the students and her partner 

agreed on mutual translanguaging and dividing their time between English and Spanish. I intend 

to return to her case, but in the chapter, I instead explore the ways community work can 

 

83 

disentangle, re-tangle, and reveal entanglements of power positions in teaching and other social 

relations. While I do not deconstruct these power positions, I take from this experience insight 

into how I might in the future. 

 

 

 

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IV – RECIPROCITY AND COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS INVOLVING EMERGENT 

TEACHERS 

My purpose emerges from my alignment with social justice teacher education. This 

approach toward teaching and teacher education shares similar motivations and purposes with 

research involving community engagement (for example, that various stakeholders should 

benefit). I intended to provide an opportunity for prospective teachers to experience the diversity 

of the world, literature, and likely of their future classrooms. I use this chapter to describe the 

process of working with a community volunteer language tutoring project and asking students 

(i.e. prospective teachers) to engage the cultural and linguistic diversity of our local community. 

Given the importance of dynamic role-taking in community engaged research (i.e. that 

researchers learn from community partners), I pursued the following questions regarding my 

project: What roles are available to students participating in service learning, and which do they 

take up? How do students in these roles influence the experience of other participants? My 

critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2015) of the students’ reflective writing indicated the 

importance of social positioning – in this case, how students situate themselves as teachers and 

learners in their community interactions – in creating possibilities for reciprocity. I conclude my 

analysis with a discussion about community partnerships, encouraging educators to consider 

dynamic positioning and learning in service learning. 

 

Theoretical Frame 

Although situated as part of a children’s literature course, my pedagogical intention was 

for students to think about teaching (in) English, and therefore I ground this work in 

sociocultural notions of language and literacy. I begin from the assumption that prospective 

 

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teachers benefit from interacting with speakers of other languages, even if the interaction is 

mainly mediated in English. I also draw upon social justice teacher education to provide a 

framing for my context. 

 

Language as Social 

 

According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), language acquisition occurs “through a ‘process of 

assimilation’ – more or less creative – of others’ words (and not the words of a language)” (p. 

89). Isolated language learning can be effective, but language is essentially social: it is used for 

communication. While a language learner may develop grammar and an expansive vocabulary 

through texts, they may not learn the idiosyncrasies of language unless used in social, 

communicative contexts. Through interaction with other speakers, learners develop a capacity to 

communicate with(in) a community. Language socialization through interaction with more 

experienced users of the target language provides more than the knowledge of words; it also 

grants a language learner access to the ways of thinking, valuing, and behaving that make 

language ideological, and ultimately tie language to identities (Gee, 2012). As Jim Gee (2014) 

and others propose, a central function of language use is the construction, development, and 

maintenance of identities. 

Identities are entangled with social, political, and economic forces, not just linguistic. In 

Fendler’s (2006) critique of community, she notes, “When constructions of identity are 

problematized, constructions of community, Otherness, and inclusion are also disrupted” (p. 

320). Teachers might explore the ways in which identity, language, and community intersect—

especially when developing community partnerships for service learning. Norman Fairclough 

(2015) applies a critical perspective to understanding language in use in the world, adding 

 

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“language varies according to the social identities of people in interactions, their socially defined 

purposes, social setting, and so on” (p. 54). The context and purposes of language use impact the 

users of the language. As a result, language is powerful. Those with knowledge of valued forms 

of language have social capital (Bourdieu, 1986) and can wield power. That capital translates 

into authority in that context. 

When the students in my course become teachers, they will – like me – have language 

and context supporting the authority they wield over students. The power that underlies language 

can create opportunity as well as disparity; language is not neutral. The way that language is 

perceived in education is often shaped around an ideal native speaker, not a capacity for 

communication. Suresh Canagarajah (2007) illuminates the incongruence between linguistic 

practices and teaching goals: “language learning involves an alignment of one’s language 

resources to the needs of a situation, rather than reaching a target level of competence” (p. 928). 

As a result, a social understanding of language (stressing language-in-use), like I hold, believes 

that the narrow understanding of language operationalized in many educational contexts 

(namely, following a standards-of-competence model) is disconnected from lived experience. 

Teacher educators could examine the power they have to shape language practices and learning 

to better account for non-school communication. 

Considering the increasing cultural and linguistic disparity between teachers and students 

as a result of broader demographic shifts in the US, teacher education would do well to include 

preparation for navigating difference. Lucas, Villegas, and Freedson-Gonzalez (2008) respond to 

the need for future teachers to be prepared to teach the increasing population of students who 

speak a language other than English (they use the term English language learner, or ELL; I use 

this acronym due to its ubiquity, but prefer the descriptor culturally and linguistically diverse, or 

 

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CLD students). They describe the importance of active social interaction in developing both 

academic and conversational ELL students. However, the authors note that most prospective 

teachers have little or no professional development or coursework to support their teaching 

ELLs, and few have shared the experience of becoming proficient in an additional language. 

Teacher education programs could require prospective teachers to have contact with ELLs: 

Without such contact, ELLs will remain an abstraction, defined by their lack of 
proficiency in English and likely to be perceived through prevalent media stereotypes of 
immigrants. Direct contact allows future teachers to see ELLs as individuals, and it gives 
the teachers-to-be a sense of the diversity among ELLs. (Lucas, Villegas, & Freedson-
Gonzalez, 2008, p. 370) 
 

While not all students learning English are immigrants (and vice versa), the concern regarding 

stereotypical narratives is vital to address in the contemporary social context. Homi Bhabha 

(2012) describes stereotyping as when the image replaces the identity. Accessing multiple 

narratives through interactions could presumably work against stereotyping by challenging the 

image through an increasing knowledge of identities. 

