Dr. Carol Doyle-Jones, academic associate dean and associate professor in the College of Education, Niagara University in Ontario, is the recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Explore Grant for her literacy-based teacher education pilot research called “Reimaging the Bookshelf: Children’s Literature for Social Justice.” She is performing the research with Lydia Menna, an associate professor at the University of Alberta.
“Literacy teacher educators have an important role to play in utilizing children’s literature that renders visible cultural, racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic differences to provide preservice teachers with opportunities to deepen and extend their sociocultural consciousness,” said Dr. Doyle-Jones. “This project will examine how we, as LTEs working in different provincial contexts, utilize social-justice-themed children’s literature in our preservice literacy courses to help build a deeper understanding of culturally sustaining literacy practices, multimodal ways of knowing, and equity-seeking pedagogies.”
In each of their literacy courses, the professors will use children’s literature to encourage preservice teachers to inquire into multiple perspectives, engage in critical conversations, and compose multimodal responses, creatingspace for them to consciously consider how children’s literature can be used to broaden the stories told, heard, and honored within the classroom.
