Creating a canon for change: how teacher candidates demonstrate readiness to reckon with rape culture through reading trauma literature

ABSTRACT This paper explores how teachers in training co-created a canon of texts for teaching about trauma issues, including sexual violence. This paper represents a piece of a larger feminist study where 23 teacher candidate participants took up readings in a sexual trauma text set and responded to pedagogy for teaching such texts with Canadian adolescent literacy learners. Overall, the data strongly indicated that many participants prioritized promoting social action in their emerging pedagogies, including anti-rape efforts. Discourses of readiness to combat rape culture especially surfaced, signalling that overwhelmingly, participants were authoring themselves as educators who prioritize creating community and enacting resistances to oppressions in some way. As such, a key finding examined in this paper was how participants collectively built on the initial corpus of trauma texts in the study’s text set that they advocated for or planned to teach in their future education careers.