As a part of collaborative teacher education projects, communities can contribute to 

preparing teachers for language diversity. Teachers would do well to recognize language is vital 

to our communities, and linguistic diversity is an integral part of society. 

 

Diversity and Social Teacher Education 

There are many visions for the future of teacher education, one of which is broadly social 

justice teacher education. Taking a stance toward social justice establishes a purpose for 

education that extends beyond academic achievement and competence development models. 

This position acknowledges and works to change oppressive social power structures. According 

to Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2010), teacher education is a political act, and social justice is a 

 

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political position. Social justice teacher educators embrace this political stance rather than a 

“neutral objectivity” that maintains the status quo, but for teacher educators to translate this 

position into a coherent trajectory for the preparation of teachers presents a challenge. 

A social justice approach to teacher education centers society’s diversity and the 

inequitable distribution of material and intangible goods across diverse demographic groups. 

According to Villegas and Lucas (2002), teacher educators need to “articulate a vision of 

teaching and learning within the diverse society we have become... [to infuse] multicultural 

issues throughout the teacher education curriculum…and revise it as needed to make issues of 

diversity central rather than peripheral” (p. 21). These curricular notions are intended to produce 

specific results among prospective teachers. Ken Zeichner (2006) explains “advocates for teacher 

education for social justice have emphasized the development of sociocultural consciousness and 

intercultural teaching competence among prospective teachers so that they will be prepared to 

teach...increasingly diverse students” (p. 328). In this approach to teacher education, a central 

purpose is to develop capacities and dispositions among prospective teachers, particularly 

regarding how they navigate intercultural interactions. 

In her elaboration of a theory of teacher education for social justice, Marilyn Cochran-

Smith (2010) explains, “From the perspective of social justice, teacher preparation also includes 

parents, families, and community groups as collaborators” (p. 460). Community voices are vital 

to teacher education because schools are often community projects; yet teacher education is often 

academic, at a distance from communities. Zeichner (2006) believes the future of teacher 

education relies, in part, on increasing the influence of communities in the education of teachers, 

noting “there is growing empirical evidence that novice teachers are helped to acquire in some 

forms of community field experiences the kind of knowledge, skills, and dispositions teachers 

 

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need to be successful” (p. 334). While policy-level changes should be implemented, considering 

the individual teacher educator’s (lack of) agency in such changes – especially for those less 

visible adjunct and graduate teacher educators like myself (see Cochran-Smith, 2003) – 

collaborations with community partners offer pedagogical opportunities to enact social and 

individual change. 

To meet academic content goals, community collaboration needs to be structured in ways 

that allow prospective teachers to develop skills and dispositions, or to learn something 

meaningful. Zeichner (2006) believes more teacher education needs to be situated “outside of the 

college and university campus in schools and communities, but we need to do much more than 

just send [prospective teachers] out there to pick up what they need to learn by a process of 

osmosis” (p. 334). Teacher educators’ roles may become fluid to respond to the contingent 

nature of each student’s experience, but they will continue to be concerned with learning 

outcomes. Balancing this concern with principles of reciprocity is a primary challenge for 

teacher-researchers: they need to navigate power relations as community and institutional roles 

shift. Meeting learning outcomes could be intertwined with respecting community agency and 

voices. Zeichner (2006) connects prospective teacher learning to the seriousness with which 

teacher educators regard community partners: 

unless these partnerships are expanded to embrace communities as full partners in the 
education of teachers, the partnership movement in teacher education will fail to develop 
the cultural competencies that teachers need to successfully teach everyone’s children. (p. 
334) 
 

Developing the capacities and dispositions to teach diverse groups of students is less likely when 

community partners are excluded from or marginalized in the preparation of teachers.  

 

In addition, community can manifest in educational scholarship in harmful ways. Teacher 

educators seeking to collaborate with communities would do well to consider Fendler’s (2006) 

 

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critique of community as a discursive construction in educational scholarship; her focus is not on 

its application to a place as applied here. Fendler (2006) notes that “assumptions about 

community may have undesirable effects like assimilation and homogenization” (p. 304). She 

explains: 

Assumptions about community are not necessarily bad, but these assumptions may be 
dangerous if we are unaware of them. Community in educational literature is a construct 
that both embodies and constitutes what it is possible to think about who we can be and 
what we can (and cannot) belong to. (p. 305) 
 

As a result, teacher educators and educational researchers need to be mindful of “the ways 

community constructs inclusions and exclusions simultaneously” (Fendler, 2006, p. 315). While 

inclusions and exclusions may be inescapable, I use this product to share my inquiry into the 

assumptions underlying some of these constructions. 

While the work of individual social justice teacher educators may be an isolated endeavor 

in academia, community partnerships offer collaborative networks that contribute to teacher 

education for social justice when carefully undertaken. 

 

Context and Researcher Position 

In Fall 2016, the US presidential election was nearing its apex. It brought heightened 

xenophobia, and its normalization in public discourse; often emotional, political divisiveness at 

personal levels. Within this broader social context, I incorporated a service learning component 

in a children’s literature course for undergraduate prospective teachers. The purpose for the 

assignment, as I explained to students, was that they interact with non-native speakers of English 

that would help them better develop their ability to teach in schools in which there was linguistic 

diversity. I tried to position them as learners: this project was an opportunity to learn how they 

adapted to unfamiliar language varieties to effectively communicate. While I expected students 

 

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would engage course themes through this project, children’s literature played a limited role in the 

tasks I required. I wanted students to have new experiences with people that might challenge 

stereotypical narratives, especially given the need for them to engage cultural and linguistic 

diversity as teachers. 

