Deficits, Therapists, and a Desire to Distance: Secondary English Preservice Teachers’ Reasoning about their Future Students

This article explores how secondary English preservice teachers reason about their future students and the consequences these systems of reasoning have for their thinking about pedagogy and their roles as teachers. By examining these systems of reasoning, this article helps to denaturalize normalized discourses about adolescence—discourses that oftentimes help to name and positionyoung people in powerful, predictable, and problematic ways. Finally, this article suggests ways English teacher educators might create spaces for preservice literacy teachers to rethink how their experiences with adolescents are always mediated and produced by discourses that authorize how young people are known and acted upon.