Learning from preservice teachers’ responses to trans-themed young adult literature: improving personal practice in teacher education

Abstract

Tensions and contradictions in my personal practice and in the extant research prompted this study of preservice teachers’ responses to trans-themed young adult literature. I adopted a self-study methodology to identify and address the shortcomings in my practice of including trans-themed literature in a Literature for Adolescents course. Through inductive analysis, I discovered that my students made statements related to literary, sociocultural, and personal themes. Next, I considered the data within and across themes to reflect on my personal practice. The students’ responses suggest that I could improve my teaching practice by (1) guiding them to employ specific critical theories and analysis and (2) including multiple texts about the transgender experience. I propose and trouble these practices and consider the ways they confirm or contradict others’ research regarding good teaching practices.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.