The course section I taught was designed to serve a cohort of global-educators-in-

training. The service learning assignment asked students to interact with international members 

of our local community, most of whom were affiliated with the university as well. The project 

was intended for the mutual benefit of all stakeholders (namely, community members, students, 

and myself); however, I suggest that teacher-researchers like myself might facilitate such 

projects by supporting students’ navigation of power relations. I argue that students situated as 

partners may be more likely to take a stance of reciprocity with community partners. 

After having taught English language and US culture courses abroad for seven years, I 

struggled with English hegemony, yet I benefited from it greatly. English was often an asset for 

me. English as a lingua franca is integral to the world, for better or worse, and teaching provides 

access to the political, social, and economic capital of a language (Bourdieu, 1986); however, I 

view English and neoliberal globalization as descendants of colonialism. As a White, 

anglophone, middle class, cis-hetero male from the US, I am granted a privileged position in the 

system’s hierarchy. Recognizing the system’s inherent injustice creates an ethical struggle: I 

acknowledge my complicity and strive to minimize my negative impact while considering others 

(as I mention in Chapter III). 

Returning to the US in 2013, I volunteered to lead English discussion classes as part of a 

community tutoring program. I was motivated to participate in some form of service, and to 

maintain a connection to people from outside the US. Volunteering helped me feel like I was not 

 

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exploiting the participants. The program was designed to provide “free English conversation 

practice for [the university’s] international students, scholars, and [adult] family members” 

(VETP, 2017). My class was an informal weekly discussion with some regular participants and 

various sporadic attendees. I tended to take more turns speaking, but participants frequently 

steered the conversation toward their interests. My hope was to provide a context that felt 

relatively equal and comfortable.  

I am unsure what other classes were like. Unlike me, most of the English-speaking 

volunteers in the program were from the community around the university—often well-traveled 

retirees. The director of the program, Mary, was a retired librarian who devoted a few days a 

week to organizing the various classes and projects of the program. She and I had conversations 

about language learning, literature, and the community throughout the next two years, and she 

described a one-on-one version of the program called Conversation Partners (CP) that was 

hoping to recruit more volunteers. 

Meanwhile, my doctoral work in teacher education led me toward community engaged 

scholarship. The University encourages researchers to engage in outreach scholarship: “outreach 

and engagement activities should reflect a scholarly or knowledge-based approach to teaching, 

research, and service for the direct benefit of external audiences” (Provost, 2009). Such work is 

meant to “cut across the mission of teaching, research, and service” (Provost, 2009, original 

emphasis). This intersectionality appealed to me because my growing understanding of education 

and social issues.  

I wanted to question the normalization of mainstream cultural experience that occurs in 

schools despite attempts at multicultural education (see Haddix, 2008). Prospective teachers 

could critically examine the erasure of identity through normalization and how it affects CLD 

 

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students. I encouraged prospective teachers to experience unfamiliar nuances of English as valid 

as those spoken in the Anglo world – what Canagarajah (1999) refers to as World Englishes – 

and to reflect on their own language and culture. I approached Mary about involving students in 

my class in the CP program. 

Mary and I developed an instructional project that could help meet the demand for CP 

volunteers. We both desired to provide meaningful experiences for the international members of 

the community. Mary already had an online volunteer application in place, and she met with 

potential volunteers to match them with international community members. It was logistically 

uncomplicated to have students apply, but it created additional work for Mary to provide 

orientation for the influx of volunteers from my course. While we later discussed ways to lessen 

her workload, at this stage in our collaboration she had perhaps the least to gain. The design of 

the project was driven by my pedagogical purposes, though not to the exclusion of community 

needs. 

 

Methods 

Research into teaching can take many forms, including participatory action research (e.g. 

Whyte, 1991) and self-study (e.g. Loughran, 2005). Pedagogical scholarship is reflexive and 

recursive: I am both teacher and researcher, and the implications of this research informs my 

future teaching while hopefully resonating with other teacher educators. 

Teachers inquire into their own practice, resolving problems while finding new ones. 

Teaching a course is similar from one iteration to the next, but participants change and the 

nuances of the content, time, and place shift. Schön (1995) describes new scholarship in terms of 

the relationship between researcher, research, and context:  

 

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The inquirer is in, and in transaction with, the problematic situation. He or she must 
construct the meaning and frame the problem of the situation, thereby setting the stage 
for problem-solving, which, in combination with changes in the external context, brings a 
new problematic situation into being. (n.p.) 
 

The teacher-researcher elaborates inquiry into teaching and learning, materializing it; however, 

this work is subjective, not conducive to controlled experiments, randomization, or other 

generally accepted standards of scientific rigor. Teacher-researchers “change the rules that 

govern what counts both as legitimate knowledge and as appropriately rigorous research into 

teaching and learning” (Schön, 1995, n.p.). This project is one of reflective practice: of my own 

teaching, and as a researcher examining the reflective practices of students engaged in service 

learning.  

