Towards Socially Just Literacy Teaching in Virtual Spaces

Abstract

This study inquires into preservice teachers’ teaching experiences within a virtual tutoring field experience in a literacy methods course. Our work is situated against the greater institutional and social-political context of a competency-based model in education and the Covid-19 pandemic that led to a shift to online instruction. From a social justice lens, we approach the research questions: What are undergraduate preservice teachers’ literacy teaching experiences in a newly-transformed-to-online literacy methods course? In what ways does a virtual tutoring field experience prepare preservice teachers towards socially just literacy teaching? By engaging in Narrative Inquiry, we unraveled preservice teachers’ experiences in facilitating literacy lessons that combine print-based and multimodal instruction, while learning about the specific tensions and questions that they confronted during the process. We realized that preservice teachers’ virtual teaching experiences develop towards more socially just teaching along the areas of knowledge, interpretive frames, teaching strategies, methods, skills, and advocacy and activism. We further found that this approach is a complex process characterized by the personal, contextual, and relational aspects of teaching.