#whoneedsdiversebooks?: preservice teachers and religious ... · espiritista. influenced my...
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60 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50 August 2015
The social media campaign #WeNeedDiverseBooks has called for more varied works of literature.
However, one of the arguments for increasing the visibility of diverse books has not received much
attention: #WNDB to cultivate religiously pluralistic thinkers. Currently, there is a conflict be-
tween the evasion of religious neutrality in English language arts (ELA) instruction and the need
to prepare young people to become pluralistic thinkers in a global society. This article examines
three lines of inquiry: How likely are preservice teachers to (a) include children’s books with
religious diversity in their future classrooms, (b) discuss the religious content of the books with
their future students, and/or (c) employ dominant social discourses in interpreting the religious
content? Grounded in theories of religious neutrality, social discourses, and cultural superiority,
the study analyzes 79 preservice teachers’ responses to the cultural-religious milieu of the renowned
picture book memoir In My Family/En Mi Familia (Garza, 1996). The corpus of data, which
includes the preservice teachers’ written reflections and responses to a set of open-ended questions,
indicates that privileging a nonreligious reading lens and excluding relevant religious perspectives
from discussions about diverse works of children’s literature can inadvertently contribute to the
defamation of other cultures and religious traditions. The study underscores the responsibility of
teacher educators to help preservice teachers take a religiously neutral approach to ELA instruction.
In May 2014, the grass roots organization We Need Diverse Books invited people to share tweets and posts about increasing the visibility of diverse authors and books to empower a broad spectrum of global readers. The campaign provided a platform for the recent resolution of the National Council of Teachers of English (2015) to advocate for “more children’s and young adult books . . . that reflect the culturally diverse lives and experiences present in the United States” and to recognize “authors, illustrators, publishers, and booksellers whose work represents multiple perspectives and cultural diversity in the lives of all children” (p. 1). The numerous images and comments generated by #WeNeedDiverseBooks (#WNDB) were so provocative that the campaign received prominent news coverage. National Public Radio’s (NPR’s) story highlighted the need to shift the currently whitewashed world of book publishing to be more inclusive in promoting racially diverse writers and books (Qureshi, 2014). The images and tweets featured in the Huffington Post’s
60 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50, Number 1, August 2015
#WhoNeedsDiverseBooks?: Preservice Teachers and Religious Neutrality with Children’s Literature
Denise DávilaUniversity of Georgia
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story called for more racial diversity and greater visibility of (dis)abled and LGBT characters (e.g., #WNDB because: “LGBT people don’t look good in invisibility cloaks”; “There are 1.2 million teens with disabilities in the US!”; and “No little kid ever said ‘I want a box of 64 white crayons!’”) (Bellware, 2014, n.p.).
I wholeheartedly agree with NPR and the Huffington Post that children need books to reflect diversity in race, gender, ability, and sexual orientation. For young readers, these books can be like “windows,” through which readers might experience new and different views of the world, and/or like “mirrors,” that affirm readers’ identities by inviting them to see themselves reflected in the text (Sims Bishop, 1997). Nonetheless, I am interested in one of the arguments for reading diverse children’s books that these news outlets have not highlighted and that the literacy education scholarship has generally evaded until recently. Here’s my tweet: “My spiritual ideas are not superstitious; they are part of my culture and identity. #WNDB to cultivate critical, pluralistic thinkers.” Pluralistic thinking grows from people’s active endeavors toward understanding different perspectives and ideas by engaging with diversity (Eck, 2006). Children’s literature that reflects a range of religious and nonreligious worldviews can be a tool for cultivating pluralistic thinking that teachers can integrate into ELA instruction (Lehman, 2005; Trousdale, 2005; Yenika-Agbaw & Napoli, 2011). Necessarily, in addition to school support and a solid knowledge of global worldviews and perspectives, both practicing and preservice ELA teachers must also have interest and agency to advance religious and cultural pluralism. After all, today’s teaching of English has always required “a carefully balanced act of honoring the diversity of local languages and practices while cultivating a repertoire of reading and writing strategies shown to be effective across contexts” (Cushman & Juzwik, 2013, p. 5).
Considering the factors that facilitate pluralistic thinking, this article offers a foray into the complicated ways in which a group of preservice teachers, who endorsed the precepts of multicultural education, regarded the cultural-religious milieu of the acclaimed picture book memoir In My Family/En Mi Familia (Garza, 1996).1 My interest in analyzing the preservice teachers’ responses to Garza’s nonfiction work stems from my own childhood, as I grew up with a repertoire of cultural practices (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) that were neither understood nor visible in representations of mainstream American families. Although my Salva-doran grandparents publically identified as Catholic, my family’s practice of Latin American espiritismo and my grandmother’s position as an espiritista influenced my worldview as a young person. Discussions of my family’s religious identity, however, were taboo outside of our home, especially in the secular space of my public school. I felt isolated, not knowing whether other children were conflicted about the contrasts between their families’ cultural belief systems and dominant religious ideologies. I did not see families like mine in any school curriculum, let alone children’s books. Moreover, I never met a teacher who would understand my reality, as some schools and literacy educators are not accommodating of the religious lives and literacies of diverse groups of students (Dallavis, 2011; Reyes, 2009; Sarroub, 2002).
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Conversely, the multicultural education agenda calls on educators to acknowl-edge and affirm the religious pluralism that is reflected among their students and within the global community (Nieto & Bode, 2008). Similarly, culturally responsive teaching pedagogy recognizes students’ ethnic, cultural, and social differences as “natural attributes of humanity” that should be “normative features of teaching and learning” (Gay, 2013, p. 67). For this article, culture is defined as an “accumulated pattern of values, beliefs, and behaviors shared by an identifiable group of people with a common history and verbal and nonverbal code system” (Neuliep, 2015, p. xvi) that influences the ways members of the group formulate knowledge and derive meaning from experience (Murphy, 2007). Religion is defined as an organic part of culture, as most people are “born into” the religions of their families and communities and engage with religion as a “microculture” of their dominant culture (Neuliep, 2015, p. xvi). The influence that religion and culture have on the literacy and meaning-making practices of students is well documented and merits our critical attention (Juzwik, 2014; Magaldi-Dopman & Park-Taylor, 2014; Rackley, 2014; Skerrett, 2013).
Children need to have a sense of how the members of different cultures and religions make meaning of the world if they are to be participants in a pluralistic society, but the dichotomy between affirming and understanding (micro)cultural diversity and avoiding religion in ELA instruction is complicated. Although many ELA teachers are expected to integrate a range of diverse literature into the cur-riculum to help students become citizens of diverse global communities (Dewey, 1938; Haynes & Thomas, 2007), such expectations are stymied by the pervasive yet unconstitutional social narrative that religion does not have a place in public school instruction (Nord, 2010). It is against this backdrop that I initiate my in-vestigation into the following lines of inquiry: How likely are preservice teachers to (a) include children’s books with religious diversity in their future classrooms, (b) discuss the religious content of the books with their future students, and/or (c) employ dominant social discourses in interpreting the religious content? I explore these research questions via an analysis of 79 preservice teachers’ responses to Garza’s In My Family. My analysis is grounded in the theories of social discourse (Gee, 2008, 2011), cultural superiority (Said, 1995), and religious neutrality (Nord, 2010; Taylor, 2011).
Theoretical FrameworkWhile the advocacy for diverse books has garnered international attention, research also shows that based on their ideological affiliations with certain cultural/micro-cultural groups, many readers, including teachers, are socialized to unconsciously privilege or censor certain books (Beach, 1993). Therefore, I assume that today’s preservice and practicing public school teachers could be influenced by the social discourses of their affiliations to favor and/or disfavor certain titles, too.
Discourse, Figured Worlds, and Simulations As a means to reveal the social discourses that preservice teachers in this study employed, I adopt Gee’s (2011) concepts of “Discourses,” “figured worlds,” and
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“prototypical simulations” to frame my analysis. Discourses (with a capital D) are ideologically influenced, unconscious, and uncritical socially accepted ways that members of a community think, believe, act, interact, value, and make sense of the world. They advance the values and viewpoints of the social group they represent and define who is a “typical” person and who is an “atypical” person, and therefore “deviant.” Discourses also influence individuals’ initial thoughts or taken-for-granted assumptions about what is “typical” in their conceptions of the world. Gee (2011) refers to these assumptions as “figured worlds” that reflect one’s simplified versions of reality and sometimes overlook real-world complexities. For example, judging a person who sees the likeness of Jesus Christ in a grilled cheese sandwich as being “atypical” could reflect a figured world in which seeing religious apparitions is not socially acceptable behavior. In this figured world, the person who recognizes and reports the presence of a religious icon in a nonreligious loca-tion becomes an outsider to the mainstream group.