 

Power in Research 

I asked students to participate in service learning, but their participation was a demand 

made by an instructor. To acknowledge my use of power over them, I returned to the data only 

after the term had concluded so my authority would not be a conflict of interest. Students had the 

opportunity to shape the research process through feedback that contributed to my inquiry into 

my own teaching practice. To better give voice to other stakeholders, Mary had the opportunity 

to read and review this manuscript. I encouraged her – as her time permitted – to read and 

comment as much as she liked. I revised this product to incorporate her feedback throughout. 

 

 

Participants 

The two groups of participants were students and partners. While students in my class 

were required to participate as part of a course project, the partners had some motivation to use 

English: most were students and visiting scholars who self-selected to participate in CP. A major 

 

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motivation for the partners was a desire to improve their English. As a result, I justify much of 

this work through its potential benefit to these partners in terms of their desire to have 

meaningful interactions with English speakers in the US. The intentional public purpose 

(Stanton, 2008) shared in the assignment description was 

to provide...students with exposure to and interaction with non-native English speakers 
that will help them gain experience working with people from diverse cultural and 
linguistic backgrounds. 
 

While partners benefited from language interaction, students developed their repertoire as 

teachers of CLD students. My intention was intended as mutually beneficial for stakeholders. 

Students in my course section were undergraduate, elementary education majors in their 

first or second year of a five-year teacher preparation program. There were nineteen females (18 

White, 1 White/Latina) and three males (2 White, 1 Asian-American). They were all 18-20 years 

old. 

Partners were from many different countries, including China, Japan, and Colombia to 

name a few. They were often spouses of visiting scholars or of graduate students who wanted the 

chance to practice English. The partners tended to be older by at least a few years, but the range 

was anywhere from mid-twenties to forties.  

Students and partners arranged their own meetings. These often occurred in public spaces 

on campus like the library or student union, or in local coffee shops or restaurants. 

The age difference was an issue: the partners often wanted more mature members of the 

community who would commit to longer than a single semester; and students were sometimes 

uncomfortable with spending time with older adults outside of their family or acquaintances. 

 

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The only access I had to the partners was mediated through Mary or students. This 

remains a major limitation of this study, and one I would like to address by communicating with 

all stakeholders more in the future. 

 

Data Sources 

Like Thomson, Dumlao, and Howard (2016), I used community engagement along with 

reflective writing, which they found “led students to develop and engage in flexible thinking and 

communication with members of their community” (p. 46). As Bowen (2010) found in his 

review of pedagogical scholarship involving service learning, empirical materials were generated 

“typically through student reflections, pre- and post-service surveys, or course evaluations” (p. 

4). I examined reflective writing completed by students in my course during the Fall 2016 

semester. 

I assigned reflective writing through written prompts as part of the students’ course 

requirements. Bowen (2010) found reflection “was most effective when it was structured and 

guided in such a way that it helped students link their service experiences to course goals and 

concepts” (p. 7). The reflective paper I focus on here followed their first meeting, and used this 

prompt: 

Following your initial meeting, write a 300-word reflection in which you consider some 
of the following questions (or your own): What did you talk about? Who initiated the 
conversation topics? What surprised you? What problems or confusion arose? How did 
you respond? What worked well? What did you notice about body language, eye contact, 
etc.? What do you think you’ll do differently next time? What questions have arisen for 
you regarding working with CLD individuals? 
 

The project positions students as teachers: the context of CP; and framing their experience as 

“working with.” 

 

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I supplement these formal, graded reflections with other reflective writing the students 

complete each week in ungraded journals—specifically, a final reflection journal entry at the end 

of the semester: 

(1) Where were you at the start of the course? Thinking about teaching, children, children’s 

literature, global educator-ness, etc. 

(2) There were a number of different ways we engaged in thinking in this course. What was 
an important moment in class for you? Describe what it was and why it mattered to you? 
(3) What’s an idea or takeaway from class that you imagine will matter to you in the future? 

 

Throughout the term, students wrote in a Google Doc for about ten minutes each week. This 

additional set of informal writing served to (dis)confirm some of the themes I found in my 

analysis of the reflective paper. 

 

Critical Discourse Analysis 

Norman Fairclough (2015) provides guidance for reading, interpreting, and analyzing 

discourse, especially with a critical perspective attuned to power dynamics and social relations. 

Discourse is social practice, and Fairclough’s (2015) notions informed my reading and analysis 

of the texts produced as a part of this course assignment. Fairclough (2015) explains the 

relationship between texts, interactions, and contexts are central to understanding how power is 

enacted through and is perceptible in discourse. 

 

Fairclough (2015) describes three stages of critical discourse analysis: description (of a 

text), interpretation (of text and of interaction, text as product of a process of production), and 

explanation (interaction and social context). I analyzed the data for positions taken up in the 

students’ reflections, reading the data multiple times to code and organize responses according to 

power relations. In my first reading, I looked across their reflection papers to get a sense of what 

students were choosing to include: cultural differences, strategies to overcome a language 

 

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barrier, etc. I categorized responses along a spectrum of how students positioned themselves as 

teachers or learners. I further developed the theme of positioning as teacher or learner in light of 

the trends in their informal final reflection.  

Analysis was interpretative; in the latter stages of analysis, “the analyst is in the position 

of offering (in a broad sense) interpretations of complex and invisible relationships” (p. 59). The 

nuances of their responses indicated the importance of power relations in partnerships, and this 

theme was particularly salient given my intention of sharing power in my pedagogical 

scholarship. I present my interpretation and explanation in the next section. 

