Conversations, connections, and culturally responsive teaching: Young adult literature in the English methods class
Despite the fact that we teach English education at two very different geographically and socioculturally situated universities one a mid sized rural Midwestern university and the other a large urban Southern university we discovered through extended dialogue that we both aim to make our methods courses safe spaces in which preservice teachers can consider and (de)construct their own identities as readers while preparing to teach literature in secondary schools across the United States and beyond. We realized that to create lifelong readers in those schools, we should begin with our preservice teachers' identities as readers, knowledge of intertextuality, and considerations of reading as a social practice before asking them to become English teachers who connect their students to texts and to the world around them. And to do this, we use young adult literature and culturally responsive teaching. Notwithstanding the prevalence of adolescent fiction in popular culture (e.g. Harry Potter, Twilight, The Fault in Our Stars, The Hunger Games, etc. preservice teachers at both our universities report being asked to teach mostly canonical texts, a fact that echoes studies by Applebee (1993) and more recently by Stallworth Gibbons (2012) in English Leadership Quarterly. Young adult literature (YAL) provides preservice teachers with the opportunity to connect with their prior experiences as adolescents as well as with their identities as readers. Moreover, YAL allows our preservice teachers to engage in critical analysis of their own lives and helps them recognize and critique "discourses of power" (Delpit, 1992) Likewise, as Kaywell (2001) argues, we should engage preservice teachers in "the reading and discussion of young adult literature so that these books will continue to find their way into classrooms to enrich students' reading lives" (p. 326) We both use YAL in our methods courses to help preservice teachers develop arguments not only about which young adult texts to include in their lesson plans but also why they would incorporate those specific texts and how those texts might mirror or complicate ideas from canonical pieces. What we have discovered, through in depth dialogue and collaborative research, is that our preservice teachers can develop more confidence and make more meaningful culturally responsive connections with texts and with their secondary students if we use young adult literature in our methods courses.