In addition, figured worlds inform the prototypical simulations people run in their minds to imagine how unfamiliar events or activities might unfold (Gee, 2011). People enact their taken-for-granted assumptions and draw information from texts, media, and/or other people to construct a mental model for a “typi-cal” scenario. For example, in deciding whether to use or avoid a book like In My Family, preservice teachers might rely on their apprenticeships of observations (Lortie, 1975/2002) to simulate the same processes that their childhood teachers modeled in selecting and/or rejecting books. When people base their simulations on familiar models or observations, it is unlikely that they will embrace alternate ideas about what/who is “typical.”
Defining the “Other”The way some people exercise authority over non-European peoples has been ac-cepted as a “typical” social practice in the Western world (Said, 1995). Socialized to presume European superiority, many Westerners have historically represented non-European culture as the “Other” by “making statements about it, authorising views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it” (Said, 1995, p. 3). Here, I regard comments that cast certain groups as the Other as othering narra-tives. Drawing from Foucault’s concept of a social discourse, Said (1995) theorized:
The development and maintenance of every culture requires the existence of another different and competing alter ego. The construction of identity . . . involves establishing opposites and “others” whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from “us”. Each age and society re-creates its “Others”. Far from a static thing then, identity of self or of “other” is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies. (p. 331)
The crux of Said’s proposition is that in every society and generation, the members of the “us” group continuously identify themselves by defining and redefining who the group’s insiders are and who the outsiders or Others are.
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Corresponding with the power dynamics of Western supremacy, othering nar-ratives continue to thrive in the United States, by which members of the dominant White American cultural group are regarded as “us” and non-members are seen as Others (Bonilla-Silva, 2013; Feagin, 2014). Some U.S. residents advance anti-Latino rhetoric (Santa Ana, 2002) via othering narratives that cast persons of Hispanic/Latino heritage as uniformly Catholic, monolingual, illegal immigrants who pro-cure jobs and drain social services, but refuse to integrate into mainstream (White) American culture (Chavez, 2008; Chomsky, 2007). The pervasive promotion of anti-Latino rhetoric via news media outlets has been well documented (National Hispanic Media Coalition, 2012).
Critical Consciousness and Prior KnowledgeWhile difficult, recognizing one’s own alignment with othering narratives is part of developing a critical consciousness (Freire, 1970) that supports the habit of asking: “How do I/you know ___ is true?” (Lee, 2001). Because the dominant Discourse defines what is acceptable for critique and because any criticism of the core assumptions of the Discourse could cast a person as an outsider to the mainstream group (Gee, 2008), it can feel counterintuitive to stop and identify the source of one’s information. Thus, helping teachers to recognize the figured worlds that inform the dominant Discourse could lay the groundwork for disrupt-ing the kinds of assumptions that stem from cultural illiteracy (ignorance of local and global cultures) and define underrepresented groups like Hispanics/Latinos as the atypical Other.
Religion and Public Education As a means to avoid divisiveness among members of a diverse population, religious illiteracy (ignorance about religion and the basic tenets of the world’s major tra-ditions; Moore, 2007) has been tolerated in U.S. public education (Nord, 2010).2 Unfortunately, religious illiteracy is dangerous because it can breed intolerance (Prothero, 2007). The movement to separate religion (church) from public edu-cation (state) actually began in the nineteenth century, but many people are only familiar with the Supreme Court rulings for Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington v. Schempp (1963), which ban public schools from sponsoring religious practices. Associate Justice Tom Clark argued that a comprehensive public education in-cludes a neutral study about religions that is consistent with the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights and cultivates a pluralistic global citizenry. In a democratic society, neutrality “has to do with the (correct) response of the democratic state to diversity” (Taylor, 2011, p. 36). Grounded in the Court’s interpretation of the Establishment Clause, public schools and universities are required to exercise neutrality—neutrality among religions and neutrality toward “any basic position, religious or nonreligious” (Taylor, 2011, p. 37). In other words, public schools are constitutionally obliged to “take religion seriously” by actually including, rather than excluding, religion and/or religious perspectives in the curricular conversa-tion when relevant (Nord, 2010, p. 176). Nonetheless, the myth that separation
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of church and state requires the comprehensive exclusion of religion from public school remains strong (Prothero, 2007).
Since K–12 public school educators are agents of the state, they are responsible for teaching a government-approved curriculum that must be neutrally inclusive of religious and nonreligious perspectives (Nord, 2010). However, there are school leaders who render their institutions “religious-free zones” by excluding religion altogether, even in violation of students’ religious-liberty rights (Haynes & Thomas, 2007). Some teachers sidestep religion in curricular conversations because they worry about their ability to demonstrate neutrality and the possibility of becom-ing the subject of a lawsuit filed by parents (Bishop & Nash, 2007). Some reject books that include religious content, even in culturally relevant contexts (Esca-milla & Nathenson-Meija, 2003). Many others feel unprepared to guide a neutral discussion between religious and nonreligious perspectives that are relevant to the curriculum (Black, 2003; Rosenblith & Bailey, 2007). Alternatively, some teachers employ diverse books that include different people and perspectives, but so limit their discussions around the texts that they exclude religious and nonreligious interpretations from the conversation (Rasinski & Padak, 1990; Spector, 2007). Collectively, these situations undercut the multicultural education objectives for incorporating diverse children’s books in the curriculum. They prompt ELA instructors to “teach students to make sense of the world in exclusively secular categories” that ultimately institutionalize nonreligious interpretations and exclude religious and/or alternative explanations of the texts (Nord, 2010, p. 5).
MethodsContext of Study and Participant SelectionAs part of a larger study (Dávila, 2012), I collected data from public university undergraduate students who were enrolled in my Introduction to Children’s Lit-erature for Grades K–8 (Intro ChildLit) course, a prerequisite for many teacher certification programs nationwide. While the findings of this study reflect the views held by 79 of the students and cannot be generalized, the same methods could be replicated with different populations. Each student provided consent for her/his comments and course work to serve as data for the study. To minimize bias, I assured participants that I would only analyze the data after their final grades were posted.
The course assignments followed a consistent structure; prior to each class session, students read a picture book or novel of their choice from a weekly set of titles and electronically responded to open-ended pre- and post-reading questions. In class, students participated in literature study circles for their books, engaged in creative literary response exercises, discussed culturally responsive critical literacy pedagogies, and examined numerous children’s books that corresponded with each week’s theme.
Participant DemographicsDuring the first week of class, students completed an electronic, open-ended questionnaire about their backgrounds, reading habits and interests, and views on
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including certain types of literature in ELA lessons. On the questionnaire, 89% of the participants self-identified as White/non-Hispanic, 83% as female, and 88% as age 23 or younger. The demographics of this group match the demographics of public school teachers nationwide, 84% of whom identify as White, non-Hispanic women (National Center for Education Information, 2011).
Notably, three out of five participants (59%) indicated that they had never before studied world religions. Among the 41% who had, most cited middle and high school history classes; none mentioned a world religions course. Moreover, the data from other sections of the larger study revealed a collective perspective among the preservice teachers that perpetuates the othering narrative: “Persons of Mexican heritage in the U.S. might be like us Americans, but they are not Ameri-cans” (Dávila, 2013).
Study Materials: Culturally Relevant Religious Content of In My FamilyI selected In My Family as one of the books for the study because it depicts Garza’s memories of the special and everyday events of her Tejano-American family.3 According to Garza (2012), books like In My Family also “elicit recognition and appreciation among Mexican Americans, both adults and children, while at the same time serve as a source of education for others not familiar with our culture” (n.p.). Such recognition and appreciation is important to literacy instruction in U.S. public elementary schools because nearly one in four students (24.7%) na-tionwide identifies as either Hispanic or Latino (Fry & Lopez, 2012).4 In addition, educating preservice teachers about Hispanic/Latino cultures is critical because cultural illiteracy has led some educators to enact educational practices that are discriminatory toward Hispanic/Latino children (e.g., Wainer, 2004). Thus, select-ing In My Family was one way to help foster participants’ awareness of American families of Hispanic/Latino heritage.
