Supporting Preservice Teachers to Explore School Censorship and Teacher Advocacy

Introduction

Nationally, the US has seen an unprecedented number of book challenges since 2020. PEN America (2023) recorded 3,362 attempts to ban or restrict library resources in the 2022-23 school year—a 33 percent increase from the 2021-22 school year. An ongoing trend for the last five years, most book bans are targeting females, LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color (PEN America, 2023) – predominantly the Black experience (Strozewski, 2022) – many of which are culturally responsive texts. This effort was seen nationally, but was led by Florida, with over 40 percent of all books bans, followed by 625 book ban cases in Texas, 333 in Missouri, 281 in Utah, and 186 in Pennsylvania (Pen America, 2023).

These challenges and bans of culturally responsive texts greatly affect students. They take away chances for authentic windows (gain insight into experiences unlike their own) mirrors (to affirm and validate student identities) and sliding glass doors (inviting readers to try on a new identity to reflect, empathize, and act) in literature (Bishop, 1990), and they affect students’ personal reading lives. Much of the targeted books were not a part of school curriculums, but were books students chose to read for themselves, and “killing this impulse in young readers is something whose costs, too, could be unprecedented” (Perrillo, 2022).

In addition to students, book challenges and the resulting negative school environments greatly affect teachers. Teachers who champion students’ right to read and who support students culturally and academically, are becoming targets. They are afraid to speak about current events or potentially controversial topics when even pushing back against the removal of a rainbow flag on a classroom door can be a reason for removal from a classroom (State News Service, 2022). As one former principal testified at a subcommittee hearing in Texas, “[Teachers] have faced online bullying, calling for their jobs. They have received death threats and hate mail. They have reached points of frustration and exhaustion that I have not seen in my near two decades in this profession” (State News Service, 2022).

These challenges and environments also create barriers to culturally responsive pedagogical practices that “help students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools perpetuate” (Ladson-Billings, 1995, p. 49). By taking away books that tell authentic stories about children from traditionally marginalized groups, censors are taking away chances to affirm students’ cultural identities and for teachers to use “cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively” (Gay, 2002, p. 106) and to challenge inequities that schools perpetuate (Ladson-Billings, 1995).