MeToo Moments: Teacher Candidates’ Disclosures of Sexual Violence

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rape culture and sexual violence have especially entered popular discourse in recent years, largely due to the significant activism of Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement. As such, because educators are increasingly taking up these topics, approaches to such intense subject matter in literacy learning need to be creatively and critically (re)considered so as to privilege more inclusive stories of sexual trauma and cultivate radical resistance against rape culture. Emerging from a feminist qualitative study that examined how secondary teacher candidates responded to a trauma text set of sexual assault narratives, as well as proposed antirape pedagogy for the secondary English classroom, this paper explores the testimonial discourses that surfaced. Teacher candidates participants either offered their own “Me Too” moments – that is, disclosures of experiencing sexual violence in some way, or disclosed witnessing trauma testimony, usually by a loved one.