Table 1. Demographics of the Future Teachers
Race Female Male Total
White 56 14 70
Asian 2 0 2
Black 1 0 1
Chinese 1 0 1
Hispanic 1 0 1
Korean 1 0 1
South African 1 0 1
White/Latin American 1 0 1
White/Puerto Rican 1 0 1
ToTal 65 14 79
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The data set for this article specifically examines the preservice teachers’ understanding of and responses to “The Miracle/El Milagro,” one of the memoir-vignettes Garza includes in In My Family (1996). Garza prefaces “The Miracle” with another vignette titled “The Virgin of Guadalupe/La Virgen de Guadalupe” (“Guadalupe”). The text introduces readers to the North American legend of December 12, 1531, in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego, a poor indigenous man who resided in Mexico during the Spanish conquest. In the legend, Guadalupe asked Juan Diego to convince the bishop of New Spain to build a church in her honor. To prove her existence to the bishop, Guadalupe performed a miracle by making her divine image materialize on Juan Diego’s cloak. Today, December 12 is a national holiday in Mexico, and millions of people, including former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,5 have visited the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City to view the legendary 500-year-old cloak. Hav-ing established the historical significance of the Virgin of Guadalupe, in the next vignette, “The Miracle,” Garza recounts the time she accompanied her mother and brother to a small ranch in south Texas. They, like many other Texans, wanted to see the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that had recently appeared on the ranch water tank. To view Garza’s paintings of Guadalupe and The Miracle, visit http://carmenlomasgarza.com/artwork/paintings. On this webpage, select image #16 for The Miracle and image #35 for Guadalupe. Table 2 provides the text that ac-companies these paintings in the picture book.
Table 2. Excerpts from In My Family/En Mi Familia (Garza, 1996)
“The Virgin of Guadalupe/La Virgen de Guadalupe”
The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to the Indian, Juan Diego, outside of Mexico City in 1531. The Virgin said to Juan Diego, “Go ask the Bishop to build a church for me here.” But the Bishop didn’t believe that Juan Diego had seen the Virgin. So, the Virgin told Juan Diego, “Go back, and take these with you.” Suddenly, Juan Diego saw roses, blooming roses, even though it wasn’t the blooming time of year. This time the Bishop was astonished. Not only did he see the roses, he also saw—on Juan Diego’s cloak—an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.I painted this picture for a Filipina woman who loved the Virgin of Guadalupe. That’s her in the painting with her four sons.
“The Miracle/El Milagro”
One day my mother heard that an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe had ap-peared on the water tank of a little ranch in south Texas. We got in the truck and drove out to see. There was a constant stream of people making a pilgrimage to the site, bringing flowers and offerings. Not everybody could see the image, but most people could.Two young cowboys had shot some rattlesnakes and hung them at the foot of the water tank. They were warning people not to go into the cotton fields because there were rattlesnakes out there.I’m in the blue dress, holding my moth-er’s hand. And there’s my brother Arturo, following us.
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Data Collection I compiled the data from the preservice teachers’ homework assignment, which was due before the eighth class session (see Table 3). The preservice teachers were required to run prototypical simulations to address the following two open-ended questions:
1. How likely would you be to use In My Family in your future classroom? 2. If you were to use In My Family with your future students, how likely
would you be to discuss the religious significance of the water tank painting in “The Miracle”?
During the eighth class session, I established a context for the vignettes “Guadalupe” and “The Miracle” by engaging students in a discussion about the historical, cultural, and religious significance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in North America. Then, the preservice teachers gathered in small groups to carefully re-read In My Family and to discuss their initial responses to the memoir in relation to the information they gleaned from the presentation. Although there is not sufficient space here to discuss the in-class activity, the data anecdotally suggest that nearly
Table 3. Lines of Inquiry and Data Sources
Inquiry 1: How likely are preservice teachers to include books with religious diversity in their future classrooms?
Homework QuesTion 1
Would you use In My Family in your future class-room? Why?
DaTa analysis QuesTion
What are the topics or themes of the participants’ responses?
Inquiry 2: How likely are preservice teachers to discuss the religious content of the books with their future students?
Homework QuesTion 2 DaTa analysis QuesTion
If you were to use In My Family with your future students, how likely would you be to discuss the religious significance of the water tank painting, “The Miracle”?
Very Likely; Somewhat Likely; Somewhat Unlikely; Very Unlikely. Please explain your rationale.
What are the preservice teachers’ rationales and/or conditions for discussing or avoiding the religious content of “The Miracle” with their future students?
Inquiry 3: How likely are preservice teachers to employ dominant Discourses in interpreting the religious content?
Homework QuesTion 2 DaTa analysis QuesTions
If you were to use In My Family with your future students, how likely would you be to discuss the religious significance of the water tank painting, “The Miracle”?
Very Likely; Somewhat Likely; Somewhat Unlikely; Very Unlikely. Please explain your rationale.
What kind(s) of Discourse(s) is/are involved? What is/are the norm(s) of the figured worlds the preservice teachers employ to judge themselves and the groups associated with In My Family?
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half of the preservice teachers (45%) were more attentive to the religious content in their second readings and discussions of In My Family.
Data AnalysisConscious of the pervasive narratives of superiority (Said, 1995) and the popularity of secularism in public education (Nord, 2010), I applied Gee’s (2011) concept of Discourse as a “tool of inquiry” and “thinking device” to guide my work. I struc-tured the data into web-like networks by employing thematic network analysis (Attride-Stirling, 2001), which is similar to grounded theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). I followed a three-stage process of analysis: (1) the reduction of the text; (2) the exploration of the text; and (3) the amalgamation of the ex-ploration. Moreover, to ensure the validity of the data reduction and to safeguard against cognitive bias, I worked with a Swedish social scientist peer-debriefer who studied global human rights issues, but who wasn’t at the time attuned to othering narratives in the dominant U.S. Discourse.
We began our analysis by identifying and coding Basic Themes in the data set.6 We developed the code “Participant would use In My Family to encourage religious awareness” to represent Week 8 homework responses such as: “I would use the book to show that different people have different beliefs.” Then, we sorted the Basic Themes according to common Organizing Themes. For example, we catego-rized the following three Basic Themes under Organizing Theme 1, “Participants would use In My Family to advocate for pluralism via religious and/or cultural awareness”: Preservice teachers (a) would use the book to encourage religious awareness; (b) would use the book to foster cultural awareness; or (c) would use the book to help students accept other people. We grouped the remaining codes under the five other Organizing Themes we identified for the data set: Preservice teachers (2) would minimize the religious significance of “The Miracle”; (3) would propose inaccurate interpretations of “The Miracle” as taken-for-granted truths; (4) would treat religion as risky and, at times, inappropriate; (5) would argue that teachers are not responsible for religion; and/or (6) would base diversity-related content decisions on student variables. To highlight the collective tenets of the data set, we synthesized the six Organizing Themes into a final macro Global Theme: most preservice teachers would use In My Family to support diversity awareness, but few would discuss “The Miracle” as a vehicle to cultivate children’s cultural/religious literacies in understanding Garza’s family. Tables 4a and 4b show the themes of the data set.
Findings and DiscussionPreservice Teachers’ Use of In My Family in Their Future ClassroomsThe data set from Question 1 indicates that 77% of the preservice teachers could see themselves using In My Family in their future classrooms to foster students’ diversity awareness, broadly speaking. According to these preservice teachers, Garza’s memoir “would be a good book to talk about different cultures” because it “introduces students to other kinds of families.” The 9% of preservice teachers
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70 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50 August 2015
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ve t
hat
le
arn
ing
abou
t w
hat
oth
ers
be-
lieve
is n
eces
sary
fo
r ch
ildre
n t
o tr
uly
un
ders
tan
d th
e cu
ltu
res
that
su
rrou
nd
us.”