 

 

Findings and Discussion 

To reiterate, the pedagogical purpose of the service learning project was for students to 

learn how to interact with people who may not speak the common Midwestern English with 

which the students were most familiar. The purpose of the volunteer program was to provide 

language instruction. Ultimately, these two purposes could compete with one another by 

respectively positioning students as learners or teachers. In addition to this uncertainty, many 

students had little experience with the international community and thus entered unfamiliar 

territory. Student reflections indicate different approaches to their partnerships; positions I 

believe teacher educators can influence to improve the outcomes of service learning—namely, to 

make these projects mutually beneficial to all stakeholders by embracing dynamic role-taking. 

Following their initial meeting with partners, more than half of the students expressed 

nervousness (five of twenty-one), awkwardness (two), worry (two), or a sense of unpreparedness 

(two). While most retrospectively described the project as beneficial, their initial uncertainty 

indicated a need for greater experience—three students wrote about having had similar 

 

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experiences, and as a result were not nervous or uncomfortable. The lack of experience with 

language diversity among prospective teachers is a problem teacher education programs have yet 

to overcome (e.g. Lucas, Villegas, & Freedson-Gonzalez, 2008).  

My work as a teacher-researcher inclined me toward community engagement, yet I never 

clearly partnered with students in ways that provided conditions for intrinsic motivation, nor did 

I express the foundational elements of community engagement. As a result, the outcome of my 

teaching choices was that students entered partnerships unclear regarding their position. I will 

next describe how positioning emerged in my analysis as the students negotiated uncertainty. 

First, I elaborate the ways power and authority were taken up through discursive positioning; I 

then juxtapose participants desire for authenticity in these experiences. Finally, I offer some 

thoughts regarding community collaboration. 

 

Teacher and Learner as Power Positions 

In their reflections, students positioned themselves as teacher and/or learner. While the 

CP program staged their interactions to position them as teachers, I also stressed the importance 

of being a learner as well. Taking up a teacher position does not require erasure of the learner 

position—I wanted students to embrace both. These roles set the tone for how they interacted 

and influenced their expectations.  

The role of teacher, in some cases, emerged from a view of language competence 

development—not a social approach. Students wrote about correcting pronunciation or adjusting 

speech patterns (five of twenty-one). This is unsurprising since the project inclines students 

toward being a teacher: they are working with partners who expect to improve their language 

 

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skills. While navigating imperfect communication is necessary, correcting can be troublesome. 

For example, one student commented: 

The only problems that arose were in minor grammatical errors (pluralization, syntax, 
etc.) in conversation, which were solved by my correction and patience. 
 

Here, language is less about communication, and more about knowledge the teacher has and can 

provide to the student. There is less room to be a learner when taking a stance toward language 

that implies a native speaker ideal. Similarly, another student wrote: 

In order to correct and give advice on her pronunciation, we resorted to writing down 
undetectable phrases on paper, and from there continued to alter the text to a better 
alternative to say the given phrase. 

 
While this comment indicates working together to solve communication issues, correcting 

“undetectable phrases” frames the teacher (i.e., native speaker) as linguistic gatekeeper. 

Alternatively, students could position themselves as learners who are responsible for 

meeting their partners halfway, as in this response: 

I couldn’t understand her at first, but I just paid closer attention and asked her questions if 
I didn’t understand. 
 

This student saw their role in communication as learner, and also framed the exchange around a 

shared desire for understanding. The onus is shared, not the responsibility of the non-native 

speaker to overcome a deficit. The teacher position allowed various degrees of the learner 

position, though sometimes students did not take up the learner role at all. 

I would like for students to develop their sense of self as a teacher through inquiry and 

critical reflection. For example, positioned as a teacher, another student considered the results of 

simplifying language: 

As I tried to simplify things I was explaining...I was troubled by the fact that I was 
creating generalizations. I tried to avoid creating stereotypes, but this is difficult when I 
had to put things in simpler terms… 
 

 

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Her knowledge is a work in progress. While this student takes on the challenges of being a 

teacher (i.e., explaining), she also struggles to justify that which she explains. Teaching choices 

are complex and considering the impact of language use indicates her developing position.  

In addition to how students positioned themselves, the partners had agency as well. 

Students perhaps imagine partners as learners, but partners do not always need a teacher. One 

student was surprised to find that her expectations of being a teacher were inaccurate. Her 

partner’s  

...willingness and persistence in wanting to help me with Chinese surprised me because 
Mary had previously informed us [this was] for native English speakers to help CLD 
individuals… 
 

Students needed to negotiate their role in these new interactions, and some found partners’ 

motivations were not what they expected given the initial framing of the project. The competing 

goals of the CP program (to teach partners) and our course assignment (to learn from partners) 

may have been confusing for students – especially when partners had their own ideas of what 

positions were available – but part of the project was for them to learn to navigate the fluid roles 

of community. 

 

Overall, students’ reflection on their experience was positive, but there was uncertainty. 

Uncertainty can be the source of confusion, in which case it might be easier to revert to 

comfortable roles; it can also provide the impetus for learning. In developing teachers, I embrace 

uncertainty as the space where questions arise, and contingency is expected. 

 

Desiring Equal Power 

Retrospectively, most of the prospective teachers found involvement in the CP program 

to be beneficial. I asked them to reflect on what could be done differently, and many of them felt 

 

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it was a project that should continue. For instance, one student claimed, “I have no regrets about 

what we talked about and what I learned.” Some mentioned a desire to have built a better 

relationship, as one student commented: “If there is anything I could do differently it would 

maybe be to meet with her more often.” The overall response from students was positive. 

