(Re)Active Praxis: Preservice Teachers, Critical Literacy, and the Age of the #ScienceofReading

This essay explores an in-class activity designed to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to leverage critical literacies as they navigate political social media claims about English/reading instruction in a methods of middle school ELA course. PSTs investigated content produced by social media teacher influencers ascribed to the “Science of Reading” (SOR) movement using Gee’s (2014) “tools of inquiry” for discourse analysis. While PSTs shared greater critical perspectives of social media content after the activity, they also struggled to identify the political underpinnings of instructional claims. The author reflects on this activity and offers suggestions for teacher educators as they prepare PSTs for twenty-first-century political and pedagogical influences.