25%
(2
0 pa
rT
icip
an
Ts)
: w
ou
lD
en
co
ur
ag
e r
el
igio
us
aw
ar
en
ess
• “I
thin
k it
is im
por
tan
t fo
r st
ude
nts
to
be e
xpos
ed t
o di
ffer
ent
relig
ion
s be
cau
se
it is
ver
y pr
omin
ent
in s
o-ci
ety
and
that
way
stu
den
ts
can
hav
e an
un
ders
tan
din
g,
appr
ecia
tion
, an
d re
spec
t fo
r p
eopl
e w
ho
prac
tice
di
ffer
ent
relig
ion
s.”
• “W
hen
I w
as y
oun
ger
I le
arn
ed a
bou
t al
l sor
ts
of d
iffe
ren
t re
ligio
ns
and
belie
fs o
f th
e va
riou
s cu
ltu
res
of t
he
wor
ld, a
nd
alth
ough
I d
o n
ot a
gree
w
ith
all
of t
hem
, I fi
nd
that
th
ey d
efin
itel
y h
elp
me
to
un
ders
tan
d w
her
e ot
her
s co
me
from
in t
hei
r p
oin
ts-
of-v
iew
on
cer
tain
th
ings
.”
11%
(9
pa
rT
icip
an
Ts)
: n
o r
el
igio
n in
p
ub
lic
sc
Ho
ol
s
• “I
wou
ld n
ot b
e al
low
ed t
o di
scu
ss
the
relig
iou
s si
gnifi
can
ce.”
• “R
elig
ion
doe
s n
ot r
eally
hav
e a
plac
e in
sch
ool.”
• “It
’s t
ypic
ally
not
ok
ay t
o te
ach
rel
i-gi
on in
sch
ools
.”
4%
(3 p
ar
Tic
ipa
nT
s):
pa
re
nT
s, n
oT T
ea
cH
er
s,
Te
ac
H a
bo
uT r
el
igio
n
• “If
kid
s h
ad q
ues
tion
s . .
. I
wou
ld a
nsw
er:
Save
you
r qu
esti
ons
for
mom
an
d da
d.”
• “It
is im
por
tan
t fo
r pa
ren
ts t
o m
ake
thes
e ty
pes
of
deci
sion
s an
d de
cide
wh
eth
er o
r n
ot
it is
a t
opic
th
ey w
ant
to d
iscu
ss w
ith
th
eir
child
ren
.”
19%
(1
5 pa
rT
icip
an
Ts)
: w
ou
lD
on
ly g
ive
min
ima
l in
for
ma
Tio
n
• “I
per
son
ally
w
ould
on
ly m
enti
on
it fo
r a
min
ute
an
d th
en m
ove
on.”
• “I
don’
t th
ink
that
it
is s
omet
hin
g I
wou
ld g
o in
to e
labo
-ra
te d
etai
l abo
ut.”
• “I
see
no
prob
lem
si
mpl
y sa
yin
g, ‘t
his
re
ligio
n is
on
e th
at
peo
ple
follo
w, t
his
is
how
th
ey fe
el.’”
8%
(6 p
ar
Tic
ipa
nT
s):
re
lig
iou
s c
on
Te
nT
is n
oT p
rim
ar
y
• “T
his
boo
k is
m
ore
abou
t . .
. w
hat
mak
es t
his
fa
mily
sp
ecia
l as
opp
osed
to
the
reli-
giou
s u
nde
rton
es.”
• “I
belie
ve t
hat
th
e w
ater
tan
k pa
inti
ng
is n
ot o
f hu
ge fo
cus
in t
his
boo
k.”
• “I
wou
ld t
reat
‘Th
e M
irac
le’ p
age
just
as
all t
he
oth
er p
ages
.”
6%
(5 p
ar
Tic
ipa
nT
s):
Do
n’T
se
e r
el
igio
us
me
an
ing
• “I
didn
’t r
eally
see
a
relig
iou
s si
gnifi
can
ce
in t
he
wat
er t
ank
pain
tin
g.”
• “Si
nce
th
e te
xt o
n
that
pag
e is
in t
he
voic
e of
a y
oun
g gi
rl,
ther
e ar
en’t
any
dee
p re
ligio
us
thou
ghts
th
ere
to d
iscu
ss.”
g60-83-Aug15-RTE.indd 70 8/4/15 3:36 PM
Dávila #WhoNeedsDiverseBooks? 71T
ab
le 4
b. B
asic
Th
emes
an
d O
rgan
izin
g T
hem
es
Glo
bal T
hem
em
osT
pr
ese
rv
ice T
ea
cH
er
s w
ou
lD
use
In
My F
aM
Ily T
o s
up
po
rT D
ive
rsi
Ty a
wa
re
ne
ss, b
uT f
ew
wo
ul
D D
isc
uss
“T
He m
ira
cl
e”
as
a v
eH
icl
e T
o c
ulT
iva
Te c
Hil
Dr
en
’s
cu
lTu
ra
l/r
el
igio
us
liT
er
ac
ies.
Org
aniz
ing
Th
eme
13%
(10
pa
rT
icip
an
Ts)
: wo
ul
D b
ase
Div
er
siT
y-r
ela
Te
D
co
nT
en
T D
ec
isio
ns
on
sT
uD
en
T v
ar
iab
le
s
Org
aniz
ing
Th
eme
15%
(12
pa
rT
icip
an
Ts)
: se
e r
el
igio
n
as
ris
ky a
nD
, aT T
ime
s, in
ap
pr
op
ria
Te
Org
aniz
ing
Th
eme
22%
(17
pa
rT
icip
an
Ts)
: wo
ul
D p
ro
po
se in
ac
cu
ra
Te in
Te
rp
re
TaT
ion
s o
f
“TH
e m
ira
cl
e”
as
Tak
en
-fo
r-g
ra
nT
eD
Tr
uT
Hs
Bas
ic T
hem
esB
asic
Th
emes
Bas
ic T
hem
es
3%
(2 p
ar
Tic
ipa
nT
s):
wo
ul
D D
isc
uss
o
nly
if T
He
re
we
re s
Tu
De
nT
s w
Ho
sH
ar
eD
TH
e
sam
e b
el
iefs
• “If
I h
ave
stu
den
ts w
ho
follo
w t
hes
e tr
adit
ion
s an
d re
ligio
us
belie
fs,
then
I w
ould
w
ant
to a
ddre
ss
this
issu
e so
th
e ch
ildre
n .
. . fe
el
as t
hou
gh I
was
. .
. ac
know
ledg
-in
g th
em.”
5%
(4 p
ar
Tic
ipa
nT
s):
wo
ul
D D
isc
uss
o
nly
if s
Tu
De
nT
s w
er
e o
lD
e
no
ug
H
• “It
wou
ld d
e-p
end
on t
he
age
of t
he
child
ren
. .
. . I
f th
e st
ude
nts
w
ere
too
you
ng
I do
not
th
ink
it
is a
ppro
pria
te.”
• “W
ere
I pl
an-
nin
g to
tea
ch
a h
igh
er g
rade
le
vel,
I w
ould
di
scu
ss t
he
sign
ifica
nce
.”
5%
(4 p
ar
Tic
ipa
nT
s):
wo
ul
D D
isc
uss
o
nly
if s
Tu
De
nT
s in
iTia
Te
D T
al
k
• “If
a s
tude
nt
mad
e th
e co
nn
ec-
tion
, th
en y
es I
w
ould
add
ress
it.”
• “If
a s
tude
nt
aske
d sp
ecifi
-ca
lly, t
hen
I w
ould
an
swer
th
eir
ques
-ti
on a
nd
expl
ain
so
me
thin
gs.”
• “If
a s
tude
nt
was
to
thin
k di
ffer
entl
y [t
hat
T
he
Mir
acle
is
imp
orta
nt]
th
en
it w
ould
be
ap-
prop
riat
e to
sto
p an
d ta
lk.”
8%
(6 p
ar
Tic
ipa
nT
s):
Dis
cu
ssio
n o
f r
el
igio
n m
ay n
oT
be c
om
paT
ibl
e w
iTH
sT
uD
en
Ts’
be
lie
fs
• “I
wou
ldn’
t w
ant
to s
ubj
ect
stu
den
ts t
o ot
her
re
ligio
ns
if t
hey
d
idn’
t as
k [t
o be
su
bjec
ted]
.”
