Pre-service teachers' negotiation of identity and figured worlds through the reading of multicultural literature

Abstract

This paper explores the effect of a multicultural literature course on pre-service teachers' abilities to examine themselves and their figured worlds through a practice known as perspective-taking. Using critical discourse analysis as a tool to analyze three pre-service teachers' work completed in the course, this study offers a series of complications and tensions embedded in classrooms like this, where white students read multicultural literature for the purposes of change and social justice in an educational context: the tension between the student-as-student and the student as-future-teacher, the contradic-tion between oral and written discourse connected to identity and positioning, and the role or "power" of the multicultural text. With implications for teacher educators and pre-service teachers in a multicul-tural society, this study theorizes the role figured worlds play in maintaining and re/creating students' identities.