Developing Understandings of Race: Preservice Teachers’ Counter-Narrative (Re)Constructions of People of Color in Young Adult Literature

This qualitative study reveals the ways in which reading and reflecting on two counter-narrative young adult novels fostered opportunities for preservice English teachers to think more acutely about their understandings of race within and beyond the text. Participants expressed feelings of empathy with and connection to characters whose cultural realities are different from their own. This emphasis on the universal human condition and transcendent power of literature suggests the potential of counter-narrative literature to allow participants to connect with characters across lines of difference. In addition, participants provided evidence of how the counter-narratives encouraged them to reconsider assumptions that society and they hold and perpetuate relative to people of color. The texts offered readers a new way in which to reconceptualize societal norms to reconsider how they see the seeming “other” and, in some cases, recognize their own culpability in promoting existing stereotypes. Finally, the counter-narrative texts heightened participants’ awareness of Whiteness, the ways in which race can privilege or limit by fostering insider or outsider status, and the discomfort that can result when such dichotomies define our identities. Findings illuminate the complexities inherent in the development of understandings of race among preservice teachers and reveal a richer understanding of preservice teachers’ development of knowledge related to the educational needs of students of color and their attitudes toward these students in and out of the classroom.