• “I
don’
t se
e th
e [r
easo
n]
. . .
to
teac
h t
he
relig
iou
s im
por
tan
ce t
o a
child
bec
ause
it
may
not
rel
ate
to
them
at
all.”
• “I
wou
ld n
ot .
. .
for
resp
ect
of t
he
stu
den
ts w
ho
hav
e d
iffe
ren
t re
ligio
us
view
s.”
8 %
(6
pa
rT
icip
an
Ts)
: r
el
igio
n is
To
o
sen
siT
ive o
f a
su
bje
cT
• “I
wou
ld b
e u
nlik
ely
to
disc
uss
rel
igio
n
beca
use
it c
an
be a
tou
chy
subj
ect.”
• “Yo
u h
ave
to
be v
ery
care
ful
wh
en b
rin
gin
g u
p an
yth
ing
that
has
to
do
wit
h r
elig
ion
in
sch
ool.”
• “B
rin
gin
g u
p th
e re
ligio
us
item
s in
th
is
book
wou
ldn’
t re
ally
be
the
best
idea
.”
8% (
6 pa
rT
icip
an
Ts)
: w
ou
lD
ge
ne
ra
liz
e
me
xic
an
s/ c
aT
Ho
lic
s
• “M
exic
ans
are
pri-
mar
ily C
ath
olic
an
d th
is is
on
e of
th
eir
belie
fs.”
• “I
wou
ld m
ake
the
poi
nt
that
Car
men
’s
fam
ily p
ract
ices
C
ath
olic
ism
—th
e ap
pea
ran
ce o
f th
ings
lik
e th
at is
com
mon
.”
• “R
elig
ion
is s
uch
an
imp
orta
nt
part
of
mos
t M
exic
ans’
[l
ives
].”
• “Fo
r p
eopl
e w
ho
mov
ed f
rom
Mex
ico
to t
he
U.S
., C
hri
sti-
anit
y ga
ve t
hem
hop
e th
at w
as h
ard
to fi
nd.
”
• “T
he
Mir
acle
sh
ows
a pr
acti
ce t
hat
th
is
cult
ure
bel
ieve
s in
.”
11%
(9
par
Tic
ipa
nT
s): w
ou
lD
ca
sT
ga
rz
a’s
co
mm
un
iTy a
s ir
ra
Tio
na
l
• “[‘
Th
e M
irac
le’]
goe
s al
ong
wit
h
the
sup
erst
itio
ns
this
fam
ily a
nd
the
peo
ple
of t
his
cit
y/er
a be
lieve
in.”
• “Ev
ents
like
th
is a
re u
sual
ly in
-st
antl
y de
emed
‘rid
icu
lou
s’ b
y m
ost
peo
ple
now
aday
s, a
nd
I do
n’t
thin
k it
’s r
igh
t to
mak
e an
en
tire
cu
ltu
re
out
to s
eem
rid
icu
lou
s.”
• “I
f I
did
disc
uss
Th
e M
irac
le, I
w
ould
dra
w fr
om s
imila
r si
tuat
ion
s.
. . .
For
exam
ple,
a p
erso
n c
laim
ed
to h
ave
an im
age
of G
od o
n t
hei
r gr
illed
ch
eese
san
dwic
h.”
• “P
eopl
e h
ave
‘see
n’ v
isio
ns
of r
eli-
giou
s th
ings
all
over
th
e w
orld
. .
. .
I w
ould
mak
e su
re t
hey
[st
ud
ents
] kn
ow th
at n
ot a
ll p
eopl
e be
lieve
this
.”
• “I
wou
ld e
nco
ura
ge m
y st
ude
nts
to
be
obje
ctiv
e re
ader
s an
d n
ot t
ake
one
book
’s t
ale
as fa
ct.”
• “I
wou
ld e
xpla
in .
. . s
ome
peo
ple
fin
d co
mfo
rt in
th
ese
typ
es o
f th
ings
.”
9% (
7 pa
rT
icip
an
Ts)
: w
ou
lD
ca
sT g
ar
za
’s
co
mm
un
iTy a
s e
xo
Tic
• “T
he
Mir
acle
re
pres
ents
a t
ime
of
offe
rin
g.”
• “It
’s a
typ
e of
rel
i-gi
ous
sacr
ifice
an
d it
’s p
art
of a
cu
ltu
ral
them
e.”
• “T
he
Mir
acle
sav
ed
peo
ple’
s liv
es e
ven
if
som
e ch
ildre
n
mig
ht
belie
ve t
hat
so
meo
ne
drew
th
e w
eepi
ng
wom
an o
n
the
wat
er t
ank.
”
• “T
he
Mir
acle
sh
ows
that
th
ey
[Mex
ican
s] w
ould
fi
nd
sym
bolis
m
ever
ywh
ere
they
w
ent
and
they
wer
e al
way
s se
arch
ing
for
sign
s of
God
.”
g60-83-Aug15-RTE.indd 71 8/4/15 3:36 PM
72 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50 August 2015
who would avoid In My Family generally proposed that, “the content itself lacks the excitement to keep my class entertained”; their comments are suggestive of a figured world in which children’s picture books are primarily for entertainment. The remaining 14% indicated that they would only conditionally use the book to satisfy curricular standards about cultural diversity and/or to accommodate students of Mexican heritage (e.g., “I’m not really sure I’d use this book, but if I had some curriculum that it related to, I would” and “I would be more willing to use this if I have students from Mexico or who celebrate these traditions”); these participants’ conditions for using In My Family point to a figured world in which picture books are primarily for instruction. Nonetheless, the fact that three out of four participants would use In My Family in their future classrooms reflects the majority of the preservice teachers’ interest in multicultural education.
Preservice Teachers’ Likelihood of Discussing the Religious Significance of “The Miracle”While most of the preservice teachers would incorporate In My Family in their future lessons, the likelihood that they would discuss the religious significance of “The Miracle” is less clear. In response to Question 2, 42% of all preservice teachers indicated they might, under certain conditions, address the religious microculture of Garza’s family and community (the conditional group). In contrast, 26% indicated they would discuss the religious significance (the likely group), while 32% would feel inhibited (the unlikely group). The preservice teachers provided a wide range of explanations to support their answers, as indicated in Table 5.
Likely Group Collectively, the preservice teachers in this group (26% of all participants) indi-cated they would include religion in their conversation about the water tower to advance pluralistic thinking as part of a multicultural education program. The majority of this group would like to nurture children’s religious and/or cultural awareness, while some would hope to cultivate students’ acceptance of diversity. The small size of the likely group is particularly noteworthy in comparison with the 77% of participants who said they would use In My Family to support their future students’ diversity awareness. The discrepancy between the participants’ desire to expose students to diversity and their reluctance to discuss the religious microculture of Garza’s memoir comports with other studies in which teachers read diverse texts with their students but avoid and/or minimize discussions about the books’ religious content (Bothelho & Rudman, 2009, pp. 277–292; Rasinski & Padak, 1990; Spector, 2007).
Unlikely GroupTable 5 lists an array of reasons why one-third of the participants (32%) would be unlikely to address “The Miracle.” The array is suggestive of a figured world that rejects neutrality between religious and nonreligious positions in the ELA curriculum. Some of the participants, like teachers in other studies (e.g., Bishop & Nash, 2007), comply with the pervasive social narrative that public schools
g60-83-Aug15-RTE.indd 72 8/4/15 3:36 PM
Dávila #WhoNeedsDiverseBooks? 73T
ab
le 5
. Pre
serv
ice
teac
her
s’ li
keli
hoo
d o
f ad
dre
ssin
g “T
he
Mir
acle
/El M
ilag
ro”
Lik
ely:
26%
(21
par
tici
pan
ts)
Con
diti
onal
: 42%
(33
par
tici
pan
ts)
Un
like
ly: 3
2% (
25 p
arti
cipa
nts
)
wo
ul
D e
nc
ou
ra
ge r
el
igio
us
aw
ar
en
ess
(15
part
icip
ants
, 71%
of
likel
y gr
oup)
• “I
wou
ld u
se t
he
book
to
show
th
at d
iffe
ren
t p
eopl
e h
ave
diff
er-
ent
belie
fs.”
