This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol 26, Issue 4, Author(s): Rachel Heydon and Kathy Hibbert, ‘“Relocating the Personal” to Engender Critically Reflective Practice in Pre-service Literacy Teachers’, Pages, Copyright Elsevier (May 2010).
This case study mapped candidates' responses to a pre-service literacy course. The course was designed to relocate teacher candidates' literacy histories and beliefs from a personal to political frame with the intent of promoting critical reflection and complex understandings of literacy, teaching, and learning.
As part of a broader qualitative case study including 71 participants over 8 months, this paper focuses on data gathered from 7 candidates.
Through a modified constant comparative method, the analysis confirmed the effectiveness of certain conditions created in the course while pointing to a need for further attention to issues of power and the unconscious in learning to teach literacy.