A common issue noted across responses (whether they found it beneficial or not) was that 

such a project is inorganic: the relationships feel forced and therefore inauthentic. One student 

explained: “I would have changed the fact that we were put together with a partner instead of 

being able to pick one. I felt as though the friendship was sort of forced upon us and was a little 

bit awkward.” While this inauthenticity is perhaps inherent to educational projects more 

generally, students came to view these relationships as personal—one student invited her partner 

to have Thanksgiving with her family. Once they became friends with partners, the origin of 

their relationship seemed inauthentic, though this was only mentioned by a few students. 

However, many students had never had such an experience with someone from another 

country, or perhaps that they never would have if not for my assigning it. While they would not 

have experienced this relationship without the assignment, the assignment made it less authentic 

than was desirable—a paradox. 

  

Critical Reflections on/with Collaboration 

I learned that Mary wanted to take a break from our project after Fall 2016—she had run 

out of partners to pair with students. I had a feeling that other factors contributed: that students 

ended their participation after the semester and were unable to meet their partners consistently 

enough throughout the semester. Additionally, the capacity of the CP program couldn't meet the 

demand from my class. 

 

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I brought these ideas to Mary to discuss in the context of researching and writing up the 

project in this chapter. She said our collaboration worked well to reduce her waiting list of 

international community members desiring a partner; however, my inclination that the 

prospective teachers’ commitment may not continue beyond the semester was accurate for some. 

Despite what students may have written in their reflections about developing a friendship, many 

of them did not continue their friendship outside the minimum course requirements. I required 

students in my class complete three tasks at separate meetings with a partner. As a result, many 

students met with partners only long enough to fulfill class requirements. On the other hand, the 

CP program intended for weekly meetings, and that was what most partners desired. As a result, 

Mary would have preferred to pair other CP volunteers with partners. I did not effectively 

negotiate with students to align what was required and what was desired in consideration of all 

stakeholders. 

This is not to say all the students would not commit to the partnership. Some of the 

prospective teachers stayed on for more than the semester. One participated beyond the Fall 2016 

semester with the same partner. Then, when her partner left, she continued to meet with a new 

partner (a friend of the original partner). This was a non-traditional teacher education student, 

and an exception. Regardless, I would evaluate her experience as successful for all stakeholders. 

Other students also had successful experiences. In one case, a student learning Spanish was 

paired with a partner from Colombia, and they agreed to alternate languages at their meetings 

and engaged in translanguaging practices that attend to the deeper issues of language and power 

in teaching and schooling in the US. I intend to return to these cases in future research. 

 

 

 

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Conclusion 

I believe service learning projects can be an enactment of creative interference. In teacher 

education, community might serve as a backdrop upon which teacher educators and prospective 

teachers justify and practice instructional and curricular choices. Community has agency in the 

preparation of teachers and deserves partnership. The academy is not the purveyor of knowledge 

to an uninformed community; rather, a symbiotic relationship emerges between community and 

academy. 

Central to the work of community engaged scholarship is the notion of partnership. The 

researcher is meant to avoid marginalizing the community, and power relations are 

foregrounded. Teacher-researchers introducing their students to community members as part of 

service learning would do well to similarly highlight partnership; however, the position of 

prospective teachers is in flux: still students, transitioning into teachers. Service learning projects 

are often spaces in which they are encouraged to act as teachers, which carries with it roles and 

relationships that can contradict a notion of partnership and learning. 

 

In learning to become a teacher, interactions centered on language diversity could include 

members of the community who represent its variety. Experience solely with children, especially 

given the ways that these interactions will carry some evaluative stance toward language, 

maintains prospective teachers’ position of authority. Interactions with older adults or peers, on 

the other hand, can contribute to working against notions of people as abstract images, or 

stereotypes – or simply provide nuance to our understanding of human diversity – by shifting 

power relations. With a goal of community involvement across teacher preparation, prospective 

teachers will need to have experience with communities outside of their university-based teacher 

 

105 

education program. These experiences could offer a variety of positions from which prospective 

teachers can interact with community members. 

 

Flexibility is crucial to these interactions. Flexibility was necessary for participants to 

engage in dynamic role-taking across multiple identity positions. To provide experiences that 

encourage such multiplicity, teachers (in this case teacher educators specifically) can develop 

community partnerships to have students engage cultural and linguistic diversity. While 

interweaving course content is central, such projects are not exclusively possible in the context 

of children’s literature as a part of teacher education. Teachers can adapt pedagogical scholarship 

to include communities in almost any context.  

However, because teacher educators can effectively meet curricular goals through 

community partnerships, such instructional projects are not necessarily beneficial to all involved. 

Perhaps positioning student-participants in ways that motivate them to foreground partnership 

and reciprocity can increase the likelihood that these experiences will be meaningful for 

everyone. 

Another contextually important consideration is my position as a doctoral student. As a 

graduate course instructor, I do not have much power or agency in the department hierarchy—

nor longevity for that matter. Developing long-lasting, strong partnerships may require more 

institutional involvement. There certainly are conditions of this particular service learning project 

that could have been more formally developed, especially regarding the curriculum, that may 

have better positioned students to effectively participate, and for partners to reach their goals as 

well. 

In highly structured teacher education programs, service learning experiences that situate 

prospective teachers in uncertainty can offer creative interference. Students navigate the possible 

 

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to determine their position and thinking. With reflective practices that center social, pedagogical, 

and power issues, these prospective teachers may be able to determine their own ethical position 

relative to the various stakeholders in these projects and education more widely. 

