From Pen to Practice: Empowering First-Year English Teachers through Critical Literacy
This dissertation explores the transformative role of critical literacy and teacher writing in developing beginning teachers’ critical consciousness. Dominant narratives frame early career teachers with a deficit lens focusing on their hardship, struggle, and lack of preparedness. This research seeks to counter that narrative by empowering beginning teacher voices through a critical literacy framework emphasizing teacher writing and critical engagement. While a critical literacy framework (Freire, 2000; Janks, 2019; Vasquez et al., 2019) has been used with students to remarkable success, less is known about the impact of critical literacy on early career English/Language Arts teachers. This eight-month qualitative study (Merriam, 1998) used narrative methods (Connelly & Clandinin, 2000) and reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) to engage six first-year ELA teachers in North Carolina public schools as they told their stories through their writing and multimodal texts. Teacher participants engaged with critical literacy in a summer workshop, participated in semi-structured interviews and documented their experiences through weekly writing submissions before revising their critical writings for publication and presentation. Data sources included over 15 hours of workshop and interview recordings, totaling 220+ pages of transcription, and 50 writing session submissions, including over 200+individual texts or 107 pages of writing.
