Preparing Preservice Educators to Teach Critical, Place-Based Literacies

Secondary education means helping students develop a diverse repertoire of literacy skills, but the focus has been on disciplinary and digital literacies practiced by geographically distributed communities (an international, middle class curriculum) rather than on practices associated with orality, the trades, and minority, immigrant, and Indigenous knowledges. In contrast, critical approaches to literacy instruction recognize the need to incorporate students’ place-based funds of knowledge into the curriculum. To illustrate one such approach, this article presents a case study of practitioner research in a secondary teacher education program. Although the syllabus of a core course on adolescent literacies focused on academic and digital ones, teacher candidates who participated in a form of qualitative inquiry called Indigenous métissage had much to say about place-based funds of knowledge in their subject areas during a field trip and class discussion. These findings suggest that critical, place-based literacy may be an untapped resource in teacher education.