• “T
his
boo
k is
an
incr
edib
le
sou
rce
to in
trod
uce
ch
ildre
n
to t
he
man
y di
ffer
ent
typ
es o
f re
ligio
ns.”
wo
ul
D f
osT
er
cu
lTu
ra
l a
wa
re-
ne
ss
(7 p
arti
cipa
nts
, 33%
of
likel
y gr
oup)
• “Ev
eryo
ne
com
es fr
om a
dif
-fe
ren
t ba
ckgr
oun
d an
d ev
eryo
ne
shou
ld b
e ab
le t
o kn
ow t
hat
not
ev
eryo
ne’
s th
e sa
me.
”
wo
ul
D r
ein
for
ce a
cc
ep
Tan
ce o
f o
TH
er
s
8% (
6 pa
rtic
ipan
ts, 2
9% o
f lik
ely
grou
p)• “
Wh
en s
tude
nts
are
mor
e aw
are
of d
iffe
ren
t re
ligio
ns
and
cult
ure
s, t
hey
are
far
mor
e lik
ely
to a
ccep
t th
em.”
wo
ul
D g
ive o
nly
min
ima
l in
for
ma
Tio
n
19%
(15
par
tici
pan
ts, 4
5% o
f co
ndi
tion
al
grou
p)
• “I
wou
ld o
nly
giv
e th
em a
litt
le b
it o
f in
for-
mat
ion
.”
• “I
wou
ld n
ot d
iscu
ss it
wit
h v
ery
mu
ch
emph
asis
.”
wo
ul
D D
isc
uss
on
ly if
sT
uD
en
Ts
iniT
iaT
eD
Ta
lk
5% (
4 pa
rtic
ipan
ts, 1
2% o
f co
ndi
tion
al g
rou
p)
• “If
a s
tude
nt
mad
e th
e co
nn
ecti
on, t
hen
yes
I
wou
ld a
ddre
ss it
.”
• “If
a s
tude
nt
aske
d sp
ecifi
cally
, th
en I
wou
ld
answ
er t
hei
r qu
esti
on a
nd
exp
lain
som
e th
ings
.”
wo
ul
D D
isc
uss
on
ly if
sT
uD
en
Ts
we
re o
lD
e
no
ug
H
5% (
4 pa
rtic
ipan
ts, 1
2% o
f co
ndi
tion
al g
rou
p)
• “It
wou
ld d
epen
d on
th
e ag
e of
th
e ch
ildre
n
. . .
. If
the
stu
den
ts w
ere
too
you
ng
I do
not
th
ink
it is
app
ropr
iate
.”
wo
ul
D D
isc
uss
on
ly if
TH
er
e w
er
e s
Tu
De
nT
s w
Ho
sH
ar
eD
TH
e s
am
e b
el
iefs
3% (
2 pa
rtic
ipan
ts, 6
% o
f co
ndi
tion
al g
rou
p)• “
If I
hav
e st
ude
nts
wh
o fo
llow
th
ese
trad
i-ti
ons
and
relig
iou
s be
liefs
, th
en I
wou
ld w
ant
to a
ddre
ss t
his
issu
e so
th
e ch
ildre
n .
. . fe
el a
s th
ough
I w
as .
. . a
ckn
owle
dgin
g th
em.”
no
re
lig
ion
in p
ub
lic
sc
Ho
ol
s
11%
(9
part
icip
ants
, 36%
of
un
likel
y gr
oup)
• “I
wou
ld n
ot b
e al
low
ed t
o di
scu
ss t
he
relig
iou
s si
gnifi
can
ce.”
• “R
elig
ion
doe
s n
ot r
eally
hav
e a
plac
e in
sch
ool.”
re
lig
ion
is T
oo
ris
ky T
o D
isc
uss
8%
(6
part
icip
ants
, 24%
of
un
likel
y gr
oup)
• “I
wou
ld b
e u
nlik
ely
to d
iscu
ss r
elig
ion
bec
ause
it c
an b
e a
tou
chy
subj
ect.”
• “Yo
u h
ave
to b
e ve
ry c
aref
ul w
hen
bri
ngi
ng
up
anyt
hin
g th
at h
as t
o do
wit
h r
elig
ion
in s
choo
l.”
Dis
cu
ssio
n o
f r
el
igio
n m
ay n
oT b
e c
om
paT
ibl
e w
iTH
sT
uD
en
Ts’
be
lie
fs
8% (
6 pa
rtic
ipan
ts, 2
4% o
f u
nlik
ely
grou
p)
• “I
wou
ldn’
t w
ant
to s
ubj
ect
stu
den
ts t
o ot
her
rel
igio
ns
if t
hey
did
n’t
ask
[to
be s
ubj
ecte
d].”
TH
e r
el
igio
us
co
nT
en
T is
se
co
nD
ar
y T
o T
He f
am
ily f
oc
us
of
TH
e m
em
oir
8% (
6 pa
rtic
ipan
ts, 2
4% o
f u
nlik
ely
grou
p)
• “T
his
boo
k is
mor
e ab
out
. . .
wh
at m
akes
th
is fa
mily
sp
ecia
l as
opp
osed
to
the
relig
iou
s u
nde
r-to
nes
.”
Do
no
T s
ee a
ny r
el
igio
us
sig
nif
ica
nc
e in
“T
He m
ira
cl
e”
6% (
5 pa
rtic
ipan
ts, 2
0% o
f u
nlik
ely
grou
p)
• “I
didn
’t r
eally
see
a r
elig
iou
s si
gnifi
can
ce in
th
e w
ater
tan
k pa
inti
ng.
”
• “Si
nce
th
e te
xt o
n t
hat
pag
e is
in t
he
voic
e of
a y
oun
g gi
rl, t
her
e ar
en’t
any
dee
p re
ligio
us
thou
ghts
th
ere
to d
iscu
ss.”
pa
re
nT
s, n
oT T
ea
cH
er
s, a
re r
esp
on
sib
le f
or
Te
ac
Hin
g a
bo
uT D
iffe
re
nT r
el
igio
ns
4% (
3 pa
rtic
ipan
ts, 1
2% o
f u
nlik
ely
grou
p)
• “If
kid
s h
ad q
ues
tion
s . .
. I
wou
ld a
nsw
er: S
ave
you
r qu
esti
ons
for
mom
an
d da
d.”
• “It
is im
por
tan
t fo
r pa
ren
ts t
o m
ake
thes
e ty
pes
of
deci
sion
s an
d de
cide
wh
eth
er o
r n
ot it
is a
to
pic
they
wan
t to
dis
cuss
wit
h t
hei
r ch
ildre
n.”
Not
e: E
ach
of
a pa
rtic
ipan
t’s r
atio
nal
es is
eit
her
gro
up
ed w
ith
th
e ca
tego
ry t
he
part
icip
ant
iden
tifi
ed in
her
or
his
res
pon
se (
i.e.,
likel
y [i
ncl
udi
ng
very
like
ly a
nd
som
ewha
t lik
ely]
or
unlik
ely
[in
-cl
udi
ng
very
unl
ikel
y an
d so
mew
hat
unlik
ely]
) or
is lo
cate
d in
th
e co
ndit
iona
l sec
tion
. Rat
ion
ales
ass
ign
ed t
o th
e co
ndi
tion
al s
ecti
on id
enti
fy s
pec
ific
circ
um
stan
ces
or c
ond
itio
ns
un
der
wh
ich
th
e pa
rtic
ipan
t w
ould
like
ly a
ckn
owle
dge
or d
iscu
ss “
Th
e M
irac
le.”
Non
e of
th
e pr
eser
vice
tea
cher
s’ c
omm
ents
is r
epre
sen
ted
in m
ore
than
on
e ca
tego
ry.
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74 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50 August 2015
are not responsible for fostering religious literacy. Others would opt to be silent rather than neutral about “The Miracle” because they anticipate that the religious microculture of In My Family would be inconsistent with their future students’ religious affiliations and could incite litigious parents. Their concerns, similar to those expressed by teachers in other studies (e.g., Peyton, Renck, & Jalongo, 2008), advance the dominant Discourse, in which societal pluralism is maintained by avoiding the divisive topic of religion (Nord, 2010). Additionally, within the un-likely group, there were also preservice teachers whose remarks indicate that they did not recognize “The Miracle” as a religiously significant event in Garza’s child-hood, let alone an event steeped in the sociopolitical history of Mexican culture and identity. Their remarks suggest that like the practicing teachers in other studies (e.g., Wainer, 2004), these preservice teachers might have had little knowledge of Mexican-American cultures and microcultures. See Table 5 for samples of all of the preservice teachers’ comments.