 

 

 

 

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V – CONCLUSION 

From the research and writing of these three articles, I learned that interference with ideas 

is not enough to produce teachers who challenge the normative project of schooling. 

Disturbances can challenge certainty and ways of thinking about the world, but such interference 

can also emerge from limiting perspectives. For instance, I made assumptions about what my 

students needed, and introduced disturbances intended to reach particular outcomes, often 

framed around dispositions. These assumptions were grounded in the closed thinking I now hope 

to avoid: prescriptive teaching that desires to bring students into the teacher’s way of thinking. 

As a result, I now strive to open possibility through interference that creates new spaces to think 

and act. This creative interference looks to pose questions where previously I might have 

provided answers. Creative interference involves inquiry into the otherness that lies beyond 

everyday experience, about choices in consideration of multiple selves and perspectives that are 

inherently limited, and about caring for multiple stakeholders in a shared material world shaped 

in part through social and discursive constructions. 

What comes to matter – materially and what we value (Barad, 2007) – in this project 

draws from a number of transdisciplinary sources and follows Sandra Mitchell’s (2009) three 

strands of inquiry: “how we conceptualize the world, investigate the world, and act in the world” 

(original emphasis, p. 18). These foci append to the positions I diffract from myself: the teacher 

conceptualizing curriculum, the researcher investigating what it means to do educational 

research, and the philosophical self existing between, across, and in the margins that informs my 

work as teacher and researcher. It is in this third, more liminal, dynamic space that I come up 

against power relations, and despite unintentionally participating in and reproducing them at 

 

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times, hope to shape my actions around an ethical stance. For instance, I hope to bring together 

community and classroom, and through doing so intend to dismantle unjust power relations—yet 

if I succeed, I still find myself in the center of another power structure. I conclude that the work 

of creative interference is dynamic and unending. 

Like Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of agential realism, I see the need for “an 

epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of the 

human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and 

other social-material practices” (p. 26). However, Mitchell (2009) notes,  

Historical contingency conspires with episodes of randomness to create the actual forms 
and behaviors that populate life on our planet. Life is not simple, and our representations 
of life, our explanations of life, our theories of how life works, will not be simple either. 
(p. 13) 

 
Here, I intend to foreground uncertainty and the importance of the improbable in my exploration 

of complex systems of life and education. I make claims about my various selves that I live in 

the material world and discursively compose here – not about others – and even these are 

uncertain. 

A complexity theory view of reality is both, as Mitchell (2009) says, “frustrating” (p. 7) 

in that it is less simple than many narrow disciplinary reductivist approaches, but simultaneously 

necessary for us to make choices and act in ways that perpetrate the least amount of harm on the 

cohabitants of our world. Knowing that our own context and perspective are insufficient for 

extrapolating all levels of complexity encourages collaboration and new experiences to take on 

other perspectives and gain a fuller understanding, which I attempt to instigate through creative 

interference. 

In attempting to shape a better world, despite my good intentions for others, it is possible 

that I have/am the problem. I think this is true of others who share my position as a teacher, a 

 

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researcher, and a White person. We often impose deficit models and take up the mission to save 

others, but without addressing how we might need to be the locus of change. Our narrative of 

self and society, as a result, excludes the possibility that the authority (namely, teachers, 

researchers, and White people) is the source of inequity. Interfering with the narratives that 

frame me and (prospective) teachers as a solution can create new possibilities—especially for 

marginalized populations. Therefore, I strive to counter normalizing discourses in my children’s 

literature course for prospective teachers. I hope to change the dominant culture through my 

work as a teacher educator, believing “formal education does not play a deterministic role in the 

unfolding of society, but does play an important orienting role that profoundly affects culture” 

(Davis, 2008, p. 63). Our culture, at times deeply ignorant and exclusionary, can be unethical. 

I’m concerned about the ways these beliefs are concealed when these discourses are rationalized. 

The largely White context for discussing issues of diversity clearly presents a challenge 

for teacher educators, but a benefit of our contemporary world is that information is accessible. 

Globalization is the human condition, so nearly everyone is confronted with translocal 

information, including the knowledge that others exist, and our respective existences are 

entangled. People have developed awareness of global travel, shipping, and communications 

networks, economies, and ideas; that we are interconnected with others in the world. The flows 

that emerge from these “scapes” (Appadurai, 1990) are a manifestation of globalization, but we 

are slower to adapt than our technologies to the realization that distances appear smaller and 

Others appear closer. 

In my attempt to reconcile my cultural heritage with my narrative of self in this complex, 

social world, I consider the equivalent of culturally sustaining pedagogies for the teacher of 

White American students to be creative interference. Interference may block or alter an intended 

 

110 

course, but in doing so it opens the possibility of new routes. Instead of changing how we feel 

about difference by objectifying Others through observation, I propose we change how we feel 

about us by investigating ourselves, and thus have the possibility to change how we can feel 

about others. This project elaborates my concept of creative interference as a pedagogical 

practice and how it might appear in curriculum (drawing upon Pinar’s currere, 2004), how I 

investigate its effects, and how I act as a teacher and researcher in ethically-motivated revision of 

self and culture. 

