Teaching Dispositions: Cultivating Critical Hope in Community Literacy
Keywords:
community literacy, community engagement, graduate education, mentorship, hopeAbstract
Too often, those new to community literacy work naïvely overlook issues of paternalism (Mathieu), the violent aspects of literacy (Baker-Bell, Pritchard, Stuckey), and the deep legacies of racism that shape engagement (Kannan). Or, as graduate students and novice community-engaged teachers learn about ethical challenges, they can become disillusioned and paralyzed (Feigenbaum). Mentoring others in community literacy therefore requires nurturing critical hope, which I define and theorize as a disposition that blends a commitment to act with an unflinching awareness of harmful dynamics enmeshed in community literacy. Drawing on data from sixteen students in a graduate community literacy practicum, I introduce a provisional matrix for mapping orientations to critical hope and explore factors that influenced students’ movements across the matrix. The most impactful factors were not pedagogical choices in the class, but ecological factors shaping students’ lives and community experiences. Given this finding, I suggest that instructors, mentors, and professional development facilitators who work with those new to community literacy provide spaces for personal reflection on individual critical hope ecologies, and I raise questions to consider as our field learns to better support those who are entering the unwieldy and energizing work of community literacy.
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