Conditional GroupLast, in between the likely and unlikely camps is the largest group of preservice teachers (42% of all participants), who would address “The Miracle” only under certain conditions. Consistent with those who didn’t think the religious content merited discussion, one in five of the preservice teachers (20%) said they would only minimally address the water tank vignette before moving on to other parts of the book. Choosing to skim over the vignette, however, is not an exercise in neutral-ity. It minimizes the religious perspectives that were relevant to Garza’s family and provides little opportunity for readers to critically discuss, for example, why Garza titled the water tank painting “The Miracle” and why she positioned “Guadalupe” as a prelude to her story about visiting the ranch. Restricting the conversation to surface-level information could also inhibit young readers from considering why Garza included images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and other religious icons in her illustrations of the different spaces in her family home and community. In short, skimming over the religious perspectives that informed Garza’s childhood casts away the opportunity to really cultivate students’ pluralistic understanding of an American family’s culture and microculture.
While some preservice teachers would only spend “a minute” on the religious significance of “The Miracle,” the comments in Table 5 show that other preservice teachers would only entertain conversations about the vignette if their students were old enough, were interested in asking follow-up questions, and/or included children who shared the same cultural heritage as Garza’s family. In other words, these preservice teachers would privilege their students’ ages, agency, and ethnicities in determining whether or not to be inclusive of both religious and nonreligious interpretations of the memoir. By establishing external criteria, teachers could avoid making internal-personal commitments to exercising neutrality in their ELA instruction, which might contradict the dominant Discourses that indirectly support religious illiteracy as a means to avoid conversations about religious diversity. In sum, the circumstances under which 42% of the preservice teachers would conditionally discuss the religious significance of “The Miracle” were actu-ally quite limited.
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Dávila #WhoNeedsDiverseBooks? 75
Othering Narratives and the Preservice Teachers’ Interpretations The preceding section highlighted five of the six Organizing Themes of the data; the preservice teachers would: (1) advocate for pluralism via religious and/or cultural awareness; (2) suggest that teachers are not responsible for cultivating students’ religious literacies; (3) propose that religion is too risky to discuss and, at times, irrelevant to students; (4) minimize the religious significance of “The Miracle;” or (5) base diversity-related content decisions on student variables (see Tables 4a and 4b). This section examines the sixth and most troublesome Organizing Theme of the data: at least one in five of the preservice teachers (22%) would provide students with inaccurate interpretations of “The Miracle” as taken-for-granted truths. This thematic network category groups together three Basic Themes, each of which represents a set of othering narratives: (1) preservice teachers would make generalizations about Catholics and people of Mexican heritage; (2) preservice teachers would label Garza and others who visited the water tank as irrational; and (3) preservice teachers would authorize unfounded descriptions of “The Miracle.”
Making GeneralizationsAt least 8% of the study participants believed that in Catholicism, “the appear-ance of things like that [Guadalupe’s image on the water tank] is common” and since “Mexicans are primarily Catholic . . . this is one of their beliefs.” Alternately, they presumed that religion, especially Christianity, is “an important part of most Mexicans’ [lives],” particularly for “people who moved from Mexico to the U.S.” because it “gave them hope that was hard to find.” Othering narratives like these reflect the generalization that Catholics are a homogenous group of Others who commonly see/believe in the appearance of religious figures. (This is despite the fact that Garza’s water tank painting is titled “The Miracle” because the appearance of religious figures is uncommon.) In reality, just as there are many different kinds of Protestant churches worldwide, there are at least 23 different types of Catholic churches (Pew Research Center, 2013), as well as a growing population of charismatic or renewalist Catholics in the United States, especially in some Hispanic/Latino communities (Lugo, Smith, Cox, & Pond, 2008). Moreover, although it is true that many people of Mexican heritage do identify as Catholic or Christian, it is also true that nearly one-fifth (18%) of Hispanics/Latinos in the United States do not affiliate with any religion (Pew Research Center, 2014). Similarly, presuming that Garza’s Tejano-American family moved from Mexico to the United States wrong-fully generalizes that all Hispanics/Latinos are foreigners. (For more information on the study participants’ definitions of foreigners and Americans, see Dávila, 2013.) While assumptions like these might reflect innocent mistakes by young people who do not know any different, they show how powerful othering narratives are in the dominant Discourses embraced by the participants in this study.
Labeling the Other as IrrationalIn addition to making generalizations about Catholics and Mexicans, 11% of the preservice teachers described Garza’s family and community as irrational Others (see Table 4b). One characterized the citizens of Kingsville, Texas, as superstitious
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76 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50 August 2015
outsiders by proposing that “The Miracle” “goes along with the superstitions this family and the people of this city/era believe in.” Another, who acknowledged that the appearance of Guadalupe’s image on the water tank would have been “extremely significant among a primarily Mexican Catholic people group,” ar-gued that such events are “usually instantly deemed ‘ridiculous’ by most people nowadays.” Therefore, he proposed that it would be inappropriate to discuss the religious significance of “The Miracle” in the ELA classroom because it would “make an entire culture out to seem ridiculous.” He would pragmatically censor the vignette to prevent his students from ridiculing U.S. citizens whose religious ideas differed from dominant perspectives. Although his objectives were sincere, this participant’s remarks, alongside his classmates’ comments, are examples of othering narratives that cast Mexican Catholic people of Garza’s generation as a ridiculously irrational group of outsiders in relation to today’s typical Americans.
Corresponding with the proposition that events like “The Miracle” are usu-ally deemed ridiculous in mainstream culture, another preservice teacher would pair Garza’s account of “The Miracle” with the popular anecdote about “a person [who] claimed to have an image of God on their grilled cheese sandwich.” This trope happened to serve as the subplot of “Grilled Cheesus,” an episode of the pri-metime television show Glee that aired on October 5, 2010, to an audience of 11.2 million US viewers (Grilled Cheesus, 2014). The trope also inspired the titles of the recent New York Times newspaper article “Is That Jesus in Your Toast?” (Gantman & Van Bavel, 2014) and the Time Magazine article “It’s ‘Perfectly Normal’ to See Jesus in Toast, Study Says” (Waxman, 2014). Both articles report on new studies that examine the inherent psychological and neurological reasons that people see significant images in ambiguous places such as food.7 The titles of these articles, in combination with droll television news stories about “religious sightings,”8 clearly reinforce the idea that seeing Jesus in a piece of toast is not socially accepted conduct in the dominant Discourse. The title of the Time report especially drives this point home with the inclusion of quotation marks around the words “perfectly normal” to highlight that seeing religious images is actually atypical behavior.
Hence, it is not surprising that a study participant would equate “The Miracle” with the trope about “Grilled Cheesus” and that some preservice teachers would warn their future students not to “take one book’s tale as fact” because “only some people find comfort in these types of things” (i.e., the appearance of a religious icon). These warnings illustrate the subversive nature of othering narratives that lead people to marginalize underrepresented groups in society and cause teachers to sidestep neutrality in presenting religious and nonreligious interpretations of texts. Thus, I am hopeful that the New York Times and Time Magazine articles will help mainstream Americans be less dismissive of people who appreciate divine imagery in ordinary objects.
