How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Joy: Leveraging Caucuses for Choice in Preservice Teaching

For more than twenty years, the critical conversation about literacy has been deeply concerned with the negative impact that teachers who are reluctant readers can have on students who are reluctant readers. The literature suggests that preservice classrooms could pose an impactful intervention, as university literature courses could help future teachers develop a love of reading that would translate into a love of reading in their own students. This study is a personal reflection of a change that I instituted in my course for preservice secondary school teachers, one designed to increase their joy in reading by institutionalizing opportunities for them to choose what they read. I found that the use of a caucus, a democratic mechanism for making a choice through a public exchange of ideas, put students in position to find books they would enjoy reading. As students became invested in their choices, they also reflected on what made a book appropriate for young readers and what would make it more likely to be enjoyable. Through the caucus, students selected the final two books that we read each semester. This article explains the process for the caucus and the changes that were necessary to my course. It also surveys some of the books that the students chose with some reflections on how those choices happily advanced learning objectives of the course despite the instructor’s reduced role in their selection. Finally, it concludes with observations about the limitations of this highly personal account of the experience as well as suggestions for how further research might produce more conclusive results.