The process of teaching, researching, and writing the three central chapters of this 

dissertation has and will continue to influence future iterations of my teaching. The first article 

asks teacher educators to consider how they make curricular choices and challenges simplistic 

binaries to determine what is good. The next troubles the notion that student learning is the only 

way to think about teaching and opens the study of teaching to possibilities beyond student 

transformation. It explores the unintended consequences of teaching choices resulting from 

sociopolitical stance-taking in teaching, and I conclude that the process of inquiry is more 

valuable than achieving the development of an abstract disposition. Finally, I introduce a 

pedagogical choice to collaborate with community and to send students to unfamiliar territory 

where they negotiate uncertain power relations in teaching and learning. With the multiple levels 

of expectations and requirements, my understanding of community partnerships evolved in ways 

that incline me toward increasing student agency in their participation. Taken together, these 

chapters explore points of entry to engage difference. This pedagogy considers the risks and 

uncertainties inherent to the difficult conversations in teacher education (and the world more 

broadly), with the intention of deconstructing preconceived notions of multiculturalism that 

prospective teachers might hold. 

 

111 

This work is meant to give rise to the possible. Fendler (2003) is concerned about teacher 

education operating as a hall of mirrors in which reflection loses its value. The prescriptive ways 

in which teacher educators expect students to undertake reflection limits possibilities because 

that which is reflected remains binary: good or evil, reinforced or in need of change. Diffraction, 

on the other hand, resists binary understandings because interference creates blurred boundaries 

between—where good and bad can coexist, and other qualities emerge. The creation of 

possibility results from interference to closed notions of what can be achieved through teacher 

education: texts that might be evaluated as bad can be used to achieve instructional goals; inquiry 

into beliefs with the presumption that they need to change may prevent change; partnering with 

community requires uncertain, dynamic positioning despite the otherwise static roles assumed in 

teacher preparation (and education). Openness to the marginal spaces between and outside 

binaries removes the limits teacher education may place on prospective teachers and teacher 

educators, limits that might prepare teachers to reproduce binary thinking in their future 

classrooms. 

These articles represent rehearsals. This is not to say they are preparation for a distant 

meaningful performance. They are all meaningful. To frame teaching as a rehearsal is to 

underscore the recursive aspect of teaching, in which each performance hones my craft. These 

various chapters rehearse diffraction – where creative interference is an additive process that 

complements reflective practices – to avoid a devaluation of reflection by losing it in a hall of 

mirrors. 

 

 

 

112 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APPENDIX 

 

113 

Outside sources shared before discussing Arab 

Spring 

Ahtone, T. (2016 February 3). Wyoming town abandons mosque opposition, pivots to anti-
refugee rhetoric. Al Jazeera America. 
 
Dizard, W. (2016 February 1). Poll: Muslim voters say Islamophobia top issue in primaries. Al 
Jazeera America. 
 
Khalid, W., & Gould, K. (2015 December 24). Don’t wait for the next war to rebuild Gaza. Al 
Jazeera America. 
 
Khouri, R. G. (2015 December 27). To defeat ISIL, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be 
resolved. Al Jazeera America. 
 
Fall 

Week 1-2 
El-Baghdadi, I. (2015 December 23). The story of the Arab Spring is far from over. Al Jazeera 
America. 
 
Gordon, N., & Perugini, N. (2016 August 30). Using human shields as a pretext to kill civilians. 
Al Jazeera America. 
 
The Disappeared 
Cook, J. (2016 August 5). The shocking story of Israel's disappeared babies. Al Jazeera English. 
 
Fares, E. (2016 August 30). Lebanon's disappeared: 'My father could still be alive'. Al Jazeera 
English. 
 
Fernandez, B. (2016 August 30). In Latin America, people disappear but crimes remain. Al 
Jazeera English. 
 
Khalid, S. (2016 August 30). Nepal: Waiting for the 'disappeared'. Al Jazeera English. 
 
Week 3-4 
Khalid & Gould (2015): Don’t wait for the next war to rebuild Gaza. Al Jazeera America. 
 
Khouri (2015): To defeat ISIL, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be resolved. Al Jazeera 
America. 
 
Osuri, G. (2015 August 24). Kashmir and Palestine: The story of two occupations. Al Jazeera 
English. 
 
Puranam, E. (2015 August 30). Kashmir: A story of defiance amid grief. Al Jazeera English. 

 

114 

Week 7-8 
Cohen, S. (2016 July 11). BDS is a war Israel can't win. Al Jazeera English. 
 
LeVine, M. (2016 May 13). The BDS question at US universities. Al Jazeera English. 
 
Mitrovica, A. (2016 August 25). Palestinian lives matter. Al Jazeera English. 
 
Week 9-10 
Berman, M., Larimer, S., & Wootson, Jr., C. R. (2016 October 15). Three Kansas men calling 
themselves ‘Crusaders’ charged in terror plot targeting Muslim immigrants. The Washington 
Post. 
 
Beydoun, K. A. (2016 July 11). Structural racism in the US won’t diminish with time. Al Jazeera 
English. 
 
Bick, C. (2016 August 29). March for racial equality on Boston’s Freedom Trail. Al Jazeera 
English. 
 
Shabi, R. (2016 November 1). Reversing the anti-refugee discourse with art. Al Jazeera English. 
 
Taylor, K.-Y. (2015 November 29). Black Lives Matter on campus too. Al Jazeera America. 
 
Week 10 
Alabdallah, I. (2016 November 6). I live in Aleppo, under siege. Al Jazeera English. 
 
Khalel, S. (2016 November 4). Palestinians mourn final Cremisan Valley olive harvest. Al 
Jazeera English. 
 
Strickland, P. (2016 November 2). Life on the Pine Ridge Native American reservation. Al 
Jazeera English. 
 

 

 

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116 

 
 
 

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