If I Knew Then What I Do Now: Fostering Pre-Service Teachers’ Capacity to Promote Expansive and Critical Conversations with Children’s Literature

In this article, I reflect on my practices as a teacher educator and respond to the following questions: How do I foster the capacity of pre-service teachers to use children’s literature to promote expansive and critical conversations in the classroom? How do pre-service teachers report their stances and sense of preparedness when reflecting on the course? To address these questions, I share two strategies I employed in my undergraduate course for elementary education majors: 1) emphasizing children's literature as windows and mirrors and 2) considering stakeholder responses. For each strategy, I include preservice teachers’ (PTs’) statements that reflect how the strategy impacted their stances about children’s literature and preparedness to use it in the classroom to foster expansive and critical conversations that are relevant and responsive to students’ diverse lives.