Exoticism Alongside those who would imply that Garza’s family and community were ir-rational, the last group of preservice teachers (9% of all participants) would offer to children grossly inaccurate interpretations of “The Miracle.” The group’s col-
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Dávila #WhoNeedsDiverseBooks? 77
lective comments construct an exotic story: Although “someone drew the weeping woman on the water tank,” the vignette “The Miracle” actually “represents a time of offering” because it is “a type of religious sacrifice” that has “saved people’s lives.” It shows that since Mexicans “were always searching for signs of God,” they would “find symbolism everywhere they went.” To begin with, although the Virgin of Guadalupe is prominent in the vignettes “Guadalupe” and “The Miracle,” at least one preservice teacher conflated the historical-religious legend of the Virgin with the ghost story of La Llorona. Accidental or not, such conflation comports with the practice of othering by which members of the “us” group describe the culture of the Other with little attention to accuracy. Similarly, to suggest that “The Miracle” shows a type of religious sacrifice or offering not only authorizes a false description, but also implies that the members of Garza’s family and childhood community must have been culturally extreme and/or primitive like the groups that practice religious sacrifices in popular films and media. Moreover, the asser-tion that persons of Mexican heritage are predisposed to seeking out symbolism and religious signs might also reflect a figured world in which Garza’s family and community get sidetracked by religion while other cultural groups can maintain multiple foci. No matter the scenario, this sampling of assumptions demonstrates the powerful influence of othering narratives in the dominant Discourse, positioning underrepresented groups as exotic outsiders and leading people to unconsciously embrace false information that perpetuates the sociopolitical contest of superiority between “us” and “them.” Hence, the preservice teachers had no reason to question the soundness of their interpretations or figured worlds.
The Global ThemeIn synthesizing the six Organizing Themes of the research data, including the theme that participants would provide inaccurate interpretations of “The Miracle” as taken-for-granted truths, a Global Theme emerged: “Most preservice teachers would use In My Family to support diversity awareness, but few would discuss ‘The Miracle’ as a vehicle to cultivate children’s cultural/religious literacies.” This Global Theme is consistent with the notion that combating religious illiteracy is unrelated to enacting a multicultural education agenda in the public school classroom (Nord, 2010). It is inconsistent with the reality that children can be profoundly influenced by the things their teachers say or avoid (Anti-Defamation League, 2012).
The data set offers insight into the concerns that different stakeholders hold in the national conversation about neutrality in public schools. For example, some religious conservatives worry: Can a public school teacher accurately teach my religious perspective with their current level of preparation? (Merritt, 2013). Their concern is validated by the data as few of the study participants would dedicate the necessary time to accurately discuss (and possibly research) the religious perspec-tives that contextualize “The Miracle.” The data set also underscores the question that advocates for religion-free school zones ask: Can public school teachers teach about religion without bias or proselytization? (Gaylor, 2014). In their simulations of public school teaching, some of the preservice teachers would fail to exercise neutrality, by either negatively judging or excluding from their discussion altogether
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78 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50 August 2015
the religious perspective of Garza’s family and community members. Finally, there are scholars who wonder: Has nonreligion been overly privileged in public schools? (Nord, 2010; Prothero, 2007). This last question is important given that 59% of the study participants had never been introduced to world religions during their K–16 educations of the last decade and that only 26% said they would discuss the religious significance of “The Miracle” without any specific limitations or caveats to the discussion. The data set indicates that privileging a nonreligious reading lens and excluding relevant religious perspectives from discussions about children’s books can inadvertently contribute to the defamation of other cultures and microcultures. In short, the study verifies the real concerns of stakeholders in the national conversation about neutrality in public education.
Conclusion and ImplicationsIn this article, I have examined a group of preservice elementary school teachers’ first impressions about using a book like In My Family and discussing the religious significance of “The Miracle” with their future students. Given the group’s collective stance that persons of Mexican heritage might be like Americans but are not Ameri-cans (Dávila, 2013), I assume it is not an anomaly that some preservice teachers also employed othering narratives in their comments about “The Miracle.” Conscious or unconscious, such narratives are likely byproducts of a historical process that has accommodated religious illiteracy as a norm of mainstream American culture and has socialized members of the dominant social group to exercise authority over nonmembers. While additional research is needed to measure the influence that anti-Latino rhetoric might have on teachers’ assumptions about religion in Mexican-American cultures and microcultures, the Basic, Organizing, and Global Themes of this data analysis raise a serious issue: excluding religion and/or rel-evant religious perspectives from ELA instruction not only violates public school educators’ constitutional obligation to exercise neutrality, but also undermines the tenets of multicultural education. In other words, if ELA teachers are expected to be knowledgeable agents of the state, particularly when using diverse children’s literature, then they must be prepared to exercise neutrality and to be inclusive of different religious perspectives whenever relevant. This means that preservice teachers need a solid foundation in the contemporary cultures and religions of the world, as well as explicit modeling for how to demonstrate neutrality. Otherwise, the national call for more diverse books will do little to advance multicultural education, let alone cultivate children’s cultural/religious literacies in becoming citizens of a pluralistic society.
To get to the point of the matter, the data set in this study emphasizes the need for us, as ELA teacher educators and researchers, to address the reality that the othering narratives of the dominant Discourse can persuade teachers to respond to diverse books in ways that could do more harm than good. Therefore, we must ask ourselves: What do we know about contemporary cultures and religions in the United States? How do we know our assumptions about these cultures and
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Dávila #WhoNeedsDiverseBooks? 79
microcultures are accurate? When and how do we explicitly model neutrality in ELA instruction for future teachers? Moreover, what kinds of support do we need to prepare preservice teachers to be informed agents of the state?
While these questions and implicit responsibilities are undoubtedly over-whelming, two publications offer a good starting point for learning about religion in public education. The first is the Anti-Defamation League’s (2012) Religion in the Public School, and the second is the First Amendment Center’s A Teacher’s Guide to Religion in the Public Schools (Haynes & Thomas, 2007); each is available online in a print-ready format. In addition, it may be helpful to contextualize our work toward religious neutrality in relation to the early days of the multicultural education movement:
Several decades ago, most teachers were woefully unprepared to deal with women’s and minority history and literature (also areas of some sensitivity and controversy). Educa-tors did not say “Well, we better not teach that stuff.” . . . Rather we started preparing teachers to deal with multiculturalism. So we should prepare them to deal with religion. (Nord, 2010, p. 187)
Certainly, it will be challenging, but if we do nothing to prepare teachers to take a religiously neutral approach to ELA instruction, then our commitments to diversity and social justice will fall short in our efforts toward a fair and pluralistic society. The call for more diverse books is not enough to shift the paradigm. We need to support religious literacy as a fundamental, constitutional tenet of public education.
NOTEs
1. Set in Kingsville, Texas, In My Family won the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book
Award (1996) and the Américas Book Award for Children and Young Adult Literature (1996), and
was honored by the Pura Belpré book award committee (1998). It is part of the contemporary
canon of children’s literature.
2. See Moore (2007), Nord (2010), and Prothero (2007) for in-depth discussions about religious
literacy and illiteracy in the United States.
3. Tejano-Americans are Texans of Mexican heritage whose families resided in the region before
Texas became a state (Benavides, 2010).
4. A recent Pew Research Center survey (Lopez, 2013) indicates that in some states, persons of His-
panic heritage prefer the term Hispanic to the term Latino. Therefore, I use both terms in this article.
5. See the Catholic News Agency story about Clinton’s 2009 visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of
Guadalupe in Mexico City (Catholic News Agency, 2009).
6. Notably, most preservice teachers provided one or two rationales to support their responses.
Therefore, each rationale was assigned a separate code.
7. The phenomenon is known as pareidolia. For an overview, see Zimmerman (2012).
8. Many television news shows include a segment on religious sightings, in which the commenta-
tors add their judgments in the form of jokes or musings about the stories. For a YouTube video
featuring clips of different news shows’ religious sightings segments, see Dobredovody (2012).
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80 Research in the Teaching of English Volume 50 August 2015
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Denise Dávila is an assistant professor in the Language and Literacy Education De-partment at the University of Georgia. Her research examines the sociocultural contexts in which preservice teachers and underrepresented groups of children and families engage with diverse works of children’s literature. She has been a member of NCTE since 2009.
Initial submission: November 31, 2013Final revision submitted: March 27, 2015
Accepted: March 31, 2015
Call for Exemplar Award Nominations
The CCCC Executive Committee announces a call for nominations for its Exemplar Award. This award will be presented, as occasion demands, to a person whose years of service as an exemplar for our organization represent the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession. The Exemplar Award seeks to recognize individuals whose record is national and international in scope and who set the best examples for the CCCC membership. Nominations should include a letter of nomination, four letters of support, and a full curriculum vitae. The nominating material should be sent to the CCCC Exemplar Award Committee at [email protected]. Nominations must be received by November 1, 2015.
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