Creating a Third Space through Intertextuality: Using Children’s Literature to Develop Prospective Teachers’ Critical Literacy

Critical literacy works to make readers aware of the explicit and implicit ideologies present in texts. Engaging in critical reading helps readers recognize and interrogate ideologies in texts in order to be more informed readers. This action research study examined the development of critical literacy skills in 19 prospective elementary teachers across three weeks of a semester-long undergraduate children’s literature course. Researchers, who were also course instructors, intentionally paired texts to help students enter a Third Space in which they could practice intertextuality (Tracey & Morrow, 2012). The Third Space afforded ideological distance from both the students’ personal ideologies and those inherent (and often unrecognized) in texts, thus allowing students to better connect and critique messages within and across texts. Researchers engaged in first- and second-cycle coding and collaborative discussion of students’ written responses to texts and discussion transcripts. Findings suggest that pairing texts with similar themes allows students to begin to uncover implicit ideologies and reevaluate their stances both toward the literature and to their own ideological beliefs. However, quality of discussion, background knowledge, and emotional connection to the literature and/or the topic may also affect the ways in which students critically engage with texts in the Third Space.