Date of Award
2026
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Education, PhD
Program
School of Educational Studies
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Marva Cappello & Emilie Reagan
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Sera Hernandez
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Rebecca Hatkoff
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2026 Kris Benefield
Subject Categories
Education | Teacher Education and Professional Development
Abstract
This qualitative dissertation explores critical, multimodal, and queer literacies and related pedagogies in teacher education. In it, I engage in both critical analysis and theorizing at the intersection of teacher education, literacy, and pedagogy, producing insights and tools that may be of use to teachers, teacher-educators, and researchers interested in resisting oppression in and through literacy and composition education. The findings contribute to the research on literacy teacher education by detailing the situated processes involved in both critical meaning-making and pedagogical enactment among a group of K-12 teachers in and beyond two literacy methods courses. I draw on thematic analysis as well as narrative and arts-based research methods, grounded in a number of critical theoretical foundations (critical multimodal literacy, queer theory) to inform the study design and analytical approach. Theoretical and methodological insights from the work bring together ideas about meaning-making from critical pedagogy, composition studies, queer theoretical perspectives, multimodal literacy scholarship, and arts-based research. As a teacher-researcher in the context of two literacy teacher education courses, my own critical multimodal and queer approaches to teaching and research provide the contextual backdrop for the inquiry, while the teacher education students’ (in-service teachers) compositions, discussions, and interviews provide the material necessary to address the research questions, which focus on how teachers make meaning through critical multimodal literacy interactions and how they enact related pedagogies in their own K-12 classrooms.
ISBN
9798247967071
Recommended Citation
Benefield, Kris. (2026). Reading the Birds: Critical, Multimodal, and Queer Meaning-Making in Literacy Teacher Education. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 1088. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/1088.
